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Reliance to build an 'industry of developers'

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE: Reliance Infocomm has big plans for the developer community in India. It has recently announced a developer contest for the best mobile applications and the best 'ideas' for a mobile application.

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“Reliance's desire to keep these applications fresh, innovative and novel was the main force for the formation of the Dhirubhai Ambani Developer Program (DADP). Since its formation last year, the program has registered nearly 10,000 independent developers and 600 corporates. The developers come up with ideas and if we find them to be viable business propositions, we then offer them the tools necessary to build them, test them and if found good enough deploy them on our network for use by consumers,” Mahesh Prasad, President, Applications and software group, Reliance Infocomm said.

According to him, around 25 of the existing applications have been worked on by these external developers. The developers whose ideas are implemented on the network have a choice between licence fee, one time purchase fee or a revenue share–when R World goes commercial–as their reward mechanism. As of now, R World is free for Reliance consumers up to March 31, 2004.

Replying to a question on the recent contest for developers announced by them, Prasad said, “Contests are a way to energize the developer community, to create a fun environment where they are encouraged to come out with winning applications. Beside, the contest has been purposely kept open even to those who are not developers, who just want to contribute ideas. If we find a good idea, we can work on it.”

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Giving further details about the program he said, “In the long run we don’t want to be doing any of the development internally. We want to be able to source the entire thing out to third party developers. We are also interested in creating an industry of developers who find it profitable to work on applications and deploy it on our network.”

According to him, Reliance would be looking at announcing similar contests in the future as measures to build such an industry.

The Applications and Software Group, presently employs in excess of 150 developers who work on applications for consumer and enterprise applications. It also has a 120 strong content team who work on building of content and localization of services. Prasad also said that the present ratio of ratio of 90:10 between consumer and enterprise applications would change as enterprises open.

He, however, refused to comment on the quantum of the change. Reliance is presently also engaged with some of the country’s large corporates in doing pilot projects for some of its enterprise mobile applications.

(CNS)

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