The New App Map

The company is located in a dusty suburb in New Udupi called Santhekatte,which roughly translates to a village marketplace. However,its 350 employees programmers,game designers,architects,artists,animators,testers,managers and technicians are helping build products for a newer marketplace. They work in cubicles set in large wings named after the rivers of the world,surrounded by inspirational quotes from the late Steve Jobs and app download counters that they anxiously reset every now and then. Big shiny Macs,iPads brimming with ever-new apps,and cerebral conversations about how best to play God of War inoculate them against the slowness of Udupi.

When we acquired eight acres of land here and started building in the mid-2000s,I wanted the glass front so we could give our employees the feeling of working in a Bangalore tech park, says Rohith Bhat,the unassuming 40-year-old founder,MD and CEO of Robosoft. If it werent for its orange passageways and old-world washrooms,the building could pass for an office block in a metro. From Santhekatte to San Francisco,where one of our products Boom,a volume booster app for the Mac platform won the Macworld 2011 Best of Show Award,we have come a long way. Thats our pitch to students when we visit colleges for recruitment, Bhat says.

From humble beginnings Bhat started the company with a capital of Rs 65,000 in Mumbai,relocating four years later in 2000 to his hometown,Udupi Robosoft now has revenues of Rs 35 crore,16 per cent of which come from its own products. By 2014,we hope to have our products contribute at least half the revenues, says Bhat. Together,Robosofts two product arms,99 Games and Global Delight,have a cache of 11 games and six multimedia apps.

Robosoft is an exemplar for a trend that could see Indias small-town programmers and software companies weasel their way into the vertiginous world of app development. Seizing on the current fascination with smartphones that are supplementing,if not replacing,personal computers,they could,with some enterprise and ingenuity,fashion the new Angry Birds and the improved Dropbox. Why not? It doesnt cost a lot of money to build an app. If you know Java and are good at programming,all you need are a few weeks and an idea, says Amritha Narasimha,a 27-year-old from Guntur,Andhra Pradesh,who quit her job at a software company in Hyderabad six months ago and is in the process of setting up an app company back home. Its not that I havent been able to find talent in Guntur. I have recruited five programmers who are familiar with Android, she says. Today,where you are doesnt really matter. With so many app stores,you get a level playing field where you compete against the best in the world, she says.

The rabbit hole of app development might have opened up,but can small-town India pull a rabbit out of its hat and deliver game-changing apps? In September last year,a little-known company crossed one million downloads on Nokias Ovi store for four apps and was listed among the top 15 app developers from India. The apps on offer: a call recorder,an SMS filter,a call reject utility and,the most popular,an expense tracking system. The company,Sinew Software Systems,is based in Sonepat,Haryana,not far from Delhi. Sinew was founded by Hemant Kumar,an electronics and telecommunications engineer,who in 2009 began developing apps for Nokias Symbian platform,later adapting them for Android and iOS. The company,which has a team of 10 developers and also undertakes customised application development for clients,charges upwards of 12,000 for a project and has a turnover of over 1 million Rs 5.06 crore.

Sensing opportunity in this space,institutes in small towns,from Madurai to Mangalore to Patiala,are adding app development programmes to their repertoire. Ask Rohit Khosla,founder of Netmax Technologies,a Chandigarh-based software development firm that conducts various software training programmes and has now ventured into app development and training. The one-and-a-half-month course is offered in Patiala,Jalandhar,Ludhiana and Bhatinda,besides Chandigarh. People who usually join are freshly minted engineers who see potential in apps. After all,apps are increasingly getting integrated with websites, says Khosla,adding that the first app development batch has just bagged placements with leading software companies.

Much of the app development market in India is still driven by demand from overseas. There are around 20 million smartphones in India and this will only grow,but the mobile apps market has not taken off in a big way, says Vishal Singhal,founder of CellStrat,a consultancy focusing on the mobile applications space. The popularity of smartphones,heralded by the launch of the iPhone in India,is on the rise,but revenues from apps are not quite booming yet. In India,mobile users look for freebies; they are reluctant to purchase an app. The popularity that Indian app makers have got is due to their apps being downloaded by users abroad, says Singhal. There is another problem. Apps use data,which is expensive in India. Mobile operators here charge for data usage,while in other countries,a flat monthly rental usually applies.

It is a nascent market in the country. Most of our orders come from abroad, admits Kumar of Sinew. The primary factor driving app development is cost arbitrage. Developers in the US charge 100 an hour,while developers here get paid about 25. There is definitely a huge opportunity for Indian companies. I come across several companies that do contract development. The other area where a lot of companies plug in is helping with quality assurance and testing; especially on Android since you need to test your app on so many phones. Although there is a lot of work,this reminds me of the outsourcing-desktop-software days, says Ankit Gupta,one of the two Stanford University graduates from India who developed Pulse,a hugely successful news reader app for iPhone and iPad,in 2010.

