2 lakh Indian programmers wary of Nokia’s moves
M A Arun ,Bangalore, May 6, DHNS:Nokia’s recent decision to outsource development of Symbian software — the operating system which runs its handsets — to Accenture, has put two-lakh Indian software programmers in turmoil.
A file picture of Priyanka Chopra with Nokia handsets. AFPAs part of the deal, Nokia is also transferring 3,000 employees — 700 of them from Bangalore — to Accenture. Indian Symbian programmers, who are not Nokia employees but independently develop mobile applications (mobile apps) for its handsets, say they also face an uncertain future.
Several programmers Deccan Herald spoke to said Nokia was getting ready to phase out the Symbian software as it had decided to switch to Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system (WP).
Most app developers work for small companies, which typically employ less than 10 people, and do outsourced application development work. “The end of Symbian is in sight and that has put tremendous pressure on small companies,” said a mid-level Infosys employee. Infosys is working with independent developers to promote Flypp, its mobile application platform.
“They will have to retrain their employees on other platforms such as Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS and lose revenue at least for a few months. This will hit hard many small companies, which barely manage to break even,” he said. “Besides, the uncertainty of doing business on a new platform, they will need at least two years to catch up with other companies already doing business on other platforms,” he added.
Murugan, who runs a seven-member company, said Symbian was a tougher platform to programme than Android and iOS. “My team took nearly a year to learn Symbian well and in the last two years we have built 12 applications. Now I am not sure if our expertise will have any use in future.”
Globally all mobile apps together are expected to generate a revenue of $3.8 billion in 2011 for various application stores, according to research firm iSuppli. As apps have also become critical to the sales of smart phones, handset manufacturers and software providers are wooing independent programmers to develop applications on their platforms.
While Apple and Google are ahead of the race in USA, Nokia, given its dominance in markets such as India and China, has built a strong base of Symbian developers. Over the last few years it has aggressively wooed Indian programmers, who reportedly now form one of the largest chunks of Symbian developers in the world.
But as Nokia started losing market share to Apple and Android phones, it decided to switch to Microsoft’s operating system WP, after exploring few other software options.
Sharing his perspective on the decline of Symbian, Dhaval Sharma, an Android programmer, said, “Symbian is neither user nor developer friendly; developing an application is much easier on Android. Nokia also failed to capitalise on the touch-screen trend and hence lost market to Apple and Android phones.”
Dispelling the fears of app developers, a Nokia spokesperson in an emailed response to Deccan Herald said “We have not specified a date when the last Symbian device will ship, but will (continue to) release more products on Symbian and modernise it,” she said.
There are 200 million Symbian customers and Nokia plans to ship 150 million more devices, she informed. She also added that Nokia will continue to support products based on Symbian platforms for years to come. But many developers feel that Nokia is getting ready to bury Symbian quietly. Murugan said there was no long-term future for Symbian beyond existing devices and planned launches. “Nokia may not say it, but Symbian wont last beyond three years,” he said. “Symbian will die and that is the bottom line,” said Sharma.
There is also uncertainty on Ovi Store among developers, where Nokia hosts Symbian applications. Ovi Store attracts 5 million downloads and 300,000 new users daily. “What happens to our Symbian applications on Ovi Store when Nokia fully shifts to Windows,” Murugan asked. “Nokia’s Ovi Store would support apps for Symbian, MeeGo, Series 40 and Nokia Windows Phones,” the Nokia spokeswoman said. ”Apps currently on Ovi Store would need to be rewritten using Silverlight or XNA for Windows Phone,” she added emphasising on the non-Symbian future of Ovi Store.
Some developers are, however, are optimistic. “Nokia-Microsoft combination will offer better opportunities for Indian developers in the long run,” said Sagar Bedmutha, CEO of Optinno, which has developed the award-winning Spam Blocker application.
A New Era Of Search Is About The Answers, Not Just The Links
Shashi Seth
1 hour ago
Editor’s note: The following guest post is written by Shashi Seth, the senior vice president of Search products at Yahoo! Previously, Shashi worked at Google where he developed the monetization strategy for YouTube and was also the product lead for search.
Search is about to change quite radically. For more than a decade, search has been stagnant: the core product has not changed much. Users have changed radically in that time frame. Even though the kind of content users consume is different, search engines are still focused mostly on web pages. Users have become less patient and have less time on hand, while search engines still require users to dig through and extract information from the web pages to find what they’re looking for. In addition, users are spending more and more time on their mobile phones and other connected devices, which require a completely different kind of user experience for search.
