Nirmala Kamath is founder-director of Bangalore’s Chie Media Pvt. Ltd, an education technology start-up (estb.2011, headcount: 25) offering curated education content specially designed for primary school children. Its flagship online portal iKidsworld.com offers Airtel digital TV interactive content for math, science and English through learning tools such as digital games, quizzes, videos and puzzles.
Newspeg. Last November, the company launched Fundoodaa Books, a multi-lingual digital library app for children in the two-eight age group, which can be downloaded from Google and Apple stores on Android devices including smart phones and tablets. The library features a collection of activities-based stories for children — available in English and eight Indian languages.
History. A highly-qualified engineering alumna of IIT-Kharagpur and the University of Massachusetts (USA), Kamath began her career in the R&D wing of the Bangalore-based IT major Wipro Technologies. After acquiring 12 years of valuable work experience in various capacities, Kamath signed up with Star Television. In 2006 when Star formed a joint venture with the Tata Group to launch Direct-to-Home (DTH) television in India, she was appointed head of the Tata Sky division which launched the company’s Active Sports, Active News, Active Wizkids, Active Games, Active Cooking etc on the DTH platform. Nine years later in 2011, she quit Tata Sky to co-promote Chie (‘blessed with wisdom’ in Japanese) Media together with former colleague S.V. Krishna Rao.
The Chie Media business model is subscriptions-based. A monthly household subscription to access the company’s iKidsworld portal is priced at Rs.51, and access to the Fundooda Books digital library costs Rs.100.
Direct talk. “Our flagship product iKidsWorld combines my expertise in digital television with co-curricular education for young children. I am pleased to report that market response has been beyond our expectation and we already have over 100,000 subscribers,” says Kamath.
Future plans. Unsurprisingly, Kamath has drawn up ambitious plans for Chie Media. “Over the next five years, we plan to expand the range of our products and services to cover middle and secondary school children who need to be prepared to derive the full benefit of higher education and workplaces beyond academia,” she says.
Fair winds!
Paromita Sengupta (Bangalore)