Mobile Design IN

Designing for India
Mobile Design India’s first event  focuses on the theme of “Designing for India”
The Indian market is a unique mobile innovation playground and untapped opportunity for anyone wanting to develop mass-market mobile experiences that needs to work across a myriad of languages, operators, income-segments, networks and user needs. Mobile has revolutionized the way people conduct business, get entertained, educated, married, to keeping up with cricket scores.

On one side the Indian masses go for “aspirational” experiences that make them stand out. At the same time the core offering of simplicity, universality and easy access has never been more important than the present, where all pc-based experiences from the developed world are already being leapfrogged by being made available directly on mobile in the places like India.  There are fewer legacies in markets like India. Mobile developers and designers have a wonderful opportunity to push for new behaviours, interactions and experiences.

Who are the designers and developers taking advantage of this unique Indian mobile opportunity? What kinds of mobile experiences are they crafting/cooking to cater to discerning, demanding Indian users?

This event of Mobile Design India aims to focus on 5 companies/startups that are crafting the mobile user experience in a unique way to take advantage of the Indian market mobile opportunity and challenge.

Please join us for an evening of thought-provoking enquiry on how to craft experiences when designing for India.

Who is speaking:
You will be learning more through case-studies from:

1. Alok Goel:  Product Manager, Google India
   Speaker Bio: Alok Goel heads Google’s Search and Mobile products for India. As part of this role, he is responsible for defining and launching products to delight Google users. Prior to this role, he was responsible for Google’s local business search.
   In this discussion, he will focus on some structured approaches to build impactful products for masses.
   
   
2. Vir Kashyap: COO at Babajob
   Speaker bio: Vir is the the COO of Babajob.com where he is responsible for business development and strategic partnerships. Previously, Vir was a partner at Indavest, a venture capital and incubation firm focusing on early‐stage investments in India. Prior to that he worked in the financial industry in Madrid and New York. His experience includes a stint in Silicon Valley he helped launch the enterprise computing vertical at Epinions.com (now part of eBay).
   He will be talking about the process for designing the Babajob service on various mobile interfaces (including voice/IVR, WAP and application development) and the user experience challenges they face in designing a product for the informal labor sector.
   
   
3. Vivek Pani: CTO at Reverie | User Experience Framework for Indian Language Text Usage on Mobile Phones
   Speaker Bio: Vivekananda Pani is the co-founder and CTO of Reverie Technologies and has more than 14 years of experience in Indian language computing. Vivek led the language tools and technologies initiative at GIST, C-DAC and was involved along with the ministry of IT with the various standardization initiatives for script encoding and display for various Indian scripts. He architected India’s first IPTV based Set-Top-Box platform to support all Indian languages and also worked among the first implementations on Indian languages on mobile phones. He authored among the very first prediction, phonetic English typing and lyrics viewing tools supporting Indian languages for mobile phones. Vivek has a passion for language computing with a focus on usability and has a few patents in the area.
   
   
4. Divya Viswanathan- User experience designer at Nokia Research Centre
   Speaker bio: Divya Viswanathan is a User Experience Designer with Nokia Research Center. Her work has taken her across the country, looking at ways in which people are using and experiencing mobile technology. These insights and explorations lead to identifying relevant new areas for mobile services to play a meaningful role in the future. She focuses on crafting research methods that allow users to play a bigger role in the design process. Her projects include work on researching healthcare systems, education and personal security for women in urban contexts. Divya has a background in Communication Design & Film making, from the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. Her work has been showcased at ‘Ars Electonica’ Handheld Learning and CHI.
   
   
5. Sudarshan HS: CEO at LatLong | Learning consumability with Latlong
   Speaker bio: Sud is the co-founder and CEO of ONZE Technologies. Before ONZE, he was selling the product R&D offerings of Infosys for a few years, and closely worked with engineering & product management of technology companies world-wide. Prior to that, Sud learnt to read protocol standards documents and managed to lead product engineering teams creating networking and telecommunication products, and eventually learnt to pay-back by writing more protocol standards & make the world a more complicated place :) Sud holds a bachelor’s degree in telecommunciation engineering from Bangalore University, aims to hold-on to his amateur radio license, and eventually find the time to get a private pilot’s license.

When: 29th April from 6:30pm onwards

Where: @ Jaaga | Rhenius Street, Off Richmond Road, Opposite the Hockey Association Stadium main gate, Shanthinagar, Bangalore.

SMS “mobile design from <starting point>” to 90088 90088 … and get directions from any place in Bangalore ( Thanks to LatLong)

Register here: You need to become a member of Mobile Design India Yahoo groups and then go to Database to add record here )