(By Preethi J & Nikhil Pahwa) V Venkatesh, CEO (Karnataka Circle) for Bharti Airtel, speaking at a panel discussion on personalization, social networking and strategies for mobile services at Mobile India 2010, said that the company will launch an application store called App Center in February 2010. The mobile application store will feature around 850 applications. This announcement comes shortly after another telecom operator, Aircel, announced plans to launch an application store powered by Infosys' white labeled application Flypp. This is yet another another indication of a trend beginning in India of telcos launching application stores. Things To Do; Challenges One of our readers recently commented that application stores are the similar to operator decks. A couple of other things to keep in mind: -- How Is Access Provided: if it is hosted only on operator decks, then it would be similar to a WAP deck. In our opinion, that is the wrong strategy. The propensity for a consumer to visit an application store on a handset is more, as compared to just on a WAP deck. For telcos, it's necessary that the service is available both on deck, and on handset. It is still a challenge getting the application store on a handset, and enabling easy access. STAR something like an application based, app-store-like content showcase with Plus a couple of years ago, but despite significant publicity, it just didn't gain traction. The other challenge is - will applications be accessible from the handset desktop or just via another application? What…
