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March 2, 2010

Young Entrepreneur Pays It Forward

Jonah Lowenfeld, Contributing Writer

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2009 was a tough year for Cameron Cohen. In March, the Brentwood 11-year-old had a benign tumor surgically removed from his leg and spent many months out of school and mostly off his feet — first in a cast, then in a full-leg brace. But the tech-savvy young entrepreneur used his recovery time to write a popular program for the iPhone — an “app” that lets users draw on the screen using their fingers — and he plans to donate a significant portion of the proceeds from its sales to the hospital where he was treated.

When he first thought about developing an app, Cohen started by reinventing the original video game: Pong. “It was just for fun and really easy to make,” he said.

But the market for iPhone Pong was saturated — “there are like a million Pongs already” — so Cohen looked for other opportunities and soon settled on drawing applications. “I had a few free ones, and one $1 app. And
I didn’t like them.” There were better programs available, Cohen knew, but “they were all either $3 or $5, and I didn’t really want to pay that for a little drawing program.”

So, after a few months of programming, iSketch hit the App Store in December— priced at 99 cents. Though Cohen won’t say exactly how many times it has been downloaded, iSketch was, at one point, among the 50 top-selling apps in the store. (There are more than 100,000 to choose from.)

Cohen plans to donate a good chunk of the money back to the pediatrics unit at the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital.

“I had really good care at the hospital — but I [also] had my iPod Touch and my computer,” Cohen says. “I know there are so many kids at the hospital that don’t have those things, and they’re probably either bored, or they don’t have as many things to do. I wanted to be able to donate so that everyone there could have the opportunity to have fun and feel better.”

Cohen is now working on updates to iSketch, and is developing a new game for the iPhone — which, he acknowledged, will probably take him longer than it took to create iSketch. That’s because Cohen is back on the basketball court; at 5-foot-3, he’s one of the tallest players.

A version of this article appeared in print.

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