Retired people, homemakers, bloggers, young IT industry employees bored of their monotonous work -- but all with a common thread running among them -- their love for their language - Kannada. A group of people have come together to voluntarily develop and curate content for a Kannada app that delivers quick readable and watchable and positive content in Kannada.
Called Dindima (from Kuvempu’s famous Barisu Kannada Dindimava ...), the app has been developed by friends Mahabaleshwar Bhat, Harsha Bhat, Manjunath Bhat, Sharath Hegde, Varun Kumbheshwar, Ranganath, Sneha, Divya Puranik, Darshan.
It concentrates on news and nuggets from the world of technology, science, business, movies and politics.
“Every morning when you open the newspaper or watch TV, there’s just so much negativity -- news of corruption, murder...there’s hardly any positive, encouraging, or inspiring stories,” says Mahabaleshwar Bhat, who in his other avatar is co-founder of a product incubation lab. “Moreover, there isn’t too much curated Kannada content online. Discovering good Kannada content online is difficult. There are many good bloggers also, for instance, but there aren’t good aggregators for their content either. A lot of people also feel content is often biased, or simply junk,” he feels.
Over the last six months, his team has been able to bring together people who are willing to contribute and curate content -- from newspapers, websites, blogs, social media -- translate, do Kannada voiceovers for videos to generate content for their app. “Most contributors are IT industry people, like me, who are bored of their regular work, but share a passion for Kannada. Retired people, home makers, our extended network of family and friends have pitched in too,” he says. Mahabaleshwar reasons that if people pick and share what they like, it will be of interest to other people like themselves. Dindima has a team of writers who are commissioned content. For example, the recent demonetisation phenomenon was explained in quick accessible articles to people who wanted to get their basics right.
Their target are people who think “I have five minutes to read something, but don’t know where to look”. Also people who may not be very adept at browsing the net or are not that much into social media, and hence tend to miss out on popular content. The overseas Kannadiga community has also shown great interest and have been pushing them to develop an iOS app (it’s currently available only on Android). Currently they are not monetising the app, and are a completely ad-free and pop-up free space. The team used available open source software to develop the app themselves. “In the last three months, we have had 3,500 downloads and over a lakh screen views,” says Mahabaleshwar. Very soon, they are planning to tie up with college students to generate more interesting content that their age group might want to consume.
For details check www.dindima.in
