 "Adobe India Gears Up For Mobile Content Market")
The mobile phone boom in India has created a substantial market for mobile phone applications. With voice services becoming commodities and the increasingly saturated markets, mobile operators are looking for new ways to increase revenue.
This has led to the emergence of a new category of data services, optimised for the mobile industry. This category incorporates rich media experiences that fully engage the user and provide more subscriber value while promising to increase customer retention for operators.
Sandeep Mehrotra, country sales manager, Adobe Systems, India, informs, “The global mobile games business, for instance, is pegged at $2.2 billion, with India accounting for around $100 million of the overall pie. According to NASSCOM, this market could well touch $500 million in exports alone by 2010. And mobile video services too, offered in APAC countries for the past few years, have seen rapid growth. With wireless technology gaining momentum, the total subscriber number is expected to reach 265.2 million and generate total revenue of US$17.5 billion by 2010.”
Adobe Device Central CS3
A new mobile category has emerged, capable of doing what Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) has done on the Internet space. These engaging mobile experiences offer more expressive content to consumers, with visually improved graphics and animation.
Adobe, a player in the mobile content applications market, has launched Device Central CS3 to focus on mobile content designers and developers. It has the tools developers need to preview and test mobile content for a wide range of devices and across different media formats, including FlashLite, bitmap, web and video.
Mehrotra explains, “The Device Central CS3 reduces the complexity of creating mobile content by helping the designers and developers community to better understand the fragmented and fast changing mobile device landscape.”
Collaborating with mobile phone vendors
Adobe has tied up with mobile manufacturers like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, LG to provide mobile content applications. Says Mehrotra, “We have a young team in Bangalore that focuses on delivering solutions for mobiles. We will develop tools focused on Flash and PDF-based solutions to create compelling experiences on any non-PC device with a screen."
Driving growth
The company wants to ensure that the Flash user environment is available on a broad range of handsets. Flash is being used to browse the web and create a compelling new user experience on these devices. Increasingly, it will be used to deliver services with a TV like metaphor or a channel metaphor.
The company is optimistic about its growth in the Indian market. It recently unveiled the latest version of its Creative Suite in 6 different editions. “Having achieved global revenue of $649.4 million in the first quarter of 2007, we are hoping to ride a new high in India. Our business plans include building new campuses, adding capacities in Noida and Bangalore centres and we are also going to focus on developing mobile applications for the Indian cell phone market,” concludes Mehrotra.