Shankar Narayanan

Education

Shankar attended elementary school in Usilampatti, Tamil Nadu, and St. Mary’s High School in Madurai, India. Shankar was prominent and active in theater and drama during his school life and took part in numerous plays and debates. He also was in the school’s Track, Cricket, and Badminton teams. Shankar enrolled in Palani Andawar Polytechnic in Palani and after a year transferred to Tamil Nadu Polytechic in Madurai, there he graduated with a Degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and continued his Engineering studies at Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai and completed his Bachelors course in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, thereafter he completed Masters in Administration at Madurai Kamaraj University followed with Masters in Business Administration in the United States of America.

Career

In 1985 he took a job as technical staff in British Physical Laboratories, then switched to a Computer start up, Micro Advance where he gained expertise in computer hardware and software. After few years there, he then joined Aurelec Computers, one of India's first computer design companies based at Pondicherry. Following that in 1991, Shankar invested and become the founding member of Nexus Computers. At Nexus he held various positions as a leader in Management, Sales, Marketing & Support and was VP & General manager of the company. Later, he decided to pursue his passion of becoming an entrepreneur, moved to Silicon Valley, California and co-founded Nexus Inc., a networking software company based at Silicon Valley in the United States of America. Following M&A of Nexus Inc in 2000, Shankar co-founded Emuzed inc, a multimedia software company with a focus on phones and other mobile devices. Emuzed developed the world's first audio and video synchronized video recording technology for cell phones during early 2000, this technology was then licensed to numerous cell phone manufacturers including Nokia, Samsung, Siemens and many others. He was also instrumental in deploying the MPEG-2 encoder technology in the Personal Computers, the first Microsoft Windows-XP Media Center PCs shipped by Hewlett Packard (HP) had the MPEG-2 encoder hardware and software designed and manufactured by Emuzed. In early 2005, Flextronics, the world's largest electronic manufacturing company acquired Emuzed. Following that acquisition Shankar remained on the Flextronics Mobile and Handset division as the Vice President and General Manager until June 2006. After leaving Flextronics he continued his entrepreneurship starting his third start-up Spime Inc., a location technology company in September 2006, he derived the name 'Spime' from 'Space & Time'. He led Spime as its Chairman and CEO. Spime's location technology is licensed and deployed by Hewlett Packard (HP), Dell, Texas Instruments and few other world's tier-one mobile device and silicon manufacturers. In May 2012, Spime Inc was acquired by Trimble, a United States Public Company and the leader in providing GPS and location-based products and solutions business.

Personal life

Shankar was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu to Sowthamini a house wife and Narayanan, a police officer, Shankar was the youngest of four children. Shankar married Valsala in 1992 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. The couple have two sons Vaishaal Shankar (born 1993), Vaishaal completed ( 2015 ) under-graduate in Computer Science engineering at UC Berkeley, University of California and Currently pursuing PhD in Artificial Intelligence at UC Berkeley and Vishan Shankar (born 2004), a sixth grader.