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BlackBerry handset maker Research In Motion, in the next five years, expects to have a third of its application developers from India.
It currently has about four lakh application developers with about a fifth of them from India.
RIM is investing over $100 million for application development across the world, Mr Alec Saunders, Vice-President of Developer Relations, RIM, said. The company is also planning to deploy a larger team in India to work on such initiative and work towards increasing the app developer base in India.
RIM plans to expand its BASE (BlackBerry Apps by Student Entrepreneurs) programme across the country to increase its application developer base in India, according to Ms Annie Mathew, Head of Alliances at RIM.
BASE, which has been held in Tamil Nadu and Kerala so far, is a programme where engineering students are given opportunities to develop applications for the company.
RIM selects a set of engineering colleges and holds summits, workshops and training sessions for students in the 3rd and 4th years of college, and all students are expected to develop and submit applications at the end of the programme. As part this, RIM has also set up a BlackBerry Innovation Zone jointly with Kerala-based incubation centre Startup Village, recently.
The aim to increase the number of people developing applications for the BlackBerry 10 platform comes in the backdrop of the delay in launch of its BlackBerry 10 platform.
The company announced last week that the BlackBerry 10 – its upcoming proprietary mobile operating system for its smartphones and tablets – will be launched early next year and not end of this year as planned.
Despite the pessimism around the delay, the company has managed to retain and also attract interest from application developers to create apps for the new platform, the company said.
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