While developing applications for the mobile phone, application developers and architects need to keep a lot of parameters like localisation and language requirements in mind to make it useful, a senior executive with a global IT consultancy said.

“You have to think about the limited screen size. For example, if your mobile software supports German, you must remember that many German words are twice as large as their English counterparts,” said Ms Rebecca J Parsons, Chief Technology Officer, ThoughtWorks. Indian IT services companies like TCS, Wipro and Infosys, which are hoping to get a bigger piece of the European outsourcing pie, may have to keep such issues in mind while targeting clients in that region.

Discussing the importance of localisation, Ms Parsons said that it would be difficult for somebody sitting in LA to develop an application for somebody in China or India. “You also have to design questions for inputs carefully. On a PC, people can answer many questions, but on a mobile, you have to probably reduce the number of questions you ask,” she said.

Indian software developers will also have to think about privacy because there are different privacy laws for different countries. Ms Parsons said that while the mobile and cloud strategy was growing, in some cases, laws require you to store certain sensitive data in certain geographies and developers will have to find ways of adhering to these laws.

>balaji.n@thehindu.co.in

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