A Conversation with Purnima Kochikar, VP Forum Nokia & Developer Communities

Forum Nokia is Nokia’s global developer community and support program for mobile developers. Unlike the other smartphone developer platforms, the developer communities for Nokia has to grapple with many types handsets from Nokia that come in all shapes and sizes and cater to different markets from developing countries like the BIIC (Brazil, India, Indonesia and China) to developed economies (UK, US, Singapore). Through a private meeting arranged by Text100, I sat down with Purnima Kochikar, the VP Forum Nokia and Developer Communities, who is currently based in Silicon Valley. We discussed various issues from the trends and observations from emerging markets, mobile apps with interesting stories to tell, and the issues with rising apps stores from different providers in the market.

To begin with, our conversation have been broken into three interesting areas which might have impact for those who are thinking about developing mobile apps for the Ovi Store:

• What are the trends and observations with regards to the mobile apps in the emerging economies, for e.g. India? : From a strategic level, Purnima comes up with an upfront answer that the mobile apps in emerging economies do not follow a one size fit all model. In fact, she broke it down into two categories: (1) high end market – where the users are global citizens and have the capability to own a smart-phone and access to mobile apps that helps to increase their productivity, for example, email and utility apps and (2) the rural communities and emerging middle working class which makes up most of the population: where the users rely on the mobile phone that can help to solve some of their daily needs or offer them a way to better life.
  
  
  She provided the example of Nokia LifeTools (which works for the handsets: Nokia 2330, Nokia 2700 and Nokia 2323), as an example of emerging market innovation where it is focused to deliver agriculture information such as weather, commodity prices and crop prices; education services (quizzes, learning English) and entertainment (daily horoscope) to rural users. In the conversation, she highlighted that that most rural households in emerging economies share one phone where both parents and the children utilize the apps for different purposes, and hence the LifeTools is designed to cater their needs and improve their life.
  
  Purnima also stressed that the way how they packaged their offerings are based on three principles: (1) Aspiration – to make life better and provide locally relevant information for the users in these markets, (2) Affordability: The key is to work out how much they can pay and what they are willing to pay for. For example, in these emerging markets, Nokia offers a choice to consumers to withdraw a service within 10 days if it does not serve their needs, and they found that there is a 85% retention rate of users and (3) Access – where users pay via prepaid cards and short message service (SMS).
• Interesting apps stories: She share two interesting apps which has grown in emerging markets and reflects theme that the consumers chooses apps that tends to have their content locally relevant. The first one is the Cricket T20 World Championship, a game which is popular in the India market, given that Cricket is a national sensation. The second app is iMusti, which started off from an entrepreneur who is interested in archiving Indian Classical Music and ended up being directed from India to Canada, where he found consumers who wants such content. In the end, he turned to mobile via the Ovi Store to distribute the music content that is specifically catered for a niche market.







• On the saturation of Mobile Apps stores in the market: Given there is an increasing plethora of apps stores coming from not just handset vendors and computer hardware & software compaines, but also those emerging from the telcos, for example China Unicom and SK TeleCom (Korea), what will be the future for consumers? Purnima replied that the apps stores are examples of how technology have replicated shops and stores from the offline world and brought into the online world via mobile. With increasing competition from handset vendors, software makers, cloud computing companies (Google) and even telcos, the online stores presented by each one of these companies will grow with more sophistication and the functional competencies of these online apps store will improve as well. The apps store will also start to evolve similar to shops in the offline world, where we have consumers making the choice to go to a shopping mall or a boutique shop.

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