Siblings Awe Tech World

Barely in their teens, Shravan Kumaran and Sanjay Kumaran are probably the youngest self-taught programmers and app developers in the country.
Siblings Awe Tech World

All of 14 and 12, young app developers Shravan Kumaran and Sanjay Kumaran’s company Go Dimensions is already three years old. They have developed seven apps for iOS and three apps for the Android operating system and are in the process of developing apps for the Nimbus platform too. Students of Vaels Billabong International School, Chennai, the brothers took to app developing with the help of their father, Kumaran Surendran, Vice-President at Cognizant.

These applications together have got more than 40,000 downloads from more than 48 countries. On the sidelines of a workshop for mobile app developers held recently at the Russian Centre of Science and Culture in the city, where they were invited to talk about their journey so far, the boys explained all that it takes to develop an app. Clad in formals, the brothers are a confident lot and instant crowd pleasers.

The categories they develop apps for range from games and lifestyle to communication. In January 2011, they developed their first gaming app called Catch Me Cop. Others include Alphabet Board, Prayer Planet, Colour Palette, Super Hero Jetpack E15 and Car Racing HD among others.

They have something to offer for the spiritual too. “Prayer Planet is an app for praying when on the move,” says little Sanjay adding that they stumbled upon the idea when they were on a plane and experienced mild turbulence in the air. “One can choose to play various religious songs, be it a Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Buddhist,” he says.

A social utility app developed by them called Emergency Booth lets users dial emergency numbers in a single click. This helps senior citizens and people during distress. It also allows the users to send an SMS to two selected preconfigured numbers. It is useful for globe-trotters as it has emergency numbers from 14 different countries.

“You can add your neighbour’s contact, so that if there’s a fire, they are alerted. And they too can escape from it. Say you’re living in an apartment. In case of a gas explosion or some such incident, the app can help in coordinating. Your neighbours can also send out distress signals to other inhabitants and the chain continues,” says Sanjay.

The duo has been invited to speak at several venues, including five TedX talks; Confederation of Indian Industry’s international conference on antipiracy and anti-counterfeiting where they spoke about mobile apps piracy and Madras School of Social Works’ event ‘Talk of Ages’ among others. They also made presentations to engineers at the Defence Research and Development Organisation on ‘How to get your app up on Android play store’. They were invited to Korea to address more than 200 CEOs at a conference organised by a national newspaper, The Korea Herald.

Former President of India Dr APJ Abdul Kalam sent the duo a congratulatory email after seeing their website. They also received many awards like Rotary Club Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2012 and CII Chandigarh’s Young Achievers Award among others. An Indian magazine called Exhibit identified them as one of the top 100 tech Indians in their anniversary issue that included the who’s who of the IT field and the brothers were the only under-25 entries in the list.

“My brother and I bought a lot of books and started reading and understanding how app development works. It’s been about six to seven years since we started programming. We first learnt QBasic and then Java and C,” says Sanjay. “We want to make our venture the Apple of India. We have a vision to get more than 50 per cent of the world’s smartphone users have our apps running on their devices. So far, we have been able to generate $600. But we’re nowhere close to breaking even because the number of devices we bought cost us quite a bit. We own a ‘dad-funded’ company for now,” quip the duo that draw inspiration from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Shravan points out how the Apple and Microsoft geniuses also set marketing examples for others to follow. “After you develop an app, that’s not it, you need to work on its beautification too. That’s actually the most difficult process. People buy an app because of its brand value and graphics. When you see beautiful graphics, they would obviously want to download it. Those are the two main challenges we face,” he says of his minimally-funded company.

Asked if they were interested in taking courses in calligraphy as Steve Jobs did, that later helped him create visually appealing typefaces for Apple, Sanjay says, “We use programmes as basic as MS Paint. We’re trying to learn Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Until now we have been doing it in a very unprofessional way and it’s not as great as Rovio (creator of the Angry Birds franchise). Rovio has 20 to 25 designers and here it is just my brother and me, and we also have school,” says Sanjay who is in Class VIII.

“Apple’s rule book is thicker than the Constitution of America. That’s the reason Apple’s store is so great. And when an app is of poor standards they don’t accept it,” he continues, with Shravan pointing out that one of their apps was featured on Apple’s top 300 apps list. 

“I taught them the basics of QBasic but as far as mobile app developing goes, they picked it up on their own. The idea is not to go commercial. They’re too small. I just tell them to do what they enjoy,” says their proud father, Kumaran Surendran.

One of their products includes a virtual reality headset called GoVR that enables immersive real-time viewing experience.  It costs `799 compared to similar products like Oculus Rift that costs $400 (approx `25,000).

suraksha@newindianexpress.com

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