Microsoft and Nokia are developing a Windows Phone-centric AppCampus, again demonstrating Microsoft's need to encourage app development.
Microsoft and
Nokia are planning to invest a combined $24 million in a mobile-application
university for developers. This AppCampus program, based out of Aalto
University in Finland, will launch in May 2012.
The program
will offer facilities, coaching services and access to academic and business
networks, according to Microsofts March 26
press release. AppCampus will not only support the
development of apps for Windows Phone, but also Symbian and Series 40.
While this
announcement necessarily appears Europe-centric, it nonetheless emphasizes Microsofts
fervent need to build a robust apps ecosystem for Windows Phone, which it hopes
will one day challenge both Apples iPhone and Google Android on a worldwide
scale.
Mobile
ecosystems with a diverse collection of apps have generally succeeded in the
open marketplace; witness the hundreds of thousands of available apps,
respectively, for Apples App Store and Googles Android Marketplace.
Meanwhile, the failure of platforms such as Hewlett-Packards webOS to generate
an app collection on that scale was seen as symptomatic of their larger issues.
With all that in mind, Research In Motion is in the midst of an active campaign
to prepare developers for its upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform.
Windows Phone
boasted around 50,000 apps by the end of 2011, with
All About Windows Phone (AAWP) reporting an
average of 265 additional items added to Windows Phone Marketplace per day.
Based on the numbers in its own tracking system,
AAWP suggested that some 58 percent of items in the Marketplace
were free, followed by 14 percent paid with a free trial, and 29 percent paid.
The AppCampus
also re-emphasizes Microsofts deepening relationship with Nokia, which largely
abandoned homegrown operating systems such as Symbian in favor of building
devices with Windows Phone. The Finnish phone maker hopes that a collection of
Windows Phone devices at a variety of price points will allow it to reclaim the
initiative in a consumer market dominated in large part by Apples iPhone and
the growing family of Google Android handsets. In the United States, AT&T
recently announced that, starting April 8, it would begin selling Nokias
high-end Lumia 900 smartphone for $99.99 with a two-year contract.
In addition to
Nokia, other manufacturing partners such as HTC have committed to building a
new generation of Windows Phones loaded with Mango, which includes hundreds of
tweaks and additional features. During this Januarys Consumer Electronics Show
in Las Vegas, HTC announced the Titan II, a 4G Long-Term Evolution- (LTE-) capable
device with a 3.7-inch screen.
Impressive
hardware aside, though, any mobile ecosystem needs apps. Hence, Microsofts
current push on the developer side of things.
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