The Enlightened Leader Project has four main components. The first is:

The Close Your Eyes phone app.

This is the one everyone is excited about. Not hard to understand why. This phone app. could bring Baba Nam Kevalam kiirtan and meditation within CYE phone appeasy reach of a huge number of people. We’re aiming at one million users over the next 2 years. This it is something every Ananda Marga acarya, meditation class teacher, or practitioner in the world would surely love to be able to give to their students or friends for free. This could go viral.

But only if it exists. A phone app looks tiny and inconsequential but creating one is more complicated than you might imagine. We have a whole team of volunteers working on this, representing ten different skills, nine of which I do not possess:

  • Concept and content creation – this is the only part I know how to do
  • Audio Production – Bhaskar Ben Barbic
  • Design – Brian Knittel
  • Graphic Design – Eddie Deva, a protege of IT and marketing professor Alex Pelaez
  • iOS coding – Raul Herta – chief architect, discovered by Whitney Hess
  • Android coding – Patrick Hill – another protege of Alex
  • Website design – to be determined – probably another of Alex’s disciples
  • Website video content – editor – Chinmaya. camera crew to be determined.
  • User interface consultant – Whitney Hess, who made this all possible by finding Raul
  • Marketing – Shankar Hemmedy has volunteered for this but we will need more help

State of play – The design is complete, and the iOS version is built, with some basic functionality. We are currently waiting for our iOS business developers license so that we can collaborate virtually for the next stage. Then all of us in various corners of the world can work on the proto-type together.

Costs: Around $3000, which is less than I anticipated, thanks to the number of people volunteering. But we still have to pay for video work, music royalties, licences and fees, and we will need money for marketing.

Target Date: Hopefully a working Beta version by years end.

Future possibilities: Multiple languages. We are designing it with a data-base for all text, which means all text can be easily replaced with a different language. This will make it relatively easy to create multiple language versions, as the amount of text is not great. The main work will be re-recording some of the audio content.

3 Comments

  1. Alexandra on March 20, 2015 at 2:08 pm

    Good morning Dada, I was justwondering how this project is coming along. Sending you love from a cold BART station.

    • Dada on March 20, 2015 at 2:24 pm

      It’s moving slowly but surely ahead. This is more complicated than I realized, but the great thing is all the skilled people who’ve volunteered to work on it. But that means they are doing this in their spare time, so it makes it slow. I was hoping to have a Beta version by the summer, but I’m not sure if that is realistic. I’ll be letting the world know when it is ready, believe me!

  2. Alexandra on March 23, 2015 at 5:19 pm

    Thanks for the update. If you ever need beta testers, I’d be happy to sign up. Wishes for patience and productivity for you and your team as you iron out the complications!

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