Moving

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Hndhld blog

Cya there...

Bubble or Opportunity?

Guess the amount of money that has been invested in start ups working in pure play Apple apps. 1, 2, 10, 50 million USD?

The correct answer is a 100 million dollars, says this piece.

Now, I dont know if its a bubble or an opportunity. For now, sitting in India, clearly it seems to be the latter.

Our website is up...

Our website is up :) Take a look (whoever is reading this blog, apart from me) Visit hndhld.com

We are on twitter too (twitter.com/hndhld) - now that's overkill for an audience of 1, dont you think?

What else is on in our lives? We seek to crack the secret code of Symbian over this weekend and also include the airport volvo routes in the volvo app...

And there is a ton of work staring at us...

Desi app stores?

The biggies are gonna roll out Desi app stores. And that seems to means Nokia and RIM. Apple gets mentioned in the piece, but their response leaves us with the feeling that they have no such plans. Sony Ericsson gets a passing mention. Google, no word...It basically seems to mean that Indian developers will be allowed to put up apps - it probably wont mean anything more than that.

What is big idea of a desi app store when the global version can do the trick? It is as great an idea as having an India specific social network. But there are already apps like Cab Lite in which Indian operators are present, so it does not prevent people from making "worldwide" apps too. In any case, this is good news for teams like ours.

And it is a good thing to create markets for apps. One, it will prove to many of the naysayers that the Indian IT market has no talent. It will also be an answer to the many who doubt Indias technical expertise. Also, it lets people do stuff that may be "too small" or in the "blind spot" of phone companies. The good thing about apps is that it allows users to customise their phone. In a nation with a multitude of languages, this is the best way to customise. But if that needs to happen, apps have be made available to phones with a much lower budget...

But there is a lot of potential out there...