Mobile application development: Pakistani firms on a roll

It has gone almost unnoticed, but there are huge economic opportunity costs consequential to Pakistan being unable to jump onto the information technology bandwagon which drove across much of Asia Pacific since the turn of this millennium. While it may have lost out on the outsourced, low-end IT work, it appears that local knowledge workers are now making their presence felt in high-end IT services. Mobile application development for smartphones (Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, Samsung, Windows 7 and Android) is big business for IT firms globally. As per a latest report by mobile research firm esearch2guidance, the market for mobile application development services - which includes application creation, management, distribution and extension services - will grow from $10.2 billion in 2010 to $100 billion by 2015. It seems like Pakistani firms are well set to have a crack at this lucrative market. Already some mobile applications have topped the user preference across different Smartphone markets. Earlier this month, TenPearls LLC - a global application development company founded and run by five ambitious Pakistanis - won 2nd prize ($50,000) for their application Animal 101 in the rivia and education category of Nokia & AT&Ts "Calling All Innovators 2011" contest. Animal 101 is a voice-driven mobile learning application that provides an engaging way for children to learn about animals. On the online Nokia Ovi store, this application can be downloaded for Rs46.99. The firm, incorporated in the US with offices in Karachi, Dubai and Washington D.C., had also won first prize for another mobile application uTrack, a daily task manager, earlier this year. Another Pakistani firm, the Lahore-based Five Rivers Technologies rose to fame when pepper.pk, its mobile application development arm, reached number one spot across all categories for BlackBerry users for three distinct mobile applications. Last month, a game called Ninja Fruit Bash topped all the categories. The game is available on Blackberry Application World for $1.99. Prior to this, another Blackberry application developed by pepper.pk that made it to the top was Photo Editor. Using this application, the user can crop, resize, rotate, and add text and frames to the pictures over the phone. Latest version of this application is available on Blackberry Application World for $1.99. The third top-ranked application developed by pepper.pk was LED Notifier, another Blackberry application. It lets the user know instantly whos contacting via email, text or call by flashing appropriate colors on the Blackberrys LED. A new version, LED Notifier Pro is available on Blackberry Application World for $3.99. Some famous Blackberry applications from pepper.pk include carbon footprint and picture puzzle, each priced at $0.99. The esearch2guidance report states also that the mobile application development market would expand at CAGR of 158 percent between 2010 and 2015 because third-party developers would get more business from mobile application publishers as the latter do not have in-house resources to develop these softwares on their own for mobile platforms like Blackberry, Android, Windows phone, iTunes Application store and Nokia Ovi. This represents a huge business opportunity for Pakistani IT firms, who can capitalise on it through nurturing and harnessing a knowledge workforce, thinking creatively, and marketing their services aggressively. They could use a little help from the government too, as it is witnessed that supportive government policies have done wonders for the industry, as in the case of many Asia-Pacific countries.