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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

Forum Nokia: Enabling Developers

Vimali Swamy
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Vimali Swamy
It is an era of unprecedented of growth for smartphones with 62.4 million smartphones having been shipped globally in second quarter of 2010. It is an era of unprecedented mobile connectivity with people using their mobiles to access email, IM, VOIP, and social networking sites. According to a report by Morgan Stanley, in the next four years, number of people accessing the internet from their mobile will be much more than those accessing Internet from their PCs or laptops. It is an era of unprecedented device convergence from maps, games, photos, camera, video and everything else coming to one single device. It is an unprecedented era of adoption of the apps. Analysts predict that by end of 2012, 50 billion apps will be downloaded globally. These statistics bring color a rosy picture for the mobile market globally. And the case in India is no different, the future looks equally promising. At 15 million mobile users being added monthly, the Indian mobile industry is hot on the radar of OEMs, operators and mobile entrepreneurs.

The mobile industry has always been the biggest driver of entrepreneurial ecosystem in India, earlier with Mobile VAS (example OnMobile, mCheck, AdMob) and now a bigger push seems to be from Mobile App development. The app development is one area which has hooked every one from an individual developer to a startup to an established mobile solutions company. With a plethora of platforms like iPhone, Andorid, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows CE, Palm, MeeGo, the playground is wide open for Indian Mobile developers to test their skills.

One of the first entrants in the Indian market a decade ago, Nokia continues to rule the mobile handset market with a 49.2 percent hold in terms of revenue share. And with its global developer community and support program, Forum Nokia, the company ensures that its reach across the developer community in India is as wide and in depth as it is with the consumers. The fact that India is one of the top five markets for Ovi, it is understandable why Nokia is bullish on the developer community here. And ensuring this is Sunil Rao, Head of Forum Nokia in India.

Of the 62.4 million smartphones shipped globally, Nokia’s market share with its Symbian OS stood at 43.5 percent followed by others. Its Ovi store today clocks 3.5 million downloads a day. Though it is comparatively behind world’s biggest app store, Apple iTunes Store that has over 300,000 third-party applications available on it and has hit 7 billion download mark as of October 2010, Nokia is not perturbed. “We are not chasing numbers of total apps downloaded or available in the store but rather empowering the developers,” says Purnima Kochikar, Vice President, Forum Nokia & Developer Community.

Engaging the Developer Community


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