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Surinder Sharma
Founder & CEO
Surinder Sharma is passionate about reading, but her younger son was drawn to mobile devices as a child and avoided books at all costs. So, Surinder used her background in publishing and apps to pass on her love of reading. “We realized that content should be made available to kids where they're spending a lot of their time,” Surinder says. “We developed an app and gave it to my son’s kindergarten class, and they loved it!” Smart Kidz Club launched globally in 2013 with a single app and a digital library of original content. They have since grown to include parent-facing and classroom-facing apps that eschew ads and animation that might distract kids from the growing library of read-aloud and audio books, reading and math flashcards, quizzes, and activities. Their B2C apps have been downloaded more than 760,000 times on Google Play, reaching users in over 170 countries.
Smart Kidz Club began using Google Firebase in 2019, developing and sharing new apps with Test Lab before full release. Monitoring with Crashlytics has helped them improve their rate of crash-free users from 92 percent to 99.85 percent. With Google Analytics, they create journey funnels to assess drop-off rates and behavior. “Insights into how people are using the app are critical in enabling us to tweak and build for a better customer experience,” Surinder says. Smart Kidz Club is now testing conversational AI from Google’s Dialogflow tool to offer prompts that spark discussion between readers and parents. They’ve also created special apps for Namibia’s Ministry of Education and the NFL Alumni Association and are looking into a Head Start app to reach more kids in underserved communities. “Reading aloud is so important from an early age,” Surinder says. “Kids are attracted to animations and video games, but keeping something educational and still having the kids love it… that’s very gratifying.”