BENGALURU: Through the years of its widening reach, aficionados as well as critics of social media platforms have agreed on one thing -- that it has democratised expression of opinion. Turns out, there is a lot of scope left to expand the web to more users. This is what the founders of Koo App aim to do with their micro-blogging site, which enables Indians to express themselves in local languages. It was recently selected among the winners of the government’s Digital India AatmaNirbhar Bharat Innovate Challenge.
Koo, which was launched in March, is available in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. “Just 10 per cent of our country understands English. Over a billion speak one of the hundreds of languages and dialects that we have,” says Mayank Bidawatka, who co-founded the platform with Aprameya Radhakrishna. “Twitter largely caters to the English-speaking urban audiences.
Catering to regional audiences needs a fair amount of Indianisation of the product,” adds the city-based entrepreneur, who is upbeat about being one of the 24 winners from 7,000 entries. The innovation challenge was held to identify the best Indian apps in eight categories that are already being used by citizens and can become world-class platforms. Koo shared the second spot in the social networking category with the writing app, YourQuote, while short video app Chingari stood first.
The idea for Koo struck the founders after they came up with Vokal, an expert-based knowledge-sharing platform in Indian languages. “There was no microblog for regional Indian language speakers,” says Bidawatka, a graduate from Asian Institute of Management, Manila, and a former banker. They made the product in some months and first test-marketed it in micro-geographies. So far, Koo has had about eight lakh downloads, and the founders hope to cross 1 million by August-end.
The app has various features like a keyboard that auto-transliterates the English script to the target Indian language. Its people feed shows the top creators, and users can view who visited their profile. Creators can ‘koo’ through 400 characters of text or 1-minute audio or video. “All instructions are in Indian languages,” says Bidawatka, revealing that while he uses the platform in Hindi, Radhakrishna ‘koos’ mostly in Kannada.
“Koo already has Union Ministers Ravi Shankar Prasad and Mansukh Mandaviya, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister Ashwath Narayan, and celebrities like Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Sadhguru, Ashutosh Rana and Ashish Vidyarthi using it. They have seen more traction on Koo because of the use of an Indian language,” says Bidawatka, who hopes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will join soon too. “There are very few platforms that prominent Indian personalities can use,” he adds. “They’d love to use Koo because it helps connect the best of India with the rest of India.”