Avenues in Mobile Apps
Mobile apps is the latest addiction across the world. Billions of apps are getting downloaded every day and it brings various opportunities for young college students to learn and prove themselves while making money and solving problems of customers. Let us look at the key opportunities in this domain:
Consumer Apps
If you use Whatsapp to chat with friends, or Facebook on mobile to update your status, then you have downloaded a consumer mobile app. There are millions of such apps that are used by consumers directly to kill as well as save time. You just have to think of 5Ws and 1H from a consumer point of view — what, when, why, where, who, how; and you will get plenty of application ideas, which you can start converting into useful mobile apps.
Enterprise apps
Blackberry started as a pager service, then quickly transformed itself into one of the largest enterprise mobile apps company — that caters to corporates directly or indirectly. The primary use of these apps is for business purpose and can be either for management or for employees. It could be used for ERP, CRM, sales channel management or simply taking attendance.
Mobile Gaming
Angry Birds, Temple Run and millions of other games have caught the fancy of people both young and old. Though mobile gaming is also a type of consumer app, it is so big in itself that there are various niche you can consider — casual gaming, hardcore games, multi-player games, single player games, board games, etc. Just find a story and build a game around it.
Mobile Payments
Giving and taking money is a business that has been there since the beginning of mankind. From kind to cash to online to mobile — that is how the evolution of payments has been, and now we see increase of technologies related to mobile payments, mobile wallet, sms transfer, swipe and share, etc. Additionally, it leads to peripheral services like mobile security, software linking banks with mobile apps, integration of apps and visa/mastercard.
Mobile Platforms
Mobile platforms allow people to build apps, deploy them on Apple Store or Google Play Store, link with app ad networks, and manage user downloads etc.
So go ahead, learn the basics of mobile — android, eclipse, java and rule the world.
(Amit Grover is the founder of Nurture Talent Academy, India's first institute for entrepreneur training. Email: amit.grover@nurturetalent.com)