Big reward awaits world’s finest software developer

Local mobile software developers now have a chance of bagging Sh76 million worth of investment award in a new global competition by Nokia which officially started on February 1.

There will be only one winner who will be awarded $1 million “in the form of convertible note debt investment.”

This means that Nokia will fund the development of the best idea to its fruition after which the application will be uploaded to Nokia’s Ovi store – an online portal.

The winner will then set the price for the application and will get 70 per cent of after-tax revenues from users who download the application.

The mobile firm will take the remaining 30 per cent as site management and distribution fees.

Kenyan entrants will have an uphill task winning the prize, given the global nature of the competition which will pit them against contestants from economies with deeper and longstanding ICT skills.

Last year, in a similar Africa-wide competition, no local innovators won any of the top five awards on offer, although the second highest number of entries overall, after those received from South African developers, came from Kenya. Two applications from Kenya made it to top 20.

Ms Agatha Gikunda, a senior official at Nokia, said the Kenyan entries were sophisticated and focused on technology.

Dominance

She urged entrants in the current competition, which ends on April 18, to make the applications simple and easy to use.

While rewarding innovators, the firm is seeking to consolidate and push forward its dominance of the mobile devices market, which stood at 39 per cent last year, following a trend where mobile manufacturers are locking in buyers with proprietary value-added services and products.

These include mobile email services and a virtual store where exclusive applications can be downloaded, some for free and others at a small fee.

Analysts have said that for smartphone users, seen as the future of the mobile business, value-added applications are a major attraction and offer differentiation as opposed to ubiquitous features like voice and data functionalities.

It is for its vast applications, at over 10,000 that Apple’s iPhone, for instance, has seen one of the highest growth in the smartphone market just three years after its introduction.

According to the latest figures from IDC, a market intelligence firm, 25.1 million units of Apple’s iPhone were shipped worldwide in 2009, representing a growth of 81.9 per cent compared to the previous year’s 13.8 million.