App developers making tomorrow’s tech
Innovators focus on education, news, photography, self-care
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, his victory came as a surprise to many who had seen Hillary Clinton as a sure winner. Experts later found that this was in part because of the widening gap between so-called media bubbles, wherein citizens on either end of the political spectrum were unaware of what their opposites were reading and taking as fact.
It’s moments like this that led Harleen Kaur to an important realization: “The role of news media is very vital, but also very broken.”
Kaur began her career at NASA as an engineer before working at a startup in Berlin and becoming Rolls-Royce’s first female vice-president, among other jobs and experiences along the way.
But after her realization about the state of the media landscape, in 2018 she founded Ground News, an app that compares different news outlets’ coverage of local and international news in an attempt to help people break out of their bubbles.
Kaur had increasingly noticed the disparity between some mainstream news sources and what was really going on, as well as the evident biases in news outlets across the political spectrum — not just in how they covered something, but in what they didn’t cover at all.
Her iOS app, Ground News, pulls from more than 50,000 news sources, from mainstream and international outlets to local news sources, comparing headlines and biases, sorting by specific topics, locations and more.
It also translates news stories into English, French or Spanish. In the near future, Kaur hopes to be able to offer a subscription bundle so readers can bypass paywalls to read articles that aren’t already covered by specific contracts between the app and some news outlets.
“I created Ground News with a mission to make it easier for people to understand things from different angles,” Kaur said.
Last year Ground News started offering premium subscriptions as well, and has launched a Safari extension as well as a Mac app. It doubled its team’s size last quarter and has seen exponential growth in subscriptions, said Kaur, adding that the Apple App Store’s Small Business Program has helped the company gear up during a time when trustworthy news is needed more than ever.
Kaur was one of four Canadian app developers who participated in a roundtable with Apple CEO Tim Cook April 8, touching on education, mental health, misinformation and the future possibilities of app technology. The event celebrated some of Canada’s most successful Apple-based apps, including entrepreneurs who have amped up their offerings with support and technology from Apple.
The three other Canadian developers chatting with Cook were Abdou Sarr, 23, whose app FILM3D lets users shoot 3D photos; Jason Krogh, the founder of Sago Mini, which offers play-based educational apps for children; and Brie Code, a former game developer whose app #SelfCare promotes deep connection and interaction that’s at odds with the social media of the day.
Sarr, the youngest of the group, said he began coding as a child, and met his future business partner in high school. They reconnected later and developed their app, perceiving a market gap. They were right: two and a half years in, they recently hit three million downloads.
Sarr recently attended Apple’s first Entrepreneur Camp for Black Founders and Developers. Sarr told the roundtable that his vision is to move into augmented reality next, something Cook called “one of the most profound things on the horizon.”
Code also attended an Apple entrepreneur camp, and was the first Canadian to do so. She said that after two decades in gaming, she encountered a cancer diagnosis that she said changed the way she thought about life.
“In those months I just started to have this ... crystal clear vision and connection to my values, and I started to be able to see what I could bring to the industry,” she said.
Code wanted to create a new way of interacting, an alternative to the gamification of social media and other apps. Her app #SelfCare follows a curve of deepening connection, she explained.
“We are inventing a new interaction model for technology that helps amplify compassion, and co-creation,” Code said. During the pandemic, the app “blew up,” she said, doubling its downloads.
“This has been a rough time,” she said. “We’re all experiencing some degree of trauma.”
Cook agreed, adding that the need for an app like Code’s is “off the charts.”
Another area that’s been upended by the pandemic is education, which has seen students trying to learn online as educators often struggling to reach them.
For Krogh, who was already in the business of digital education and was in the process of launching another app, the digital shift represented an opportunity.
Krogh said he develops apps with the youngest users in mind, making them “free of instruction” so kids can “own the experience.”
Since its inception, the company has grown from eight employees to 70, and last year they doubled their revenue, he said.
His new app, Sago Mini School, launched at the beginning of the pandemic. The pandemic has been “hugely challenging” for families, as well as educators, said Krogh.
The past year has also highlighted the need for technology that parses out information from disinformation, said Kaur, “because it’s a problem that the whole world is facing,” alongside the “second pandemic” of misinformation.
As Cook put it, perhaps the age of misinformation could have been prevented or mitigated. But now, “it’s like an oil spill that has to be cleaned up.”