Mumbai: The Mobile Application Conference held on January 7, 2012 in Mumbai was specifically designed to provide top level industry insight from some of the top Mobile brands. The audience interacted on wide range of topics and was fortunate to get direct insight from high-profile industry thought leaders, network with experts and make valuable connections with top developers and app store providers.

The conference was a leading event that underlined accelerating growth of the economy in mobile world. The summit gathered renowned leaders and business professionals to provide effective strategies for improving the organization’s performance and achieve continuous growth. The purpose of this program was to provide an insight into the interplay of cultural, institutional and organizational factors that affect the organization’s growth.

Arvind Rao, CEO and Co-founder, On mobile delivered the inaugural session where he shared his own exploration in context to issues related to ‘The Future Of Mobile Ecosystem’ which is the hot topic in today’s mobile world scenario. He spoke in terms of business alignment and not with limitation to the functional domain.

The next session had Nitin Bhandari, AVP - New Products and Partnerships, from Vodafone sharing his thoughts on a very interesting topic ‘Thinking outside the network’. The session lasted for 20mins which was interactive.  Beerud Sheth, Co-Founder & CEO of Webaroo(Smsgupshup.com) spoke on topic Social Mobile Apps: How does mobile redefine social networking?

The first panel ‘Mobile Applications Explode. Who wins and who loses?’ was by some of the industry experts like Badri Sanjeevi, COO of Mauj Mobile who quoted"The event was organized very well, great co-panellists and a very inquisitive audience"  Rajat Kulshrestha, CEO,India & Middle East from PlayUp. Narayan Babu, CEO of Dexetra a young and budding Entrepreneur and Kunal Lagwankar, Co-founder of  Novix Technologies who moderated the panel and gave an insight on the thought provoking topic.

The Opportunity: It used to be ringtones — now what? was the second panel:  Ninad Chayya, COO of  Playcaso, Rakesh Deshmukh, Co-founder & CEO of  MoFirst Solutions, Girish Dhakephalkar whose 3D iphone application was very much appreciated and Karthik Krishnaraj, Co-founder & Director of Arkenea Technologies who took the initiative of moderating the panel. Karthik quoted “The audience thoroughly enjoyed the exposure to the wide variety of opportunities in the mobile space right from simple apps to gaming apps to enterprise solutions apps from our panel discussion. An engaging Q&A session across all these opportunities post our discussion was evident for it”. 

Girish stressed that interactive 3D software is becoming more accessible on mobiles and it will see a variety of innovative applications based on this technology in the next few years. Games, as of now, are the dominant genre of apps on mobiles. But a lot of the experiences are very shallow. The need would now be to focus more on quality over quantity.

The next panel on Opportunities for entrepreneurs in the Mobile Space. Speakers in this panel came from Venture Capitalist Firms and shared their knowledge and guided the entrepreneurs Anil Joshi, Head Operations, Mumbai Angels said that “Mobile Application Conference was well organised and could see lot of standees during the event. I feel Silicon India did a great job in attracting large number of audience who had aspiration to explore Mobile App space. Also audience was very curious to know about newer opportunities in Mobile Space, was really excited to see the same.” Karan Mohla from IDG Ventures also joined the panel

After this interesting panel the Mobile Startup battled out for the most coveted prize of the ‘Best Application Developer’ in the Top Mobile Apps Competition!

Mobile Marketing, the closing panel had panelists Vaibhav Gupta, VP Technology, Airpush, Leo Bian, VP Marketing, UCWeb India, Aakrit Vaish, Business Operations Director & Managing Director, India, Flurry ,  Pratick Thakrar, Founder & Managing Director, Imagine Worldwide and Saptarshi Roy Chaudhury, VP Marketing, [x]cube LABS who quoted ‘"Discoverability of mobile apps is one of the biggest challenges that developers face and in the mobile marketing panel we actually tried to convey the importance and discuss the elements of having a holistic marketing strategy for app promotion. Also there were suggestions provided on how to market your apps on a shoestring budget which I believe would be extremely useful for small / independent developers”. He also mentioned that the targeted audience made for a good scope of networking and knowledge sharing

Randhir Singh Mangat, CEO Ironroad IT India was overwhelmed to see the new Apps being developed and promoted by different companies at the conference. He was quoted saying ‘We were humbled by the overwhelming response showed by the visitors in knowing more about VMS and how video is going to be the mode of communication in future mobility services’

‘Advancements in mobile technology mean a marketer can genuinely put mobile at the heart of their digital, or marketing, strategy but there needs to be an emphasis on long term engagement programmers versus short term tactical executions. Positioning one’s brand now via mobile, and trying to future proof via local and international best practices, will assist in safeguarding a client’s mobile strategy in a fast moving industry, and to an even faster moving consumer” said Pratick Thakrar, Founder & Managing Director, Imagine Worldwide.

Over all the Mobile Applications Conference was entirely a new platform for the budding Entrepreneurs to bring their diverse thoughts, different experiences, thought provoking new ideas. Different industries have valuable lessons to offer to others on what they do very well. The event’s success would have been incomplete without our sponsorers Airpush, Vodafone, UCWeb, ironroad, Playup and InMobi.