Storytelling with a Twist

Every child deserves a story filled with drama, excitement and a lesson learned. With innocence that would move you; these carefree, loving and full of life children are all around us. They put perspective and imagination into this monotonous life. To add more colours and vividness to their dreams, 5 Masters of Finance students from the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University have started a company, teleStory, which aims to empower illiterate parents or guardians to read bedtime stories to their children.

teleStory delivers audio lessons through a mobile phone that corresponds with a teleStory story book. The interactive audio contains questions, games and words that match with the story being told. These lessons are primarily designed to help and guide an illiterate parent/guardian read a story to their child. The designing of these lessons is done by their local partner, Early Childhood Education Institution.

As C.S. Lewis once said, “There are no ordinary people”, and these students truly define that. They are one of the six finalists from the 20,000 applications for the 2015 Hult Prize competition. They are now on their way to New York City to present their company at the Hult Prize finals for $1M USD seed funding. This grand amount is awarded to the winners of this competition and they have had a great head start. The Hult Prize Foundation is a start-­‐up accelerator for budding young social entrepreneurs emerging from the world’s universities. Named as one of the top five ideas changing the world by President Bill Clinton and TIME Magazine, the annual competition for the Hult Prize aims to identify and launch the most compelling social business ideas—start-­‐up enterprises that tackle grave issues faced by billions of people. Winners receive USD1 Million in seed capital, as well as mentorship and advice from the international business community. This year’s challenge was to find a sustainable solution that improves early childhood education in urban slums and can reach 10 million children in five years.

The innovative minds behind teleStory include— Michael Custer, CEO–Chief Executive Officer; Callum Porter-­‐Harris, CCO–Chief Communication Officer; Matthias Keschka, COO–Chief Operating Officer; Dennis Du, CFO–Chief Financial Officer and Sarah Long, CMO–Chief Marketing Officer.

One might wonder how are an entrepreneurial competition and the people associated with it connected to Mumbai Smiles. Well, these students initially started their base in China and ran a successful pilot in June. Currently, teleStory calls 50 users a night in rural Hubei Province. Although, they started their pilot in China, they plan to put up their base in India. So, here they were, reaching out to different organizations to expand their reach and touch the lives of as many children as they can. In Mumbai, they started off their pilot session (3 months) with Pratham, Smart Steps and Mumbai Smiles. Under their expansion plan teleStory will reach 28 more preschools with Smart Steps and 28 Balwadis of Mumbai Smiles. The expansion saw teleStory reach 62 schools and over 1,200 children during six weeks of operation within India. Currently, teleStory has 65 lessons on their platform and supports books in three different languages–Hindi, Marathi and English.

They arrived at Mumbai Smiles office to train the Balwadi teachers in availing this service. They gave out 16 different books to be supplied to all the Balwadis. Each book has a unique ID number making it easier to decide which book they wish to choose. They also conducted a fun session wherein they co-created a book with the teachers, as they rightly believed that no one knows the kids more than their teachers. It was an activity which consisted of a book and each of its pages either had a colour, shape or animal and a sentence at the bottom of it. The teachers sat in groups and wrote their ideas of description and content. This was done in order to not let the child just read the sentence but to try and associate it with a colour or a shape. Basically these are personalised books which they hope to create and distribute.

In conversation with Callum Porter Harris, Matthias Keschka and Vineet Poosarla (intern), we learned that these people have high aspirations complementing their impeccable strategy. On their way to entrepreneurship, this team of 5 hopes to make education accessible and friendly, even in the remotest areas. With determination in their heart and passion reflected in their work, we believe in their dreams of enriching the lives of many children. Good luck team teleStory.

To know more about them, check out their website www.telestory.in
For their produce demo— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9kWEcDt1LE