Industry mHealth
Startup Website www.friendslearn.com Founded 2011 Number of employees 14 | Products fooya Headquarters Palo Alto Number of locations 2 Type of business Private | |
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Key people Bhargav Sri Prakash, Founder and CEO | ||
FriendsLearn is a privately held Silicon Valley EdTech and mHealth startup company headquartered in Palo Alto California, USA. The company was founded in 2011 and develops mobile health technologies, best known as the producer and developer of fooya!. FriendsLearn is a pioneer in Neuropsychology based behavior design and learnified therapeutic entertainment.
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Founding
The company was founded by Bhargav Sri Prakash when he was a fellow of the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City. The United States Department of State and EducationUSA awarded FriendsLearn a contract to design and produce the world's first gamified application based on a track record of the founder's previous company in gamified student recruitment. "Your 5 Steps to US Study" was launched in 2012 and is distributed around the world by US Consulates and EducationUSA centers. This "gamified" advising adventure is a cutting-edge immersion experience that allows international students to learn about the steps needed to study in the United States. This platform delivers information on new ways to help international students change their lives.
Mobile Health & Behavior Design
FriendsLearn has produced and designed the mobile app fooya, which is the product of the company's innovations in 'learnified' gaming and was presented at the 2014 Stanford MedicineX Conference under a session titled "Scalable Behavior Design through Mobile Gaming". The session focused on scientifically validated mobile content platforms as possible solutions for global health issues, as well as a case study of fooya and lessons learned for digital health gaming. Fooya delivers a health and wellness platform aimed at addressing an awareness and behavior gap among children and young adults, pertaining to dietary-lifestyle choices and is a scalable solution to address the growing epidemic of childhood obesity and lifestyle diseases around the world. The impact of Fooya among 6th grade students in Houston (Texas) was measured through a study by Scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine's Children's Nutrition Research Center.
Health outcomes of clinical trials conducted by researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine's Children's Nutrition Research Center were presented at The Obesity Society's 2014 ObesityWeek Conference in Boston.
In 2014, the company entered into a collaborative partnership with the 2014 ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp and was used to promote healthy choices among middle school campers from across the United States.
The company was featured at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Conference in 2013 as an emerging startup in health gaming.
Fooya was first launched as a Facebook App in 2012 at the DEMO Conference in Silicon Valley and successfully raised over $50,000 through a crowd funding campaign via Kickstarter
Reciprocity Wave
The Reciprocity Wave, a program conceived by Architect. Sheila Sri Prakash, is a Sculpture Competition where students create art work with recycled materials to sensitize the public about social and environmental issues that need immediate attention. Shilpa Architects have already conducted three such initiatives, two in Chennai and one in Bangalore. The most recent initiative at Cubbon Park, Bangalore, brought to light various issues ranging from corruption to women's rights, and gained attention from the Bangalore Media for the powerful concept and impact that it created. Many of the leading daily's published a series of articles about the event and also covered the competition at length. The event also included a Health Gaming Championship involving fooya!, in partnership with FriendsLearn.