Barely out of school, teens turn tech entrepreneurs
BANGALORE: Call them India's Restless Teenage Inc. Some are still in high school, some barely out of it, and they are into fascinating ventures — a transaction platform for bitcoins, applications for Google Glass, and more. They are even mentoring older entrepreneurs on technology and business.
Take Kshitij Kumar, 18, who has just finished class 12 from Khaitan Public School in Delhi, and is heading to the University of Illinois for a degree in business and computer science. He started a magic tricks tutorial portal called Horizonmagic.com when he was 10. Four years ago, he started a software firm called Blix that created products, including Snappy, that allows users to covert pictures into any format, and Mathomatic, a free math problem solving tool.
Now he's working on developing an app called Getcaption.io for Google Glass. "If you are talking to someone whose language you do not understand, the app will show you, on the glass, the translation of what is being said in a language that you understand - like subtitles in a movie," Kumar says. It's still work in progress, and currently offers translated subtitles only in English. The app can also take pictures of, say, each of three people in a conversation, and lay out the entire conversation . in a Whatsapp-like format.
Joel John, 19, has just joined Symbiosis University in Pune for a Bachelor's in business administration. People call him a bitcoins guru. "There's nothing that he does not know about bitcoins," says Brij Bhasin of GSF, a startup accelerator and investor that has a programme called High School Geeks that not only helps children like John and Kumar to build their businesses, but also uses them to educate their older entrepreneur members.
