Himanshu Gupta and Harsh Taneja are employed respectively as the Head of Growth at Thumbworks Technologies, a financial technology startup in India, and as Assistant Professor in the College of Media (Advertising) at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Himanshu led the India marketing & strategy for WeChat, Tencent’s hit Messaging app in Asia, between 2013-2015. He has a keen interest in understanding the factors behind the rise and fall of digital platforms. Harsh’s research focuses on how social, commercial and technological factors together shape digital media use. His recent work has examined Global Web Usage and Fake News Audiences in the US. Himanshu and Harsh share a common interest in how emerging media technologies and societies interact and in developing perspectives that combine insights from both industry and academia. They have previously collaborated to write articles warning about the potential consequences of the roll out of Free Basics, a walled garden approach to internet, managed by Facebook in markets with low internet penetration.
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