We're in the New Straits Times

The NST's SME pullout ran a piece on Malaysian tech companies today, and Nerd Attack is in it.

Ow and I are in the New Straits Times today, in the SME pullout. Tanuja Rajah and Jonathan A. Victor wrote about Malaysian companies doing internet and mobile work, and our part runs under the headline “It’s an ‘app-ed out’ world”, with the photo of the two of us at our booth at Nokia Connection in June.

It goes back to the beginning. Nerd Attack started on 18 March last year, and our break came at a Nokia event in the second half of 2009, where developers were asked to send in ideas for apps. We spent a week on ours and sent it in without expecting much, and that’s how we started working with Nokia. Before that it was web design, which paid the bills, but mobile is what we always wanted to do.

Most of our projects are tied to product launches. When Nokia launched the N8 here, they wanted TV3 and 8TV catch-up apps on every N8 sold in Malaysia, and Media Prima came to us to build them.

Ow explains in the piece why we’d rather work with the phone makers than only sell in the Ovi Store. People here don’t like paying for apps, and piracy is a problem. To make it through the store alone you’d need something made for Malaysia, and Malaysia is too small … it would take an app the whole of the US wants. The store itself is growing fast … Nokia announced last month that Ovi Store is doing 3 million downloads a day.

We’re at capacity. To take on more work we need more designers and engineers, and people who know mobile are hard to find here. That’s why we take interns, and why we’ve been training Limkokwing students with Nokia, which is how we spot the good ones early.

The piece ends with Ow saying we’re focused on Nokia, but already experimenting with Android, and soon the iPhone. I was already wondering about the iPad back in June, so that one’s been on my mind for a while.