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| Jayadev Gopalakrishnan and Anupam Varghese, Tinfo, Thiruvananthapuram |
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There are many challenges to developing games for mobiles. These include tight programming, using the best algorithms, optimizing available pixel area as well as knowing the quirks of numerous handsets.
So conventional thinking would have prompted Jayadev Gopalakrishnan and Anupam Varghese to opt for less complex models when they decided to start their own software firm. “We focused on innovative products from the very beginning. We took a conscious decision to create solutions that were truly innovative and not run-of-the-mill,” says Gopalakrishnan. In 2002, the company got an opportunity to develop mobile games for a European client and Anupam became the first Indian to develop mobile games on the Mophun platform.
There was no looking back after that. And their firm, Tinfo, formally launched in 2005, is already a rapidly growing multi-million dollar company. In 2004 they became the first team to port high end games to colour GSM mobiles. But perhaps the greatest achievement of the company was when it joined hands with Lunagames International to jointly develop ‘Truck Tycoon’. The game launched in 2005 received rave reviews and a rating of 8/10 on the leading mobile games industry website, Midlet Review.
But the 10-member team at Tinfo has not restricted its achievement to the gaming area. It won a special prize in the Reliance Infocomm-NASSCOM contest for ‘All-Minder’, an application that allowed visually impaired to hear missed calls and SMSs on their mobiles.
Besides, based on a rendering engine called ‘Vector Draw’ developed by the team, they produced an application ‘TeachMe Akshara’ which teaches users to read and write alphabets in local languages.
Gopalakrishnan and Varghese, who had earlier teamed up as vocalists for the school rock band, seem intent on producing more than just voice out of the mobiles.
Courtesy:
Anannya Nath, i.t, October 2006
Contributed by: Administrator
