FierceDeveloper spoke to with Nokia’s Senior Vice President of Developer Experience and Marketplace Marco Agrenti about their Windows Phone developer initiatives, and Marco revealed the company has already given away 17,000 out of a promised 25,000 Nokia Lumia handsets to developers to stimulate the growth of Marketplace.

He also said Nokia has held or will be holding about 600 developer events worldwide from January through June this year, with more than 100 developer events for Windows Phone in North America alone. He said Nokia had hundreds of people with local offices in several countries fully dedicated to developer support.

Marco said Nokia’s focus was locally relevant apps by which he meant  apps that are catering to specific users, specific brands, specific contexts that are unique locally. He was also looking for apps which leverage the unique features of the Windows Phone platform, like Live Tiles.

In terms of monetizing apps he noted that  Nokia had operator billing support with 146 operators in 50 markets and that this increased monetization and conversion rate by 300 to 500 percent.

Read more about Nokia’s Developer Initiatives at FierceDeveloper here.