Virat Singh Khutal has an answer to this problem: stop this slavish adherence to high-end smartphones and create mobile phone products for the common man,he says. A programmer and former game designer,Khutal,now 31,started a mobile app company in his hometown,Indore,three years ago with the dream of delivering apps to the masses. After a series of misadventures in the first two years,which brought his company,Twist Mobile,to the brink of a shutdown,Khutal came out wiser and decided to focus on original,free apps that would earn money through in-app advertising. He must have done something right,for Twist Mobiles 30-plus apps have clocked over 35 million downloads in Indian app stores including Nokias Ovi store,Getjar and Mobango. Nine of the apps have crossed a million downloads each and one of them,Psycho Hunter for Nokia,hit the magic number in 15 days. The oddly named Psycho Hunter is a game for feature phones that promises to reveal the players personality. It is through these simple,seemingly pointless apps that Twist Mobile now manages to make 1,000 in revenue every day.

According to McKinsey,India will have 350 million internet users by 2015,with over half of them accessing the Web through mobile phones. Khutal,a staunch believer in the local,wants a share of this pie. When you have a market outside your door,why would you want to sell to customers who are thousands of miles away? I have never been to the US,so how can I create apps for American sensibilities? he says. Today,India has a large population between the ages of 18 and 24 and they cannot afford smartphones. I have to cater to them and to villagers who have access to educational and utility apps but dont have much in the way of entertainment. For instance,one would think that an app that morphs your photo to predict what you will look like 30 years from now would be of no use in rural India. But this app of ours,Age Effect,is immensely popular in villages.

Being in a small town,uncorrupted by the urbanites false sense of affiliation with foreign products,has worked well for him,Khutal says. He uses a Nokia phone himself and employs a small team of 30,most of them locals. Finding talented developers and retaining them is easier in Indore than in Bangalore,he says. In big cities,people are constantly looking to switch jobs for money. Here,they are content and have a sense of ownership, he says.

It is a matter that also comes up for discussion at Robosoft,which recruits graduates from the IITs,the National School of Design in Ahmedabad and the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar just as often as it picks up students from colleges nearby,most notably from the Manipal Institute of Technology located just a half hour away. So far,Robosoft has had a relatively low attrition rate. I think its the surf beaches nearby, jokes Rachit Jain,a young techie from Jabalpur,Madhya Pradesh,who joined the company five months ago,rejecting offers from better-known software giants. IT jobs could be a little boring,but here you see the output of your labours. In some ways,it feels like an extension of college. It is fun,and there is a lot to learn, he says.

When Robosoft moved to Udupi,it had trouble getting round-the-clock power and a stable internet line. Today,it has a dedicated transformer for its office. One of the pluses of being in a small town is that you get treated like a VIP, Nath says light-heartedly,recounting the early days when he had to request people to rent out their apartments to his bachelor employees. There is good flight connectivity to Mangalore and 23 engineering colleges within 60 km of Udupi. Trust me,being in a smaller place is easier, he says.

Often what app makers lack in originality they make up for in packaging. This model has kept the app engine running in India. Among the several baby monitoring apps for busy mothers these include reminders for feeding time,diaper change,etc. in the Android market,there is one by Neurocompusys,a company in Bikaner founded by Saurabh Mehra. An engineer by training,Mehra began developing customised applications for the Windows Mobile operating system and has now branched into Android and iOS development. The company has launched an app called Rapstar that allows the user to create an avatar of himself as a rapper,complete with a song-and-dance sequence. Priced at 99 cents,it is a popular download at the Apple app store. Of course,these small successes dont rake in enough; like most Indian app companies,Neurocompusys undertakes contractual projects for clients abroad.

Location Guru,a six-year-old Nagpur-based developer firm that employs 43 people has a different business model. It makes apps with the cellular service provider in mind. Says Shaheer Ahmed,CEO and founder,When we began in 2007,our main aim was to provide cost-effective location services to service providers. We have slowly expanded into the Android and the iTunes market. Pocket Finder,the app it released in 2010,was marketed heavily by Aircel; other apps,Smart Pilot and Buddy Finder,were marketed by Tata Docomo. While Pocket Finder and Buddy Finder help customers locate their families and friends,Smart Pilot is a step-by-step guide to driving in cities. These apps are more like services,costing between Rs 15 and Rs 100 a month. The companys revenues have touched Rs 4.5 crore and its downloads have crossed a million.

Till date,over a million apps have been published in the Android and Apple app stores. Can small-town Indias practitioners of cool produce apps that are cooler? Lets wait and watch the app charts.

With inputs from Rohan Swamy