It hasn’t been a good year for Nokia, getting absolutely hammered in the smartphone industry. But yet in Indonesia it has a fighting chance. In an effort to help, Nokia Indonesia is encouraging developers to build more apps for its platform, and to that end it has launched Nokia DevStart together with DailySocial. Narenda Wicaksono, a developer operations manager at Nokia Indonesia, answered our questions regarding this competition and the future of Nokia in general.
1. Can you explain a little about DevStart?
Nokia DevStart is a competition for startups and professional developers based in any of the four cities (Jakarta, Bandung, Jogjakarta and Surabaya) to make an app with Qt tools and specifically targeting Meego OS on Nokia with Nokia N9 as the hardware.
2. DevStart submissions have already ended. How many apps were submitted? Did it exceed your expectation?
The submissions definitely exceeded our expectations. To cut from over thirty to ten submissions is hard for the committee. One of the apps that really caught my attention was a location-based augmented reality app.
3. One of the competitions is Best NFC Apps. Do you think NFC will be easily adopted by casual users in Indonesia?
NFC adoption isn’t depending only on hardware makers, but the most important thing is the supporting ecosystem — for example, the government, the brand, and of course the developers. . . But as for the technology, i think it should be easy.
4. What makes you think Nokia (especially the upcoming N9) can compete with other smartphones in Indonesia?
Nokia N9 has features that are better than most smartphones out there on the market, so there is no reason the Nokia N9 can’t compete. (You can check the features here)
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