Nokia is continuing with its commitment to the developer community investing €6.7 million ($10m) in four Indian applications developers, providing funding for Bollywood Hungama, Eros Bollywood, India Today and Aaj Tak Videos.
The applications have multi-screen infotainment features and have been selected from over 900 entries from over 60 countries.
Nokia will fund more companies as part of the second phase of the project, the Open Screen Project Fund which was initiated with Adobe.
These applications will now be available at Nokia’s Ovi stores from later this month.
The winning applications were announced as part of a series of new initiatives to assist Indian application developers tap global revenue generating opportunities at the Forum Nokia Developer Conference ’09, held in Bangalore this week.
“Mobile users everywhere are consuming more and more content daily. Considering that the next billion mobile users will be from emerging markets like India, our developers have the opportunity to not only shape local and global consumer mobile experiences but also lead the mobile applications ecosystem,” said Nokia India VP and MD D. Shivakumar.
Nokia also announced the global release of a new software development kit (SDK) for its Series 40 mass market mobile devices. The SDK makes it easier for publishers and developers to create innovative applications for millions of mobile consumers being served by Nokia Series 40 Lite devices across the world. It will also feature support for Indian regional languages.