Developers in India have a moment to rejoice. Facebook has announced, that it has rolled out benefits amounting to $20 million under its rather unknown FBStart initiative. Through FBStart, Facebook provides enterprise grade tools to mobile devs in startups by partnering with over 25 brands across the globe.
The FBStart initiative, which was formally kick started last year, provides startups with an exclusive community, access to worldwide events, and mentorship from Facebook. The program has already deployed free tools and services to developers worth $50 million in the Asia Pacific region.
Developers are an important part of our ecosystem. We have grown from a small size and we know the hurdles that developers can face while developing products.
Facebook Director Product Platform Partnerships Ime Archibong told PTI.
Out of the total $50 million in benefits distributed in the Asia Pacific region, Facebook has given away more than $20 million to startups in India alone.
Among the beneficiaries are Delhi-based app Cardback and Hyderabad’s Samosa, which offers a collection of clips from popular movies.
India has the highest number of developers under the FBStart program, making it the largest market outside of US. Developers in India have been developing apps which have generated huge amounts of revenue, 75 percent of which are integrated with Facebook.
In Asia, Facebook has more than 1,000 members as part of the FBStart programme. To promote this initiative, Facebook began a ‘FBStart World Tour’ event across 20 cities, in order to interact with the mobile developers spread across the world.
Cities such as London, New York, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Seoul and Taipei were part of this tour. In India, it will be hosting these events in Bangalore and Gurgaon.
With millions of people still not yet connected to the Internet in India and around the world, there is a huge opportunity for mobile developers to build some of the first experiences people have with the Internet,
he said.
Facebook believes that through programmes like FbStart and the controversial Internet.org, it has provided a nurturing ecosystem to developers and start-ups. Through this initiative, the company is aiming to demonstrate the outreach capabilities of the internet, in which the mobile applications play a crucial role.
On developers front though, this a a huge bonus, considering they get direct access to some rather expensive enterprise-grade mobile app building tools, from companies including the likes of Adobe, Github, hootsuite etc.
