Bhargav Sri Prakash
Bhargav Sri Prakash (born 20 April 1977) is an engineer, entrepreneur, and investor of Indian origin. He is the Founding CEO and the Chief of Product at FriendsLearn, which is based in Redwood City California and is focused on creating a health and wellness platform to address global health issues. He is the product leader behind Fooya, the crowd-funded game designed to address an awareness gap AbOUT the health consequences of diet and lifestyle choices, as a first step to induce behaviour modification. He is the inventor and pioneer of learnification, as a design methodology that taps in to the inherent educational value of entertainment, especially games.
Early life
Bhargav Sri Prakash was born in Chennai, India. He is the son of architect, urban designer and Artist Sheila Sri Prakash and M. V. Sri Prakash. He was the top ranked junior Tennis player in the nation in his age category in 1990 and also in 1992. He also played in international tournaments representing India and had a career best International Tennis Federation world ranking of 761. He enrolled in the Birla Institute of Technology and Science but dropped out in his first semester and returned to Chennai because "the tennis courts on campus at BITS were tarred and the net appeared to be a hammock", as he described in an interview. He gained an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the prestigious College of Engineering, Guindy and went on to attend graduate school on a research fellowship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and graduated with a Masters Degree in Automotive Engineering.
Career
He started his first company, CADcorporation, when he was enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Michigan to commercialise his graduate research in math-based simulations for design optimisation of automotive powertrain systems. After selling CADcorporation, he founded Vmerse in 2005, which was the first to market with a gamified 3D simulation platform for college recruiting and alumni relations. He sold Vmerse in 2009. In 2008 he started an investment fund and asset management company – Nirmana Investments – and served as a managing director along with Amrit Sahasranamam, which manages over $2 Billion in assets globally. He was invited to speak at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University about his plans for an investment fund focused on emerging markets in 2007.
Based on his experience with Vmerse, he was invited to serve as a Fellow of the Kauffman Foundation to analyse and build scalable technology solutions that tackle global issues, which is when he founded FriendsLearn. The United States Department of State awarded FriendsLearn a contract to develop the world's first gamified digital application to attract international students to American educational institutions based on his track-record with Vmerse. He draws inspiration for his entrepreneurial ventures from his life experiences as a professional tennis player and the value system instilled during his formative years of training as a professional athlete.
Invited Speaker
He was invited to speak at the Stanford School of Medicine's MedicineX Conference in 2014 and presented a session titled "Scalable Behavior Design through Mobile Gaming", which was a case study of fooya and lessons learned from digital health gaming. Fooya is a mobile game that delivers a health and wellness platform via a AAA-quality entertainment experience aimed at addressing an awareness gap among children and young adults regarding dietary-lifestyle choices. Fooya is the product of innovations in learnified gaming. Such scalable solutions may be a way to address the growing epidemic of childhood obesity and lifestyle diseases around the world. The impact of Fooya was measured through a study by Scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine's Children's Nutrition Research Center, to evaluate and quantify the impact of fooya on 6th grade students. The session focused on scientifically validated mobile content platforms as possible solutions for global health issues.
He was invited to speak at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing event in Half Moon Bay, California about the future of health gaming and was also an invited panelist at a Health 2.0 event in Silicon Valley about the use of gaming technology and learnification, as an awareness building and behaviour modification solution to global health issues. He was invited to speak at Designing Games for Learning by Silicon Vikings and announced fooya at DEMO 2012.
Patents
Bhargav Sri Prakash holds three patents for inventions in Automotive Systems and in Virtual Reality Simulations.
See also
- List of Indian entrepreneurs
- List of University of Michigan alumni