Meet the Kumarans. Geniuses…Brothers…Programmers

Ask any owner of a smartphone and he will tell you the importance of applications. A dominant part of this craze involves games and incase of games nothing is too much. Young boys comprise a large part of games enthusiasts. And not too in the 10-12 age-group would care about the backend of the games they play. But, 13 year old Shravan Kumaran and his 11 year old brother Sanjay Kumaran are exceptions. These brothers hold the distinction of being the youngest Mobile Application Programmers in India by Apple. The boys operate through their company called GoDimensions, where Shravan is the co-founder & President and Sanjay is the co-founder & CEO.

They have built four applications -- Colour Palette, Prayer Planet, Alphabet board, Catch Me Cop –which is available in both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Play store. Their next app is called ‘Emergency Boat’ which was inspired from their own experience when Sanjay fell off the skateboard and tried calling his dad in vain, who only responded after 30 minutes. They have made this app for use during emergencies where you can set up important contacts along with six emergency contact numbers (recommended) like 911 or 100, fire and medical assistance – a total of nine numbers that can be dialed during emergencies. Once assigned and in case of an emergency, it gives an immediate call to the assigned number as well as sends an SMS saying emergency. Their applications are quite popular on both the Apple and Android stores and have received close to 24,000 downloads since launch by word of mouth marketing and showing the application to the people they meet.

Besides coding, both the brothers like animation, reading books, painting and making caricatures and cartoons. But all their computing passion is not interfering with their regular studies. Shravan says they follow a timetable, and only program from 6:00 pm to 7.30pm. They sleep by midnight and attend the school punctually from 8:20 am to 3:00pm. Shravan favours Apple while Sanjay prefers Android. These youngsters were encouraged by their dad who taught them Powerpoint, Qbasic, Java etc. But their thirst did not end there and they both learnt application development languages themselves to work on Android and iOS. The brothers are still not pros on mobile operating system’s application platform because they feel it has its own share of drawbacks and difficulty levels.

Shravan and Sanjay aspire to develop a tablet called ‘GoSheet’, which they want to be the thinnest and lightest tablet in the world. They are very excited when talking about it and say, that the tablet would be a customizable tablet, which in the hands of a 7-year old can be used to play adventure games and for a 25-year old can be used for business purpose. This would be possible, as the tablet will allow multiple ‘users’ to be added with every person having a different login on the tablet and who can access the applications which they prefer through their respective logins.

Shravan and Sanjay are no strangers to accolades. They have spoken in various events like TEDx, IIMB flagship event Eximus and CII Chandigarh among others and have also been honoured by former president of India, Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam. But these young kids know the value of sharing and want to share 15% of their profits with the poor and needy.

So if you guys want to become programmers like Shravan & Sanjay, then you need to learn Qbasic and excel in it says Shravan. He also says its important to be good in Math to learn programming. And Sanjay’s advice to those of you who want to be an entrepreneur is to start early. And if you want to do anything with computers then being good at algorithms is important. “It is kind of easy but you need lots of patience,” says Sanjay.