Today Vishwak Solutions’ Project Lead Sheik Dawood presented a talk on Developing Mobile Applications for Multiple Platforms. It was part of the two day workshop Mobile Application Development held in Chennai Anna University’s Department of Information Science & Technology Department.
Sheikh walked through how you can abstract the backend data in an unified format that can be easily consumed in the client end Mobile Apps. He covered with examples of the project working on iOS, Android, Blackberry and WindowsPhone7. A copy of the presentation can be downloaded from here.
Yesterday in the Inauguration function of the workshop, the Chief Guest was Vishwak Solutions Chairman T.N.C.Venkata Rangan.
In his keynote address Venkat talked about two main ideas:
- The first was how during last decade innovation in Mobile Phones technology happened in Fareast (Japan & South Korea), but now United States is back in the driving seat with iPhone & Android. As the Morgan Stanley reported pointed out in 2009, in last two years 5 trends have converged in the mobile world and they are 3G, Social Media, Video, VoIP & SmartPhones. If Netscape was the inflection point for Internet, then iPhone has become to be known as the inflection point (disruptive technology) for Mobile Internet. Before iPhone an average Cell Phone was being used 70% for Voice, now over 50% of usage in an iPhone is Apps & Data.
- The second was about Mobile Apps (Mobility software), the potential and importance of it. A simple game from Rovio (Finland) “Angry Birds” has been downloaded over 47 Million in first 15 Months and the company with ~50 Employees is valued at several hundreds of million dollars. If we thought that is out of this world, look at this – a recent game “Tiny Wings” written by a single developer (Andreas Illiger) is the top grossing game in Apple App Store in February 2011. So conventional wisdom of Software Industry and big corporates don’t hold the key to innovation in Mobile Apps. It can be any person with decent programming skills and a brilliant idea. So students in an academia environment like Anna University are well poised to become the next “Rovio” if they start thinking beyond their books and scores.