Karthik Krishnaraj

During my corporate work life, I was imagining of starting a company of my own for a long time and one day just set the target date for it without any idea of what the company will do. 6 months before the target date, I had the idea and a business partner to launch the venture - Arkenea Technologies.

I just had one inflection point in my career that happened even before I took my first job at Ogilvy. I was holding a job offer in Dubai in printing industry with a salary 5 times more than what I was offered at Ogilvy for a trainee position. But my heart said that I will do better in my professional life in an ad agency than printing and it paid me rich dividends. My simple advice to people starting their career, do not get swayed by money. If you think you are in the right place just enjoy what you are doing and money will just follow you.  

When you work in a MNC, you are spoilt with support systems. I had to do stuffs that mattered to only my profile and responsibly. But now as an entrepreneur running a start-up takes all my time in managing every function in the company right from general admin, Finance, HR, Business development to Delivery.

Growing Arkenea Technologies to a formidable IT services and Mobile development company in the world.

Do not spend time on a job or a role that does not drive passion in you. Keep the altitude of your attitude low even if you are the best in the world. Else, it will crash-land you sooner or later.

Enterprise mobility will be the next big trend I am watching out in the mobile domain. Most of the companies worldwide are saddled with legacy systems and they are not able to swiftly move to mobility. They have started assigning huge IT budgets to move over to new technologies to leverage on the mobility space.

Simple advice for the young developers who are planning to enter mobile app development – focus on the fundamentals and sharpen your language skills. Do not take short cuts to coding by adapting ready made codes in forums and APIs. Challenge everything and code yourself. This will stay with you for life and make you a better developer.

Keep up to the latest trends in the market by visiting websites and blogs on a regular basis. There are enough learning material to become a better developer at iOSDev Centre https://developer.apple.com and Google IO site http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index-live.html, http://techcrunch.com, http://mashable.com and My personal blog on apps http://appyview.wordpress.com