Srini Kumar-People You Should Know

News, People You Should Know/Pg 2 — By Buddy Sampson on August 15, 2011 at 11:48 am

Phone Call To The Future

Inventors are visionaries who have the innate ability to foresee a need. They make all the necessary moves to carry out their vision. “I’m an inventor,”said Srini Kumar, a visionary, destined for a bright future in the software arena.”You see holes in the world of products, things that haven’t been invented yet.” Kumar is the creater of Tinyvox, a product that will revolutionize the mobile cellular industry.”Look at what talking can do,” said Kumar. “Look at Martin Luther King Jr. and President Obama. Talking is a very powerful form of audio communication.” But what is Tinyvox? Tinyvox turns Facebook, Twitter, email and message boards into a huge voicemail system. “It is easier and more direct than typing,” he said. “And easier and more direct has real value on the Internet.”

Srini Kumar has an impressive resume. The winner of the Web Award at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in 2008, he developed METANOTES, a real-time brainstorming tool that works like a shared wall of stickynotes. The inventor, who also developed StickerNation.com, which lets customers print custom vinyl stickers in small batches at low prices for their projects, studied at Stanford University earning a BA in Sociology. “All of this Internet stuff is Sociology,” he explained. “It’s coding society, coding people’s minds.” He also studied at the storied University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Kenan-Flagler Business School, garnering a MBA in May 2007. Born in Urbana, llinois and raised in upstate New York, Srini was always tech savvy.”I was an IBM kid,” he said. “I’ve been with computers since 1980, when I got my first PC.”

Tinyvox is an application that is useful for people on the move that don’t have time to type long messages. It is designed to be useful for tech and non-tech savvy users, including celebrities, sports figures, students, writers, artists and other consumers that use Twitter, which has a limited use of characters, to send messages that can be as long or short as desired. “Whenever you have an idea and you have to communicate it through the Internet right now, you have to summerize it into sequences of 26 letters,” said Kumar. “In terms of Twitter and Facebook, you’re typing, typing and typing all day. It’s very limited. Not only I have to incode it into words, you on the other hand, have to decode the words and try to get the feeling that I’m trying to get across.” Picture Paris Hilton or Ashton Kutcher or Jay-Z or Beyonce, who are on the go and don’t have time to type long messages on Facebook. They simply can use Tinyvox to deliver a message to their legions of fans by sending a link from their Tinyvox software, which turns their cellphones into powerful audio recording tools. And they can thrill their fans, who hear their voices, instead of just reading written text.

“Celebrities can communicate to their fans much quicker,” explained the inventor, who is an expert in Information Architecture.”Let’s say you’re a celebrity having a conversation poolside. You can Tweet it out to your fans. And then all their fans can live vicariously through them.” Tinyvox is also a useful tool for screenwriters. “If you’re screenwriting a fiction story, what better way to get that dialogue done than just embody that character,” he explained. “It turns the script writing process into a pleasure.”

A huge advantage of Tinyvox, says Kumar, is the ability of making people that lack spelling or writing skills to make intelligent messages that make them appear smarter than what they would have written on Twitter or Facebook. “With Tinyvox, you feel like you’re saying something for the ages everytime,” he said. “That’s important.” An additional advantage of Tinyvox, unlike video applications, like Skype or You Tube, is that the user doesn’t have to be seen and worry about makeup or dressing for the camera. “You Tube is a wonderful thing, but do you see yourself wanting to be on video every morning,” he laughed. “We don’t do it because it is uncomfortable. We don’t like to do it.” Tinyvox, a superb technological innovation, is the wave of the future and a very inexpensive software tool for mobile telephone apllications.

Find it today on the iOS App Store and visit www.tinyvox.com. Srini Kumar, who invented Tinyvox, a phone call to the future, is a visionary and inventor and one of the People You Should Know.