The Hindu Business Line : Making the mobile phone a tool that teaches

No. Individuals fund us. We are talking to a few people. But we may be a bit too early for Venture Capitalists who want to put in a $3-5 million investment and want much larger business than what we are now. What we are looking at right now is either seed or early-stage type of funding company or an angel investor or a syndicate of enlightened investors who are passionate about this.

What stops competition and duplication of your efforts?

Anand Kannan

(Anand Kannan) The security guard outside my office! (laughs)

Any team has to go through the same process of discovery. You need to understand students and service delivery. That has to be reflected in every aspect of design. The development of software technology, development of content and provision of facilitation are three different things. It would be hard for a large company to do this as a business.

It is easier for them to get into an established and mature market where they can look at building a $200-300 million business in one year - rather than get into something like this which is at an early stage.

But that apart, what one team has done, another team can do. However, most of the good inventions in the technology side have come from small passionate teams.

What happens when more players enter the scene? If another 10 guys come in?

The biggest challenge is persuading the student that this is better than traditional alternatives such as reading from a book or going to class. So if guys number 2 to 11 come in, they would make the job easier. The burden of pioneering doesn't have to be on us. We still have other advantages to differentiate ourselves. It is not a one-trick pony. It is a well-thought-out product. So it will stand out. We have to innovate and be ahead.

What has been the most difficult part of the journey so far?

Finding and retaining good people. Convincing them to work in a start-up and make them feel part of it. Salaries have gone up significantly in the last two years which as a start-up, we can't match. Nor is there a willingness to match. The guy who gives up something to join here brings in a lot of energy. But it is frustrating when we lose people — sometimes it looks like a losing game.

What keeps you going?

When a student comes and says "WoW" it makes the effort worthwhile. That is a real motivator.

Mobiles for learning? And on a regular basis, at that?

(Anand Kannan) It is a behaviour change. It took my mother a long while to shift to e-mail from post cards and now to Skype chat. Some shift quickly - they are early adapters.

Any computer device with communication ability can be used for different things. Providing a good learning experience is both science and art. The current generation is growing up with mobiles. So it will be easier for them to adapt.

Does mobile size not pose a constraint?

(Anand Kannan) I'll answer this in two parts.

I'll give you an example I am fond of giving. Which is bigger? The sun or the moon? The sun obviously. And by a huge factor. But when you look at them in the sky, the moon appears only three times smaller.

The visual impact is dependent not only on physical size but also on proximity. Hold something closer, it looks big. So most people hold their phones 20 cm away, a computer is an arm's length away.

When you keep the phone closer, it'll look bigger. It is actually the size of a pop-up window on your PC. This is one part.

The second part is that we have paid a lot of attention to how learning happens (See graphic accompanying story). Only that much information must be shown at a time that you can actually learn. Learning is the key word here. Because we are not providing you information access. We are not telling you - go to Wikipedia. We give you one piece of information at a time.

We measure whether you learn it and then we send you the next piece. So everything is carefully and critically broken down ahead of time. So we can measure the consumption and repeat it if necessary.

The learning orientation provides a certain design of the flow, which is also mapped very carefully. That is called content mobilisation or lesson mobilisation.

Together, both these things make the mobile a good instrument for this. If we had found it physically inconvenient, we may have even dropped the project.

We are convinced it is a great learning medium - it does not make sense to commercialise otherwise.

I'll also say that careful design and careful monitoring of the learning experience is necessary. In and of itself, a cell-phone will not be a learning device.

You need a back-end to supplement and to provide service and to shape the content in a way that fits into that phone. For example, for two different mobiles, you need to send different things. You can't send the same things.

The back-end has to understand and scale things accordingly.

So every time some one logs in, we measure the screen size and then content is scaled accordingly.

Is that why you won't move this to some other medium — such as a CD?

Monetisation would be hard. Providing personalisation and interactivity is impossible however well-designed the CD is. You can't anticipate all the possibilities at the time of design. The CD will never find out if you are sleeping, for example.

vageesh@thehindu.co.in

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