Two young tech developers from the city — 13-year-old Shravan Kumaran and his 12-year-old brother, Sanjay Kumaran — managed to surprise the audience at My Fortune hotel as they confidently spoke about their achievements in the world of mobile applications. The boys, who received the Young Achievers Award from the Rotary Club of Madras East, have created seven mobile apps in all, which have been downloaded 60,000 times by users spread across 62 countries.
Talking about the journey, the brothers, studying in Vael’s Billabong High International School, say, “We started out with MS Word and PowerPoint and gradually moved on to more complex computer languages such as QBasic and JSON.” They were indeed egged on by their dad, Kumaran Surendran, who is the Director Engineering, Symantec, but that shouldn’t take anything away from the boys. “When I noticed that they were quick learners, I wanted to give them a challenge by asking them to learn complex programming languages,” he says and adds proudly, “But today, they are quite comfortable with writing code for the mobile platform, which I didn’t teach them. They learnt it all by themselves!”
Their first application was a game called Catch Me Cop, which has seen around 20,000 downloads so far. The other useful apps created by them are Emergency Booth (it saves the need to remember emergency numbers of different countries), Colour Palette (useful for kids to learn different colours) and Alphabet Board (an app to learn the letters of the English alphabet) As if to prove that they belong to a different generation of Indians, the brothers have even started their own company, Godimensions, which, they say, is totally ‘dad-funded,’ and want to turn it into a global company.
Shravan says, “I am more of a ‘programmer,’ while my brother can both code and design apps.” What’s on their agenda next? “A crowd sourced app that would provide traffic and pollution updates,” beams Shravan.
Like all successful people, the brothers too have a little secret to their success? “Quit wasting time on Facebook and chatting with friends. We spend it on developing apps,” says Shravan, who, along with his brother, enjoys watching cricket and playing football.
Also felicitated on the occasion were D. Anandhi and R. Puratchi Tamil from the Chennai Girls Higher Secondary School, Saidapet. While Anandhi was a school topper in the Standard Ten Board exams, Puratchi Tamil won a contest “Talk your way to Japan.”
