THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Developing their own mobile application at the age of 11 and 10, Shravan Kumaran and his younger brother Sanjay Kumaran had the two options - of either publishing the app as an individual or as a company in the Apple’s App Store.
The youngest mobile application programmers in the country, Shravan and Sanjay, went for the second option to walk in as one of the youngest entrepreneurs in the country as well three years ago.
Aged 15 and 14 now, Shravan and Sanjay are the president and CEO respectively of ‘GoDimensions’, an app development firm, and have to their credit seven apps in Apple’s App Store, three in Android Play Store and one in Windows Mobile Store in the short span of three years.
Class IX and XI students of Hiranandani Upscale School in Chennai, Sanjay and Shravan were in the city recently to talk at ‘Tathva’, the annual technical fest of National Institute of Technology, Calicut
(NITC).
Shravan and Sanjay say, “Having developed a strong desire to launch our own company and to stand on our own at a small age itself, we were firm to launch our first mobile game application under the banner of our company even though our Dad suggested the other option. Later, our Dad carried out the processes of company registration and we released the app in ‘iTunes’, the Apple’s App Store, in January 2012.”
“We had a passion for computers at a small age itself and started doing programming since class III itself. We started with the programming language QBasic and then shifted to Java and later started experimenting on Android applications using Java. But iOS programming is what that excites us now and most of the apps we developed were iOS apps for iPhone. We are getting good reviews from across the world and our apps have seen a total of more than 1 lakh downloads from more than 60 countries across the world. We even received an appreciation mail from former President A P J Abdul Kalam who downloaded our apps after meeting us during a visit to our school,” add the excited kids.
‘Catch me cop’, a hunt game for a criminal escaped from a prison, was the first app they developed and launched. Apart from games, educational apps such as ‘Alphabet Board’ and ‘Colour Palette’ that enables kids to learn alphabets and colours also include the 11 apps they launched.
Besides, they have developed an ‘Internet of Things’ device for their house to lock and unlock the house using a mobile application.
They have also developed a wireless virtual reality googol that gives an in-field game experience while playing games and are now developing a game for it.
“While the available virtual reality googol is very expensive and complex, we developed it at just Rs 700 by making its hardware using our 3D printer. We just made it to explore the technology and have no plans to manufacture it as we are devoid of time and money to manufacture it,” say Sanjay and Shravan.
They also point out that a lot of job applications are reaching them and they currently have no plans to make the firm a full-time establishment but will be taking in employees once they finish their graduation and completely devote themselves to the firm.
The kids were one among the top ten designers in the world selected by the ‘Korea Herald’ newspaper in 2013 and spoke on entrepreneurship and mobile application production at a function organised by the newspaper.
They have also interacted with students at a number of top universities and colleges such as the IIT Bombay, IIT Chennai, IIM Bangalore, NIT Raipur etc.
