Top 10 Android Apps in India [Google Maps, Talking Tom, Angry Birds..]

With Android phones available for as low as Rs 6,000 now, their sales have been been always on the rise in India. The next step after one buys an Android phone is downloading Android apps. With the market buzzing with 300,000 apps already, and hundreds still getting created every day, there is an app for almost everything under the sun.

Indian companies and developers are also targeting Android apps now, which are more popular than the Apple apps because of the price-sensitive Indian market.

Here is a list of top 10 Android Apps downloaded by Indian Android phone users, not in any particular order though:

Google Maps: With GPS-enabled smart phones getting popular by the day in Indian customers, and people using navigation on their Android phones, this one really comes in handy. It also gives you details about nearby restaurants, ATMs, and petrol pumps. With the recently launched offline cache support, you may find your way out even when you do not have a data plan.

Facebook: The most popular social networking platform of all times finds a place in the top apps downloaded by users to instantly share with friends.

Talking Tom Cat: Oh this fun app does find a mention in the top 10. A very simple app that just records your voice and repeats back in a high-pitched, funny voice, is not loved only by kids, it is a good accompaniment to any gathering of friends or family.

YouTube: This is one of the many apps that are much better than the original browser apps. YouTube app provides in-page playback, which means whenever you click on a YouTube link on your phone/tablet, it opens up the app, and plays the video in a full-screen mode, and this happens so seamlessly that you do not even know that you left the browser (or any other app) to the app and are back.

Angry Birds: The pigs are getting greedier and birds angrier. Perhaps the most-addictive phone game has now found a liking in the Indian users too after it was opened to the Android ecosystem and was made free.

Twitter: An ideal app for a phone because of a word limit synchronous with an SMS, and the kind of urgency with which people tweet, it is faster and easier to tweet from your phone from wherever you are, about whatever you feel like.

Advanced Task Killer: Just because Android apps have no close button doesn’t mean they shut down when you return to the home page or move on to another app, and continue using up memory. This app lets you kill them and release memory, improving performance of you phone.

Book My Show: A very simple and clean up that allows you to book your favourite movie, play or event even when you are on the move, it also lists venues in the nearest-to-furthest order.

Times of India: This app from the country’s highest-read newspaper provides you breaking news from local, national, and international areas to your Android device. It also comes with movie reviews, live cricket scores, and photo galleries.

Moneycontrol: The Markets on Mobile app is your gateway to all critical real-time information about the Indian and global markets through your Android device. It provides real time stock quotes, and helps you manage and keep track of your investment portfolio, watch Live TV and get in-depth coverage & analysis of financial markets, economy and business.

A look at these apps conveys a mixed feeling. There is no one category Indians are downloading apps in. There is social networking, games, utility, entertainment, and news. The Android App market is a versatile one and supports apps for all kinds of uses. While GPS aids navigation and check-ins, accelerometers and gravitometers have taken gaming experience to the next level. Cheap data plans and fast 3G connections in India mean apps relying on the connectivity are becoming popular.

Free apps mean the revenue depends on advertisements, which depends on the popularity of the apps. Depending on how popular your app is, this may fetch in more moolah than a download fee. Angry Birds, for instance, was once a paid app at $1 per download. It was later made freely available in the market, and now makes $30 million a month on advertisements, which is far more than Rovio could have made on charging that fee. 30 million downloads a month is unconceivable even for a game as addictive as Angry Birds.
For utility apps like BookMyShow, the ROI of developing an app comes in the form of an increase in the number of users who pay through the app, if not for the app.

If you are a company that relies completely/partially on the Internet for business, what percentage of your development efforts (and $$) do you think should you spend on app development? For a company that is completely into app-development, what do you think will you develop? A utility app or a game? The first kind of company can outsource to the latter. There is another question for developers though, should you target Native or HTML5?

[Guest article contributed by Ashutosh Saxena.]

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UnPluggd4 – and Hackathon V1

UnPluggd is the flagship event of Pluggd.in, India’s favorite startup site. After the huge success of previous editions which have seen speakers like the founders of Flipkart, inMobi, Mast Kalandar, Vaatsalya Hospitals and have seen promising startups demo their products, we are all set for the 4th edition of UnPluggd. This edition is being conducted in Pune on the 19th of November.

