Tag Archives: NDSuccess

Twist Mobile sees big payoff in Nokia Store

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Twist Mobile was founded in India in 2009 with a clear approach to winning over the emerging and international markets. With a wealth of content making its way to India, the Twist team decided to develop apps for their home country while letting others focus on the U.S. market. However, the team was faced with a challenge most developers encounter, how do I grow my company and generate revenue?

“We started out by developing our first application Age Effect, an old-age photo effect app, using Java for Symbian phones. It received a good number of paid downloads from operators in national and international markets, but we wanted to really look at how we could further drive success,” explained Virat Khutal, Twist Mobile Founder & CEO.

By partnering with Nokia, Twist Mobile changed their business model from a paid download model to an ad-funded model. The two teams worked together to design a user interface that would make the ad placement a less intrusive element of the user experience. The Twist team also found it easy to integrate the advertising SDK into their apps, enabling them to push out apps to the market quickly. The model with ad-wrapping from Vserv Ad Engine displays ads at the beginning and end of each application, and doesn’t distract users as they engage with the app. The ROI of this model is $3.50 USD per every 1,000 impressions and Twist brings in roughly $1,000 USD in daily revenue.

In this Nokia Developer video, Twist Mobile’s CEO Virat Khutal and Technical Head Pramod Pandey talk about their success developing with Nokia:

Developing for Nokia was always the team’s first preference, given Nokia’s global reach, local support and penetration in the Indian market. Twist Mobile has developed for other platforms, but is committed to developing for the Java™ platform and Nokia phones. “We have experimented on some other platforms but distribution was a key challenge so we stopped those plans,” said Anirudh Parasher, Twist Mobile Deployment Manager.

Once Age Effect launched in the Nokia Store as a free ad-funded app, it received one million downloads in just six weeks; a huge achievement for the team fueled by the new business model. This set the tone for developing more apps in the Nokia Store to maximize revenue and profit share, so the momentum didn’t stop there. Soon after, the team launched Psycho Hunter, a personality analysis game, that generated one million downloads in the Nokia Store in just 15 days!

As a result of the successful new strategy, Twist Mobile was the first company from the Asia-Pacific region to surpass 10+ million downloads in the Nokia Store with more than 30 free and 10 paid apps available for download. The company has surpassed 25 million downloads in six months, with more than 120,000 downloads a day from the Nokia Store – without investing in any promotional marketing.

The company received more than eight million downloads from their camera apps alone including, Sketch Effect, Age Effect and Photopia. “We wanted to harness camera technology, motion sensors and all other accessory features to give our user a great experience,” said Khutal.

The team is excited to take on developing for Nokia Lumia smartphones running on Windows Phone. The Twist Mobile team is made up of 18 developers and designers, with growth plans to reach 35 people in the next three months.

With Nokia’s global reach, Twist predicts that Windows Phone will emerge as the biggest player in the space by attracting a younger consumer market through the integration of Xbox and their ability to handle games at 60 frames per second. Khutal added, “We have aspirations to reach one million downloads per day and we’re fully confident we can get there with our free and paid apps.”

To learn more about Twist Mobile’s apps, check out the breakdown below:

 

Psycho Hunter
   
Category: Games – Action
Downloads: 2.1 Million
Description: A simple game of deer hunt with a personality analysis tool for calculating and understanding your behavior and game play techniques.

Sketch Effect
   

Category: Apps – Entertainment
Downloads: 2 Million
Description:Take any photo from your mobile camera and quickly convert it into a sketch. The Sketch Effect app lets you share your sketch with your friends on Facebook so you can have a different profile picture, or set it as your wallpaper on your device.

Photopia
  
Category: Apps – Entertainment
Downloads: 2 Million
Description: A global photo-sharing application that applies effects to your photos and lets you share them worldwide.You can also see photos from other users and rate them, comment on them, or follow them.

CellApp lights the way for millions of Nokia users

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In September 2011, India-based CellApp began to gain exposure as a ‘recommended app’ in the Nokia Store, sparking millions of downloads of their content in 190 countries around the world. One of CellApp’s first applications was the widely popular QTorch, an application designed to let users of Nokia Symbian phones turn their device into a torch or flashlight when the need arises.

CellApp developed QTorch – including a Qt-based version of the app – specifically to address emergency situations that leave people without power for extended periods of time. The app uses a custom algorithm to increase the brightness of the phone screen as necessary. To date, the free version of the application has been downloaded 1.7 million times, earning recognition as a “most downloaded” app for the Nokia N8.


    

Using feedback from Nokia Store customers, CellApp has since moved on to create other successful applications, including DataMonitor, which measures traffic through network connections and displays real-time data usage information. In nearly every market, operators can charge users for data overages. With DataMonitor, users can keep track of their data consumption in real time from the home screen and set alerts to sound as they approach their data limit. This app has helped several hundred thousand users decrease mobile bills. The free version allows users to monitor GPRS data usage, and the premium application allows them to configure and position the ticker window, set a usage alert, and select the network to be monitored (GPRS/Wi-Fi). User testimonials in Nokia Store have showered the app with compliments:

“I have been getting huge bills for using GPRS data connectivity while on the move. With DataMonitor I hope to have some control over my phone bills. Good going! – rahulg_85

“Useful app to know exactly how much you download!” – enzodamato

“DataMonitor helped me to find hidden online costs!” – quax_ge

  

CellApp was established in 2010 by developers with experience creating applications in Symbian C++, Qt, Java, Nokia’s Web Runtime, Series 40 Web Apps, and Adobe Flash Lite.

“When using Qt, we found it very easy to develop the user interface, and the development time can be virtually cut in half,” said G. Padmakumar, CEO of CellApp. “Qt has a drag and drop UI editor, which incorporates many tools that help in our rapid application development.”

Many of the developers working at CellApp have been working with Nokia platforms for years; and they have recently developed five applications in the Windows Phone Marketplace – in just four weeks.

“For us, it was simple and a great experience developing on WP7, from installing the SDKs and IDEs to transferring the app to the test devices, to uploading the final application to App Hub for publication in the Windows Phone Marketplace,” said Padmakumar. “Help is just a click away and there are developer champions all over the world contributing to the community by posting code-based articles for additional support. With Microsoft slowly opening up the development platform so that complex apps can be developed, it’s only a matter of time before WP development will become the mobile developers’ favorite.”

Windows Phone Marketplace is home to more than 65,000 apps, and counting including the five from CellApp, and is seeing more than 300 new apps published every day. CellApp plans to explore the Windows Phone platform to create more globally relevant applications and is taking advantage of the fast-growing and increasingly popular third ecosystem.

“Innovate, adapt, excel,” said Padmakumar. “Our motto has been a guiding light for our endeavors and will continue to inspire us to work with Nokia for years to come.”