Airtel joins race to tap mobile apps market
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
NEW DELHI, Feb 9 (Economic Times): India's largest mobile operator, Bharti Airtel, has joined the race with handset makers such as Nokia, RIM (maker of BlackBerry) and Samsung among others to get a share of the mobile applications market in India.
Bharti's app store is set to go live Wednesday (February 10) with over 1,200 applications making it the first Indian telco to attempt replicating the highly successful business model of Apple, the pioneer in this space.
Last month mobile operator Aircel had announced a tie-up with Infosys for its mobile applications platform and the telco is set to unveil its app stores by the March-end, an indicator that more operators here set to tap the business potential this space offers.
Mobile apps have been a rave globally ever since Apple launched its App Store in 2008. Earlier this month Apple said that its apps which are divided into 100,000 categories such as games, business, news, sports and health have seen over three billion downloads.
Other handset makers such as Nokia who have joined the fray over the last 12 months are also seeing big business opportunities in this space. For instance, BlackBerry's app store which is only a few months old already boasts of over 4,000 apps. Ditto with Google's Android which as already crossed the 20,000 apps figure.
Bharti's app store is set to go live Wednesday (February 10) with over 1,200 applications making it the first Indian telco to attempt replicating the highly successful business model of Apple, the pioneer in this space.
Last month mobile operator Aircel had announced a tie-up with Infosys for its mobile applications platform and the telco is set to unveil its app stores by the March-end, an indicator that more operators here set to tap the business potential this space offers.
Mobile apps have been a rave globally ever since Apple launched its App Store in 2008. Earlier this month Apple said that its apps which are divided into 100,000 categories such as games, business, news, sports and health have seen over three billion downloads.
Other handset makers such as Nokia who have joined the fray over the last 12 months are also seeing big business opportunities in this space. For instance, BlackBerry's app store which is only a few months old already boasts of over 4,000 apps. Ditto with Google's Android which as already crossed the 20,000 apps figure.