Dont miss India’s best and most relevant startup event!

UnPluggd will be preceded by a Hackathon where we will get the best and brightest among you, get them in a room and ask you to hack away and create a product.

At Hackathon, we will provide you with all the infrastructure necessary along with suitable mentors who will be with you throughout the full event. They will guide you, ping you, ask you tough questions, help you in design, help you get on to a cloud server setup fast, use APIs – the works. In short they will help your dream of a product become reality. And of course the food is free – you have to get your own beer.

2 Winning Entries Will Get A Chance To Demo Their Product At UnPluggd. And in these 2 weeks, our mentors, Pluggd.in team will help you sharpen your focus, sharpen your tools so that you can actually build a product/a working prototype in 2 weeks time and showcase that to the world

So go ahead, register here and see you at Hackathon and Unpluggd!

Hackathon: Agenda

Get together the evening of 4th November and find a team (or get yours)

Get together on 5th morning.

Get your business idea sounded with mentors, PI team, others.

Start coding.

Don’t’ Sleep.

Don’t Sleep.

6th Nov – evening 6 pm – have a prototype ready.

Demo to mentors, investors, audience, others from 6 pm to 9 pm.

Sleep.

Who can participate?

Anybody and everybody – you could be a designer, engineer, marketer.

Students are especially encouraged.

Why should you participate?

The largest journeys are often started with a single step. This is YOUR first step and what better avenuethan where seasoned professionals and startup guys are around to help you take that. Build your firstprototype and kick some ass.

Are outstation participants allowed?

Of course. You will be missing out on some cool stuff if you don’t travel for this. Especially peoplefrom in and around like Mangalore, Cochin, Chennai, Pune – actually all of India is a flight away from Bangalore. So just land up at 3 pm on the 4th of November.

What does it cost?

You can book your tickets here. There is an early bird discount for some time – so don’t be late. We have kept the pricing to be very affordable.

Discount code
For UnPluggd : PIBUDDY
For Hackathon : HACKBUDDY

The dates clash with another event or exams or my girlfriend’s birthday?

In the last case you can get your girlfriend along (no discount). In the other cases, life is short and prioritization is important – go wherever you think you can get most mileage out of.

We will be sharing more details soon – so stay Pluggd.in!

- For any queries, join the UnPluggd Facebook group and ask qns.

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Four mind-shifts you’ll need to make mobile marketing work

Mobile marketing is up-and-growing, but it’s also an entirely new ball game altogether. Many of the rules that applied to other media have to change if you have to apply them to the mobile space.

Here’re a couple of ways in which mobile is different from other media you’ve known – that you’ll do well to keep in mind.

1. Mobile targeting is different from other media

If you’re advertising on web search, you target customers by the keywords they type in. If you’re advertising on newspapers, you target customers by the regions where they stay(based on editions). Each of these needs you to think very differently.

Mobile is different – and requires a different mindset altogether. For instance, on mobile, you can target your customers by different handsets and different operators.

Think about what kind of devices your customers are using. The users of low-end basic phones are a very different demographic compared to users of high-end sophisticated Android devices, iPhones or iPads. What devices are your best customers likely to be using?

On the same lines, would you want to target larger, national telecom operators? Or smaller, niche, regional operators? Larger players give you access to more customers – but presence on these larger players is also more expensive, and more competitive. Users of which operators do you want to target?

2. Mobile has unique interactive capabilities

The mobile medium is far more interactive than anything that’s come before it. Engaging, interactive ads using rich media can make full use of the capabilities of the mobile medium.

For instance, the possibility of dragging-and-dropping, or of tapping the screen, or of swiping a part of the screen all open up unique possibilities for designing graphics-rich ads and reaching out to users.

When you think mobile, think of the unique capabilities of the medium and what it lets you do.

3. Mobile transactions work differently.

If you offer mobile value-added services(ringtones, subscription based alerts, paid apps, music etc.), the way you receive money is very different from the way you do in traditional media or the internet.

You typically bill your customers in two broad ways:

1. Through app-stores if you are selling an app. Your user pays the app store, the app store pays you.
2. Through mobile operators if you’re selling mobile value-added services. Your user gets billed by the telecom operator, you receive money from the operator.

