Aspiring Young Entrepreneurs at TIEYouth 2012: High School Students Developing Mobile Apps Using Appcelerator Titanium
Do you need a big idea to become a successful entrepreneur?
Conventional wisdom may say “yes”. Vinod Khosla, Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems and Founder of Khosla Ventures said, “don’t always follow conventional wisdom.” I tend to believe the latter. I believe that we need to let our children explore newer ideas and be creative. There are successes in following a predictable path but there is much more to gain by trying the unknown.
I attended Silicon Valley's TIECon 2012 conference a couple of weeks ago and one of the tracks was for youths. A ton of young high school teenagers presented their new ideas that exemplified how simple ideas can be insanely powerful and effective in the mobile domain. The era of mobile technology has changed the way we think about building software. “Building apps is as simple as doing homework,” said a participant at TIEYouth 2012.
TIEYouth 2012 was organized to help high school children showcase their products, exchange ideas among peers and take advice from those who are successful in Silicon Valley. Vinod Khosla, one of the key icons in "the valley" who has gained tremendous success, gave the keynote presentation. For Vinod, the path to success was not always easy. There were many failures in between his successes. We happen to know him for his successes; and that is how people will remember you.
In light of Vinod Khosla’s presentation, I was enlightened by the timely advice he was giving to the young generation while at the same time actively engaging us elders. He made it clear that you can’t be innovative by listening to conventional wisdom – do the unknowns and follow your dreams. You may fail but that is the true measure of your hard work.
After the presentation, we met a few High School students who presented their mobile apps built from very simple thoughts. Their creativity showed that a mobile app doesn’t necessarily have to be super complicated to be useful. In fact, the opposite is true – apps need to be simple to use. Many of these kids built their apps using the popular Appcelerator Titanium cross-platform app development framework. The choice for them was quite simple– it was free, easy to use, and simple to program using the javaScript language. The students, still young, show great promise for becoming the next generation of app developers and programmers.
By the time these teens complete high school, they will have multiple apps deployed in app stores. They will be able to add these to their college admission applications. Perhaps a few of them will be successful building businesses around their ideas. There are tremendous opportunities in the mobile app development and more are growing each day as we hook into this technology. A useful framework like Appcelerator Titanium helps to ensure that an app can be developed with ease and that it can be adopoted across multiple platforms.
Shak is a member Appcelerator's Customer Success team. He is also President of the Silicon Valley Chapter of American Association of Bangladeshi Engineers and Architects and a volunteer at TIE, where he advises youths with mobile application development.
