Nokia East and Southern Africa yesterday presided over the graduation of 35 mobile application developers. The 35 were the second lot under a training programme from the World’s largest mobile phone manufacturer. The three month training programme was conducted at the eMobilis Kenya Mobile Technology Academy where all the 35 had the training fully sponsored by Nokia. The event was held at the Nairobi Hilton and presided over by Agatha Gikunda - Nokia’s Head of Solution Sales for East and Southern Africa, and Dorothy Ooko - Nokia’s head of Corporate Communications for East and Southern Africa. 35 more students in Uganda are set to graduate soon under the same program carried out at Makerere University.The training programme equips a new set of developers with skills to create applications using Java. The program ran from 7 February to 13 May 2011 involving 70 students selected from over 500 applicants in Kenya and Uganda. The selected students were taken through a fully-paid 14-week programme that included hands-on code laboratories dedicated to mobile technologies.Java technology enables the developers to address a huge diversity of market segments, including those in emerging markets. The core benefit of the Java platform is that it can run on top of several different operating systems. The Java Runtime for Nokia delivers a comprehensive set of consistent Java APIs to Nokia devices based on Symbian and the Series 40 platform. This technology enables the developers to build sophisticated applications for multiple devices with confidence.

The selected developers will be developing for Nokia’s Series 40 mid-tier phones which run Java based applications. The Series 40 range has a market of 600 million phones worldwide and is also makes up majority of feature phones in Africa.

Nokia has an evolving user interface (UI) with’ Touch’ and ‘QWERTY’ and enhanced capabilities increase applications and service use on Series 40 phones. Furthermore, the device performance has increased and the latest features include things like Wi-Fi and location awareness. It also has accelerometer and capability to run selected applications in the background, which enable smartphone-like experiences at affordable price. Nokia will be launching a new version of the C3 in Kenya that comes with above features and the Ovi Browser. The Ovi browser replaces Opera Mini and provides a better, faster and cheaper experience according to Nokia.

Agatha said that Nokia was looking at increasing the number of local mobile applications. The 35 Kenyan grandaunts have already created 22 apps that are available on Nokia’s Ovi Store. One of them is a game known as ‘Asteroid Attack’ that simulates an alien attack on Nairobi. Others are a maternal health application; ‘bidhaa tele’ - an app that enables customers to shop for goods on their phones and have them delivered; msafiri - a travelers application and a Kiswahili dictionary (Kamusi). Nokia will be helping the developers in marketing of their applications.

According to Agatha Gikunda, it is critical for developers to have a highly engaged customer base and several ways in which to monetize their applications. Some of the biggest markets for Nokia applications globally include India, Indonesia, China and Nigeria. The grandaunts were advised that they can target these markets already with paid applications.

Paid apps face a challenge in Africa as credit card use and awareness is low on the continent. Alternative billing methods in the Nokia Ovi store include operator billing where a user can use their mobile credit to pay for the app. Nokia is working to expand this in Africa - operator billing is currently available in South Africa and Egypt in the continent.

Oyolla says “Building this knowledge will not only help operators increase volume and Average Revenue per User (ARPU) but will also enable developers to make money from mobile applications. Java applications are supported by Series 40 (S40), which represents the highest volume mobile developer platform - representing a huge opportunity for profitability in the mobile industry.”

Developers can also make money by getting sub contracted by enterprises to create mobile applications on their behalf, at a fee. Bata and Cussons already have applications on the Nokia Ovi store.

Nokia plans to ship 150 more Symbian based smart phones to add to the already existing 75 million in the world. Symbian is the most popular smart-phone operating system in Africa accounting for up to 90% of smart-phones according to Admob data - Admob has the largest share of the African mobile advertising market.