Nokia Foresees a Bright Future of App Development in Pakistan

Forum Nokia invests in top Pakistani developers with hands-on training to bring out the best local apps on Ovi Store.

KARACHI: A four-day Developer Workshop organized by Forum Nokia here at a local hotel concluded on a positive note. The event instructors, Teemu Kiijarvi, Developer Relations Manager for Nokia Middle East and Africa and Tony Torp, Forum Nokia Champion Developer gave hands-on training to the participants on Java ME and Qt programming. The workshop was organized by Forum Nokia in collaboration with P@SHA (Pakistan Software Houses Association).

The workshop was attended, free of cost, by around 50 avid developers in Karachi. The regular fee for these kinds of workshops organized by Forum Nokia is around $500. However, in an effort to encourage the local developers to participate more in mobile application development, Nokia offered the workshop without any charges. Registrations were made on first-come, first-serve basis.

Speaking about Forum Nokia’s role, Teemu said, “Forum Nokia will be organizing many more trainings in future that will be geared towards user experience. How the end user will react to a mobile app should be an important point to consider for any developer. At the end of the day, a mobile app would have a good selling value only if the end consumer finds it meaningful and is attracted to it.  Through our training programs, we want to work together with the developers to expand the ecosystem. Forum Nokia is a growing online community of 2 million active users. Forum Nokia members get access to e-learning/ tutorials and online support to hone their skills.”

Commenting on P@SHA’s collaboration with Forum Nokia, Jehanara, President, P@SHA said, “I’m delighted that Nokia ahs introduced this 4-day workshop for developers in Karachi. It was a very useful session for developers to learn about the latest technology tools - JavaME and Qt, framework as well as user interface for the development of mobile products. These kinds of trainings are important as developer community increasingly focused on mobile app development. And that’s what the future is all about. We hope to work with Nokia on many more capacity building trainings in future.”

Expressing her views on the first Forum Nokia Developers’ Workshop 2011, Rabia Azfar, Solutions Manager, Near East said, “We are thoroughly impressed by the marvelous response we received from the developer community. Forum Nokia workshop is a part of the chain that Nokia has initiated in Pakistan to provide new opportunities to the local developers. The workshop was geared towards channelising the strengths of local developers and providing them a rich bundle of resources to develop more locally relevant mobile apps. With the successful conclusion of the first workshop and positive feedback from the participants, we are planning to take this to other metropolitans of Pakistan in near future.”

By the end of the four-day event, the participants seemed happy about the invaluable knowledge they had gained to make the most of the application development tools at their disposal. The event also instilled a new sense of direction among participating developers by giving them tips to successfully implement the app development projects they were currently pursuing. The training sessions of this kind is the essence to enable a rich mobile communications experience for Pakistani consumers.