Wirkle: Bringing the world on our fingertips Date:   Tuesday , February 02, 2010 Mobile application developers are striving to get the world on our fingertips resulting in a flood of products and services. Standing out in this crowded market is Wirkle-the software development company with exclusive focus on the mobile domain, which was selected as one among the top 50 emerging companies of India in 2009 by NASSCOM. Wirkle was a dream realized in 2004 by school friends Varun Khurana, Sunil Goyal and Lomesh Dutta with an aim to develop a platform to optimize the web and bring it to the mobile. They started with product development before getting into services in 2006. Today, they are a 70 member strong team providing services like social networking, instant messaging, location based services, multimedia streaming, banking, enterprise applications, payments and barcode scanning among others. With an impressive list of big platforms like iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile for whom they develop applications, this Delhi based company has carved a niche for itself. Using their patented technology frameworks they provide low cost and high quality propositions with lesser time to market. Regardless of the fact that many big companies like Infosys have ventured into this area, Wirkle claims to have an edge simply because they deal solely in the mobile domain. “We are the mobile experts. We have been helping companies, some among the US Fortune 500, in conceptualizing products in the mobile space, engineering them and seeing their usability for the past 6 years.” They not only help customers in building products and solutions, they also guide them on which platforms to build. Although there are plans to go directly to the consumers, Wirkle currently operates in the mode of partnering clients in conceptualization and finding the right channels to market the applications, placing special emphasis on the latter as “no matter how good your product is, it cannot be a success without the right kind of marketing” in Lomesh’s words. Among the many successes, the ones that find a special mention are the social networking platform that Wirkle developed for MyZenPlanet’s carrier grade mobile client-server which enables consumers to use sites like Facebook and Twitter on their phones, a security surveillance solution and Mobileum-a dynamic information portal for which Wirkle designed, developed and implemented the client –server architecture, server platform and the mobile application. It is estimated that in 2010, consumers will download close to 4.51 billion mobile applications, double the number of downloads that happened in 2009. Given the staggering statistics, rapidly changing devices hardly come as a surprise. Lomesh Dutta, Chief Operating Officer, Wirkle says the biggest challenge would be to come up with user experience. “We target both interface and customer base. The real test would be to put application into space.” He adds that there is a need to develop creative applications to cater to Indian consumers owning basic phones who form a majority of the market. In the context of the future of mobile apps, a major problem cited by experts is interoperability-the ability of an application to be usable in different phones. Lomesh sees it as an opportunity rather than a problem. “The volume is so huge. Nearly 150000 applications are already on our store and none of them are interoperable. So it would be a challenge.” Taking on such new challenges, Wirkle continues to ‘accelerate mobile software developments’, just like their tagline says.