Ahead of the public launch of Lumia in Indonesia on February 17, Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace has expanded to five additional countries including Indonesia as of today. Just last month, the Redmond giant added six countries to the App Hub so developers could prepare their apps for distribution in those countries. The five countries are Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, The Philippines, and Argentina, bringing the number of Marketplace availability to 40 countries.
Among the six countries recently introduced to the App Hub, China is the only one not included in this expansion but developers are still welcomed to submit their applications. What is holding back China is unclear although one could speculate that Microsoft may still be working on the legalities and paperworks in order to allow developers to make their apps available to Chinese consumers.
Three Indonesian Developers Among Global Finalists of Nokia’s Create 4 Millions Competition
The three finalists are Mico Wendy with Baby Write Numbers in the Access to Knowledge category, Kemas Dimas with his TransJakarta S40 in the In the Know category, and Agate Studio with Urban Fatburner Macho in the Fun and Games category. The winner’s announcements will be held during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month.
Previously Nokia Indonesia held a similar event on the national level and two of the winners there went on to the global competition. The prizes to be won on the global competition are €50,000, promotional drives in various Nokia channels, and complementary consultation on user experience from Nokia and a number of design agencies.
Create 4 Millions was a competition specifically held for the S40 platform which recently sold its 1.5 billionth unit since it was first launched in 1999. In total, the S40 platform controls a quarter of the downloads from the Ovi/Nokia Store. The competition was also held in national and regional levels in 10 countries and attracted more than 1300 participants.