Here’s the second instalment of highlights from our panel discussion on the “Monetization of Mobile Apps” at the mBillionth Awards South Asia 2012, where our panelists - Dr. Abhinav Mathur (Spice Labs), Ashay Padwal (Vserv.mobi), Dev Khare (Lightspeed Ventures), Jonathan Bill (Vodafone India), and Rajiv Kumar (RockeTalk) , discussed issues related to monetization models, native apps vs web apps, and in-app ads, among others: Nikhil: So how do developers decide between Mobile apps versus Mobile web? Dev: My advice is to developers is - if you want to target feature phones, go mobile web, if you want to target smartphones, go for apps. Nikhil: But what about monetisation then? Dev: That should not be a key focus right now. If you look at models in the west, it is not advertising that is making money for people - it is in-app transactions. It's paying for an app, it's subscription. It's certainly not advertising. Advertising pays some bills. Abhinav: We have been seeing the blackberry ecosystem as a low hanging fruit, applications were there, and they were enterprise focused. The Blackberry ecosystem have been going down, and the consumers of our apps have asked us to put the app on the iPhone or Android. Now we're seeing healthy numbers on Android, not because we have been really great in terms of putting our apps on the app store, but the reason is that consumers who have used our app are seeking us out. Another thing that we have done is that we have gone and used facebook for distribution: we've put an app which is tied up to our device, on facebook,and ensured…
