Earlier this week, Bangladeshi American Shah Talukder, the founder and general manager of Cisco’s Safety and Security Systems Business Unit, launched an app called YakSee, which allows its users to programme their own interactive broadcasting station. The main inspiration behind this invention was none other, his own daughter Leilah.
Leilah, then 12 years old, came to Dhaka four years ago and worked with a local NGO, the Sajida Foundation, to help poor students in learning English. After returning to the States, Leilah wanted to continue helping those students. So, she and few of her classmates from Los Gatos High School formed an English Language Outreach Club (LOC), stretched their help to the students all the way in Bangladesh to teach English.
Every two weeks, students would meet with Leilah and her friends through a Skype conference, at Sajida Foundation’s Dhaka office. But, regular communication with Bangladeshi students proved to be very difficult, due to slow internet connection, strikes, weather, or traffic jams. “We were getting frustrated because we couldn’t help those students due to external factors, which we couldn’t control,” said Leilah.
Witnessing Leilah’s frustration, Talukder, an Electrical Engineering major from Georgia Tech, wanted to help. He envisioned an interactive one-to-many, a two way video streaming platform, to solve Leilah’s problem.
After hearing Talukder’s idea, 14 of his tech-veteran friends from Silicon Valley volunteered to help solving the problem.
After working intensely for four years, Talukder and his team were able to create the virtual platform and named it ‘YakSee’ meaning-- to talk profusely and see, simultaneously.
Using YakSee, anyone with a smartphone or tablet and 3G internet can broadcast interactive sessions from anywhere in the globe.
It allows participants in a group to interact and exchange ideas, ask questions through video or radio feed. Once downloaded and installed on a smart phone, one can use his or her Facebook account to log into YakSee. Registered business or famous celebrities can have their own professional YakSee broadcasting station.
“YakSee is going to disrupt the television broadcasting system,” to said Zahid Rahim, a veteran of Silicon Valley’s semiconductor industry and Talukder’s friend.
Developers claim that YakSee is better than any other app in the market (Google Hangouts, Skype, Viber, or Whatsapp) in terms of server capacity. “You can have any number of participants in a broadcasting session,” said Talukdar during the launching campaign of YakSee at Microsoft’s Dhaka Office on July 4.
Currently, YakSee is using Google Cloud to manage its massive virtual data. YakSee is still privately funded and based in Los Gatos, California. Talukder and his veteran team could have easily launched this app in the States, but chose to come to Bangladesh first.
“I want the story of YakSee to be a Bangladeshi Story,” said Talukder. “I believe developing countries like Bangladesh can benefit the most from this innovation—especially in the education sector”. Talukdar and his team have spoken to several Bangladeshi NGOs about the potential uses of YakSee in the development sectors. Developers believe, Yaksee is going to be the next big video thing after YouTube.