It’s been a week that Red Herring has picked the Bulbul application among the top 100 winners in Asia. The list comprises the most exciting startups from Asia, Europe and the US. Predictably the mood is upbeat at the Bulbul office. To be an entrepreneur, you should be a good storyteller, need collaboration, technology and distribution in place — and that’s what Prakash Dantuluri , CEO of Bulbul applications managed to pursue to fulfil his dream.
Quitting his job
Having worked in the US and returning to India after quitting his job, Prakash had a checklist in place and wished to go solo in fulfilling them. Hailing from a middle class family, Prakash talking on what kept him pushing forward, states, “I am a good engineer, but I feel, am a natural storyteller. After I’d quit my job, I was working for an animated serieson television called Paramanandayya Sishyulu . It was a failure.”
Prakash felt he had go back to IT and started a tech firm called Deevee one in the year 2003 with his cousin which created a SMS-based price alert system for the farmers to help them understand the volatile market situation and eliminate middle men.
Many ventures later, he also co-produced a movie, Satyabhama starring Bhoomika Chawla and Sivaji and directed the Telugu movie Om Shanti ` with the help of producer Ashwini Dutt.
Birth of Bulbul
After a few ventures, finally in 2014 he started an application called Bulbulconsisting 12 members. The application is a collaboration of several writers, animators, artists and musicians around the world. The application was developed with a vision to provide clean, ad-free content to children between six and nine years old.
“The main idea is to provide local content with global standards. We have many applications like ‘Row Row your boat’ which has English Rhymes with Indian essence. We want to break cultural barriers and have no boundaries. We have 30,000 people from neighbouring countries that like us on Facebook and stand at the . fifth position among the android users in Pakistan,” claims Prakash.
Application highlights
The recent addition to Bulbul’s library is ‘Tuk Tuk’ . The story is about an auto rickshaw, which goes to Mumbai for the first time and explores the city.
It has animations of Mumbai trains, traffic and film city.
Plans for the future
On the response for the app Prakash says, “When people can sell dinosaurs and make money, we feel the local content could also be sold as it has got great potential.
When Chitti Chilakamma , the Telugu rhyme on YouTube has more than a million views, reaching to people with good content around the world isn’t impossible.”
But that’s not all; he has more on his mind. “We would like to add more features like vocabulary, puzzles and reasoning and analytical skills to the apps in future,” adds Prakash. When asked about success or awards, he states an example of women who came all the way from the town to their office to download the app.
“That was the moment we felt, we have succeeded in reaching the right audience,” he adds with pride.