Therefore, because the app stores and operators are typically large, anonymous entities, you have to pay careful attention to payments policies – and plan for them(for as a marketer you definitely aren’t in a position of power compared to these guys).

4. It’s early days yet

This is a good thing for most marketers. A majority of brands and advertisers aren’t active yet on the mobile medium. Which means there isn’t much competition, and the rates are cheap compared to other media. For instance, many businesses I have seen have a cost-per-lead on mobile that’s under 50% of what it is on web.

What does this mean for you as a startup, or a marketer? This is the time to get into mobile, before it gets hypercompetitive and rates shoot up.

[Shamanth Rao is the head of campaign management for APAC at InMobi (http://InMobi.com ). His writings are at http://BywayStar.com ]

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On Shifting Equilibrium And Challenging Status Quo

[Guest post by Anu Sharma, Co-founder of simplelife.in. This post was reproduced from SimpleLIFE's blog at - http://www.simplelife.in/threadbare]

An equilibrium is the stable-state outcome of a game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only his own strategy unilaterally.

There are several examples of equilibriums in the tech world.

1. Until 1873 when Christopher Scholes came up with the QWERTY Keyboard, there had been no standard pattern to arrangement of letters on a typewriter keyboard. QWERTY maximized the distances between frequently used letters to deliberately slow down the typist, and reduce jamming of keys on manual typewriters. DSK – Dvorak’s Simplified Keyboard, patented in 1963, reduced the distance fingers travelled by 50%, and same material could be typed in 5-10% less time. Yet, it has never been able to replace QWERTY.

2. Stanford economist Brian Aurthur tells a famous story:

“In 1890 there were three ways to power automobiles — steam, gasoline and electricity — and of these one was patently inferior to the other two: gasoline… [A turning point for gasoline was] an 1895 horseless carriage competition sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald. This was won by a gasoline-powered Duryea — one of only two cars to finish out of six starters — and has been cited as the possible inspiration for R.E. Olds to patent in 1896 a gasoline power source, which he subsequently mass-produced in the “Curved-Dash Olds.” Gasoline thus overcame its slow start. Steam continued viable as an automotive power source until 1914, when there was an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in North America. This led to the withdrawal of horse troughs — which is where steam cars could fill with water. It took the Stanley Brothers about three years to develop a condenser and boiler system that did not need to be filled every thirty or forty miles. But by then it was too late. The steam engine never recovered.”

3. Facebook has acquired equilibrium in inheriting the percentage of new entrants to the Internet. Google Plus is not about to change it unless Facebook falters on a crucial new wave that it stubbornly fails to acknowledge as the next big thing for individual pride in society.

Often, though, each game can have more than one equilibrium. In a fantastic book on game theory, Avinash Dixit illustrates how it’s possible to move to a different equilibrium.

Speeding is illegal but people frequently drive over the speed limit. First, it may actually be safer to drive at the same speed as the flow of traffic. Second, when everyone’s driving over the limit, the chances of your being caught are miniscule.

As more people become law-abiding, the incentives to over-speed fall dramatically. If one driver slows down, he makes it a little bit more attractive for everyone to slow down. Yet, if everyone is speeding, no one wants to be the only one to slow down.

What can lawmakers learn from this? The key is to move a critical mass of drivers to drive within the speed limit. A short burst of extremely strict enforcement and harsh penalties can change the behavior of enough drivers to make full compliance extremely attractive.

The best chances of bringing companies to change their existing equilibrium rest with the leadership because incentives for enforcement, punishment and reward can most likely be implemented top down. Even a relatively autonomous group can shift a company culturally by implementing these incentives within the closed group.

However, while implementing these incentives, the outcome must be measurable in binary terms agreeable to everyone. ‘Either you rock, or you suck’, a friend from a respected e-commerce company once said to me. That usually is the key to deciding which equilibrium you want to set for yourself.

Any guesses as to which online shopping company this could be?

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Indian eCommerce And The Hype [Interesting Infographic]

There has been quite some discussions around a possible eCommerce bubble in India. While some believe that eCommerce industry is only opening up in India and there is huge potential to be unlocked, there are others who although don’t doubt the potential but are skeptic on the valuation of the eCommerce companies.

Here’s an interesting infographic on the potential of Indian eCommerce from Referral Candy.

*Referral Candy is a sponsor of Pluggd.in

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