Shifu, the Made in India smartphone sidekick is set to outsmart the best of the breed apps
“Shifu is your smart friend who lives in your smartphone. It observes when and how you use your phone. It knows what important things need your attention and when is the right time to show them to you…Shifu reminds you to do things which are important to you... Shifu reminds you of things which you otherwise would have missed and it does so without being intrusive. Shifu is the sidekick you always wanted.”
Welcome to the world of smarter Made in India application Shifu. This app with a name pronounced “shurfoo” in China, and “shee-foo” the Indian way, is smarter than your iPhone voice assistant Siri. Prashant Singh, Co-founder, Signals, the fledgling company behind Shifu, explains Shifu is very different from Siri and other apps in this space. He calls his journey to innovating Shifu “a long story”. “The idea of Shifu germinated while working in my previous job.”
Working with a portfolio of 20 apps which had 53mn downloads Singh used to look at the usage statistics of the apps and wonder, “How can I make use of this information to help people get more out of our app? Can I find out when the user is free and bored and remind him to use our app?” Singh was sure that this kind of gentle nudging at the right time could help the user get more value from the apps. “I thought if I could do this for our apps, why can’t I do it for the entire phone experience, i.e., can I make the phone suggest what is the best use of it at a given point of time?” says Singh, reminiscing about his inspiration.
His thoughts were leading him in the direction where the phone would nudge the user to make/return a phone call to a friend, check Facebook, visit a nearby coffee shop, or watch a video, or upload a picture, etc. There were so many ways in which a mobile phone could be used, and Singh wanted to figure out the best way of doing so. Step one; the budding innovator decided to quit his job. He partnered with two of his friends, Michael Massey and Deepansh Jain, in November 2012, to launch Signals, the startup that was to launch the breakthrough app Shifu eight months later in June 2013. Massey is not just the Co-founder but the Custodian of Server and Analytics. “He is the man behind all the server side magic you see in Shifu,” says Singh. With a Masters in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur, Massey’s love for analysing data has his partners’ respect. “He is obsessed with optimising algorithms,” says Singh. Deepansh Jain, the third partner in the trio, leads all of the client side initiatives at Signals. He holds a BTech degree in Computer Science from Delhi College of Engineering.
“Deepansh is a very active member of Android forums and was the first moderator of StackOverflow from India,” says Singh proudly. Jain manages an online community of ebook enthusiasts. This serial innovator built a couple of apps in his college days which got half a million downloads in aggregate. He built an Android app for India Against Corruption (IAC) which proved to be very popular. Singh himself has an illustrious list of achievements for one so young. He has eight years of experience in mobile app development; he is the founder of the Delhi chapter of Mobile Monday (MoMo), an industry association for mobile developers; and he was on the program management team at Monsoon Multimedia, a mobile TV startup based in San Mateo, part of the core team at Spice Labs, which developed a portfolio of apps that got 53 million downloads and reached a daily revenue of `123,780–495,120 ($2000–8000). “We were the top publisher of apps on Blackberry, Nokia and Android,” says Singh about his last stint. A resident of Rajasthan, Singh credits his innovative streak to his environment. “All of us are born with this tendency to be creative. Some are more fortunate to be born in an environment, which provides us enough resources to take care of survival needs like food and shelter and encourages enquiry and helps us with resource and guidance to get ourselves educated to find answers.” The company has big plans in the offing—first they are filing a US patent for it. Meanwhile, the team is exploring all possibilities to make Shifu the ultimate best friend indeed.
“We want it to help you in everything, from showing an intelligent alert for the battery to helping you stay in touch with your friend. The possibility of what can be done with Shifu is immense and I believe that we are just scratching the surface of our smartphones,” says a confident Singh. “We are witnessing interesting ways in which people are using Shifu,” he says adding cautiously, “But it’s a little too soon to talk about the future roadmap. We are one of the very few product startups in the country. This is my fourth startup and the first one as a founder. Running a global startup is a hard task everywhere in the world.” In India he finds “on the positive side you have access to a significant chunk of the market. We can develop our product at a fraction of their cost.” However, as Singh says, “No one has built a global product like Shifu in India before, hence finding someone who knows how to do it is tough.”
Notwithstanding the challenges, the smart innovator of the smartest smartphone sidekick is sure to find a way to make more smart moves.