Digital Learning Made Easier

Bulbbulapps library, a smartphone and tablet app for children below six years, has garnered more than a million views on YouTube. Merely four months old, Hyderabad-based startup Bulbulapps is available on all platforms is and  is currently among the top apps in iOS India.

How Bulbul was conceived

A serial entrepreneur, Prakash was always passionate about films and books right from his childhood. “I grew up to become a filmmaker and an artist. Bulbulapps is inspired by this very fundamental need to learn and unlearn. Most importantly. It is meant to unlock the curiosity of every single child. It became even more evident when my child began to ask questions born out of curiosity. They enjoyed reading and learning through the digital platform as it was highly engaging and had a tremendous visual and interesting narration,” says Prakash, founder and CEO, Bulbulapps.

Prakash was awed by the curiosity and the questions that every child asks constantly. Their hunger for answer is endless. “When I first came across the bird ‘Bulbul’, I found that it was unique, bubbly, full of curiosity and had a  restlessness to discover things around it. I wanted to create a brand that had a distinctive and childlike voice – a voice and visual that stimulates something  personal, embraces modern technology and puts the child reader and parents’ choice foremost in the process. So Bulbul came to existence,” he says.

Loaded with stories

Bulbulapps library is loaded with different stories wherein  a kid or a parent gets on single library app with lots of categories and books that they can download and read. The basic version is free. We also offer a subscription model. “Currently, we don’t tie up our apps with any physical books. Though we have requests from pre-schools at this moment we are more focused on the library app itself,” Prakash points out.

Collaborative effort

The foundation of the library app is ‘Think like a Child’. “For our app Krishna and the Universe we had a writer from Mumbai, a Spanish artist from Mexico, an Israeli music studio, a city animator and a Hyderabadi voice-over artist who collaborated to create this beautiful app for the pre-school children using our bulbulstudio.com.  It is a highly engaging, enriching a mobile phone story for children,” says Prakash.

The team has over 180 artists from around the world, who constantly bring new story ideas on board and translate them to lovely apps. “We believe if people can collaborate from different countries to do coding and create software, they can also collaborate to make a beautiful interactive story for kids,” he says.

Currently, Bulbulapps have touched 250,000 cumulative downloads and counting. “Some of our books even went on to become No1 eBook app in 14 countries including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan,” he adds.

What next?

“We began our journey by creating known folk and fairy tales. Our next focus is to develop native characters and regional content for India. All the apps in our library are more popular and easily understood stories in English. Apart from English, we are in the process of creating local apps in Hindi and Telugu. In the next six months we plan to introduce apps in another 12 languages. Our new series is kids travel apps. We just introduced Tuk-Tuk in Mumbai. Soon we will it in other cities,” says Prakash.

Source: http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/Digital-Learning-Made-Easier/2015/10/08/article3067952.ece

New Indian Express, 8/10/2015