With third party application developers increasingly gaining importance in the MVAS ecosystem, handset manufacturer, Nokia is proactively aiming to get its act right in this segment. The Finnish firm has funded four firms namely, Bollywood Hungama, Eros Bollywood, India Today and Aaj Tak Videos, all developed by Indian companies and developers. The funds are worth $ 10 million.  

These applications have multi-screen infotainment features and have been selected from over 900 entries from over 60 countries. These applications will now be available at Nokia’s Ovi stores from later this month. The funding is part of its Open Screen Project Fund jointly initiated along with Adobe.

The company will fund more companies as part of this project in the second phase.

Nokia has also come up with a new version of its software development kit (SDK) for its Series 40 mass market mobile devices. The version provides allocation developers more tools including building applications based on regional Indian languages such as Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Marathi and Bengali. 

“Mobile users everywhere are consuming more and more content daily. Considering that the next billion mobile users will be from emerging markets like India, our developers have the opportunity to not only shape local and global consumer mobile experiences but also lead the mobile applications ecosystem,” says D. Shivakumar, Vice President and Managing Director, Nokia India.

Purnima Kochikar, Vice President, Forum Nokia and Developer Community adds, “India has the largest and most vibrant pool of qualified developers in the world. As the Internet is entering into the core of mobile experiences, we see unprecedented opportunities for Indian developers in shaping the future of mobile services. This is just the beginning. We will work in close collaboration with the large, talented developer base in India.  Our goal is clear, and that is to make it effortless for our partners to create and market highly appealing, relevant applications that consumers globally will find indispensable. Our focus is on open collaboration with the ecosystem and we continue to invest in creating large scale revenue opportunities for application developers and as well as new powerful experiences for our consumers,”

Nokia also launched a new Forum Nokia Code Competition for Qt Mobility APIs inviting developers across the world to create code samples for Symbian that utilize Qt and Qt Mobility APIs.