Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo! are aggressively wooing Indian app developers to build their next gen products.
Faced with a shortage of product developers in the developed world, these companies are eyeing a range of them from college students to software firms to chart their future strategies.
Recently Facebook organised a contest to woo developers who could design apps that would increase its user base, test new ground for some of the innovations which could generate revenue off in the future.
Saurav Bhardwaj, with his start-up Digital Venture Technologies has developed an app for Facebook users that will help them to know which blood types are available in blood banks through a desktop or a mobile phone.
Similarly, Snehil Modani, a student with Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), is developing an app called ‘social debate’. Once downloaded, it would pull up the data of all Facebook users who share similar views on a topic and help them interact with each other.
Move for Windows 8
Meanwhile, Microsoft, which traditionally relied on the huge software developer community in India, is wooing it before the launch of Windows 8 in October to catch up with Apple and Android.
Anish Shenoy, a developer working for Antara Software, a technology provider for clinical research trials, has developed an app that would help students to learn about physics (by collating information from different Web sites), especially for their SAT examinations. For Windows 8, Anish Shenoy, a developer at Quadwave Consulting, has developed an app that lets a user create a template for playing new levels in the ‘Tower of Hanoi’ game.
opportunity
Internet company Yahoo!, as a part of its annual exercise, invited over 700 developers to come up with new apps. Amod Pandey and Nikhil Kumar Brock created an app that allows even a lay person to write software codes with a few clicks. Sumit Ranjan and his friends showcased an app called Chrome Beam that allows a user to manage files from multiple cloud services (such as Gmail) in a single Web browser from a desktop or a cell phone.
“For the developers, it gives an opportunity to showcase their apps at a global level and they can monetise it too,” said Harish Vaidyanathan, Director - Evangelism at Microsoft Corporation India.