If you think apps are something that you pay for and run on smart phones, you would be wrong on both counts. Many in India are in fact experimenting with apps that will run on other platforms. And they are not doing it just for the money.

One company which wants to extend apps beyond mobiles is Intel. Speaking to Business Line , Mr Narendra Bhandari, Director — Asia Pacific, Software and Services Group Developer Relations Division said, “We are looking at a seamless integration of information from mobiles to PCs. We are urging our developers to think of delivering content from 4-inch mobiles to 40-inch TVs and everything in between.” Intel has over 15,000 such developers based out of India and they have created over 1,600 apps.

One of these developers, Nextwave Multimedia Pvt Ltd, got into apps in order to break away from traditional IT services. Mr P. R. Rajendra, Managing Director, said that the company develops apps for various platforms and has made $1 million from apps for all these platforms over the last two years. “Traditionally, IT services companies grow by adding manpower, but we were looking at growing with products,” he said.

Of course, money is not the only thing that motivates developers. For instance, we have Mr Suhas Shankar Sharma, who has just joined an engineering college and has developed an app for an SMS service called txtWeb. Explaining his app, Mr Sharma said, “Some time back, I had a basic mobile phone and I wanted to access mail, so I wrote pushmail. It took me some two to three days.” Since txtWeb apps, which use the SMS platform, are free, Mr Sharma does not gain any financial advantage from this app.

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