21 July 2008

A wealth of different platforms
place the mobile space among the next
great opportunities for developers

The mobile market offers vast and varied opportunities for developers, with platforms such as Nokia's Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux-based platforms vying for developer mindshare.

However, as a group of leaders at a recent meeting of the New York Software Industry Association (NYSIA) here said, developers are most likely to go to the platform that makes things efficient for them and where they can make the most money building applications. Right now, Symbian is the mobile market leader with the largest number of smart phones based on the SymbianOS, but as the market evolves that could change.

"We want to enable developers to take what they know and build what they want," said Eric John, director of marketing for Forum Nokia, Nokia's global development community. "We're not talking about just the C++ and Java developers, but even web designers and others who want to create applications to run on top of the Nokia handset."

John, who was part of a July 14 NYSIA panel entitled "Mobile -- The Opportunity for Developers and Business People," said the mobile space shows where the power of web services and applications are merging. And Nokia is pushing three primary types of applications: web applications, ad-enabled applications and location-based applications, John said.

"New York is a development town, but it's more of an advertising town," John said. "We're looking at applications as a way to bring consumers together with advertisers via widgets," he said.

Meanwhile, Vishy Gopalakrishnan, founder and chief technical officer at Mobility Partners, a wireless and mobility consultant to Fortune 1000 companies, said the merging of location capability with other features allow targeting to be done and enables the intersection of payments via mobile, he said. "We see location as something that factors into decisions for building applications.

Gopalakrishnan said "developers will flock to environments that provide them an easy way to develop mobile and wireless applications and to distribute them and make money. Apple has made things easy as long as it's for the iPhone. Nokia has 60-plus percent market share...but how can I make money off of that and then take that to RIM [Research in Motion] and other environments. It's not going to get easier in the next couple of years."