BANGALORE: Saurabh Jain is the author of India’s first book on J2ME (Java Platform Micro Edition), titled ‘Mobile Phone Programming’. He is a Nokia Developer Champion and a Blackberry Elite developer, and has been featured prominently in five YouTube videos as part of the Blackberry dream app factory contest.
Interestingly, he is a Chartered Accountant, having started his practice in 2003. “It taught me how to work with clients and government authorities,” remembers Saurabh of his CA days. He was interested in computers at a very young age, and was part of Bits N Bytes, the computer club at Modern School, Barakhamba. He attended a symposium called Access in 1992, where he saw students creating computer applications, and someone actually sold an app to a big company for `17,000. This changed his life. He promptly learnt the ‘C’ programming language and got hooked on to programming. Bill Gates remains his business idol and with entrepreneurial parents, jumping into entrepreneurship was a natural progression.
Saurabh’s company, SKJ Technologies, has created a content editor that can gamify education content in an easy and cost effective manner, allowing teachers to create mobile content for students on the fly, the same way that they create content using MS Office. For example, a teacher can make an Angry Birds kind of game to teach Physics concepts like gravity and impulse.
Nokia has sponsored apps for their Asha range of phones. Apart from this, they have clients like Reliance Communications, Penguin – Dorling Kindersley (DK), Mindtree, LG, Tata Teleservices, Indiagames and Games2Win. They are currently working with DK to convert HTML-based content from iBooks to HTML 5-based hybrid apps for Windows.
Saurabh has conducted workshops on J2ME, HTML 5 and Blackberry development for over 3,000 participants, in companies like LG and Kyocera and colleges like Delhi Technical University and BIT Mesra’s Noida campus. OpenClass, an initiative of SKJ, is a community for mobile and web developers, that has organised more than 30 technology-related events and workshops. “I’m inspired by people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to play big, work hard, think laterally and stick to high moral standards for long-term success and I believe in the principle of ‘nishkaam karm’ (work without desire for any direct gratification),” he says.
— rohit@learnbizsimulations.com