When we talk about Search, keep in mind that Search, Discovery, Recommendations, and Serendipity are all essentially the same thing. Why? Well, to start with, one would need a comprehensive index of content for each of these things to work. This gives you a world view, so to speak. How that index is created has changed over time, and what goes into that index has changed. About ten years ago, the index only consisted of HTML pages, but that information has been changing. How the index was created was heavily focused on signals provided by HTML pages, links, consumption, etc.
Today, many social signals are consumed, including how often and how quickly an entity or URL is being embedded elsewhere, whether it is with positive or negative intent and sentiment, and is it trending up or down since last week/month. Search engines have mostly focused on the backend and infrastructure, and rightly so, because search requires a delicate balance between some of the most complex technologies, and a vast amount of infrastructure. Solving today’s user needs requires a different focus: a special blend of science, a finely tuned user experience, cutting-edge design skills, and a slightly different mix of engineering and infrastructure.
The question now is—how do search engines respond to this new world?
The answer, to put it simply, is to re-imagine search. The new landscape for search will likely focus on getting the answers the user needs without requiring the user to interact with a page of traditional blue links. In fact, there may be cases where there are no blue links on a search results page at all.
Search engines will keep assimilating content from many different sources and aim to provide immediate and rich answers. You ask a question and you get answers, nothing else. The user may not even type the full question. Search engines will have to become more and more personal, understand the individual user’s preferences, location, type of content preferred, context from previous search and browse behavior, signals from social graphs, and much more.
Search has been a pull mechanism for information and content, while social sites such as Facebook and Twitter are push. For search to succeed in today’s world, it has to become more push, which is why we at Yahoo! have been so focused on what we call contextual searches. A contextual search is when a user happens to be away from a search box, maybe reading an article on Yahoo! News, and comes across a name, or place that he/she wants more information on, yet they don’t want to spoil the reading experience and leave the page, open a new tab, and do a search.
With Infinite Browse, Yahoo! currently enables users to highlight the term and get a small pop-up search result out of that action, without leaving the page. Yahoo! also identifies and underlines interesting terms/entities on the page, so when the user hovers over the word or words, additional information is provided.
Imagine a future where this information is entirely pushed to you without prompting the search, so engagement with the content you want is immediately at your fingertips. This will prompt more and more searches to happen away from traditional search results pages, and will happen more in context of wherever the user may be—reading a news article and wanting to know more about a topic or entity, accessing information on a commuter train, getting recommendations pushed while writing an email or social conversation on that topic, and much more.
In the near term, innovation in search will provide more in-depth answers. For example, if someone types the name of a Major League Baseball team, they get a search results page with the team’s homepage and likely a couple pieces of recent news. In the next phase of search, you will type the name of that baseball team and without hitting the search button or leaving the search box, you will be presented with an interactive display that includes a link to their homepage, recent news, the results and box score of their last game, their overall record and standing in their division, a schedule of upcoming games, photos, videos, and social media streams.
How about searching for a restaurant? In search today, you find links to the restaurant’s homepage, address, phone number, and rating. In new iterations of search, you will type the name of that restaurant and be provided with its address and map, a view of its menu, the option to reserve then and there via OpenTable, see its ranking on Yelp, CitySearch, Zagat—along with photos, tweets, what your friends have said about it in your private social networks, and a quick and simple way to compare it with other similar restaurants.
The next chapter of search is going to be about providing answers and not just answers from Q&A sites (although Yahoo! Answers hit a billion Q&A last year). We obviously believe in these types of “answers” and leverage it heavily, yet there are plenty of other types of real-time answers.
Most search indexes are in the 10s of billions of URLs, trending towards 100s of billions of URLs. Information is dynamic and changes frequently. For example, the movies running in a theater next to you are changing every week, and the timings may change even more frequently. The San Francisco Giants score changes frequently too, as do the players stats. So, while Q&A sites are really interesting in solving a certain set of needs for users, they are only a piece of the puzzle.
But the rise of Q&A sites across the Web speaks to the underlying need for better answers. A new era in search is just around the corner that will make it easier to access the information, services and answers people are looking for. A list of links just doesn’t cut it anymore.
