The latest news in the global expansion of mobile marketing is that Nokia has kicked off an aggressive campaign to promote the Ovi online store among software developers in East Africa.
For now, Nokia is holding “developers’ forums” in the early stages of the campaign to simply introduce the online store throughout many east African nations.
Getting a big push is the Ovi store, a digial marketplace where “developers upload their applications and Nokia users can download them from anywhere in the world.”
Its biggest competitor? You guessed it… the Apple store for the iPhone.
Until now, African software developers have not stepped up to take an aggressive posture in designing and uploading applications online because of bandwidth concerns (not to mention legal and corporate infrastructure problems).
But growth is inevitible. And despite setbacks and lingering disadvantages, the Ovi store is expected to start accepting applications next month.
According to the report, developers will get 70% of the revenue and can track the number of downloads through the Ovi Web site.
