Organized by Apstrak Studio, a partner in Thailand, BlackBerry Jam Sessions Thailand provides Thai developers in Bangkok and Chiangmai insights into app development for BlackBerry® 10 platform — its strengths, vision, and how to make BlackBerry apps that stand out and get downloaded. Join us as Justin Lee (@triplez82), BlackBerry Application Development Consultant, and Johan Kremer, Senior Manager, Alliances and Business Development from Research In Motion® (RIM®), tell you more about BlackBerry 10 and how to make money on the platform.

Jam Chiangmai
Tuesday September 18, 2012
18.00 – 22.00
Centara Duangtawan Hotel
Registration: http://www.blackberryjamthailand2012.com/blackberry-jam-thailand-2012-chiangmai/

Jam Bangkok (SOLD OUT!)
Wednesday September 19, 2012
18.00 – 22.00
Dusit Thani Hotel

Following hot on the heels of the Thailand sessions, there are two more mini BlackBerry 10 Jam sessions in Vietnam, organized by BlackBerry Dev Group Viet Nam. Happening in Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi, the Jam Sessions bring to Vietnam developers a localized version of the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour series. Vietnam developers will hear from Justin Lee at these events too. To register, send your details to the group’s manager Louis Tang at louis.keeper@gmail.com! For more details, check out BlackBerry Dev Group Viet Nam’s post here: http://blackberryvietnam.net/threads/blackberry-10-mini-jam-viet-nam-2012.12427/

Ho Chi Minh City
Thursday Sep 20, 2012
6pm-10pm
Café Tinh Tế, Hồ Chí Minh

Hanoi
Friday Sep 21, 2012
6pm-10pm
Café Amigo, Hà Nội

And that’s not all! We’re not forgetting our dear friends in Indonesia. BBDevID is holding a series of BlackBerry 10 Jam Sessions in Indonesia! Named “BlackBerry 10 Mini Jam Indonesia,” the series also brings snippets from BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour to the Indonesian developers in six cities. They have already kicked off the first event last weekend in Yogyakarta and there’s more to come. Look out for the BBDevID and RIM troop in the following cities and dates:

Saturday September 16 – Yogjakarta
Tuesday September 18 – Semarang
Saturday September 22 – Malang
Tuesday October 2 – Bandung
Saturday October 6 – Denpasar Bali
Monday October 8 – Jakarta

For more details: http://bbdevid.tumblr.com/post/31129297043/bb10minijam

It’s non-stop action here in Asia, and the developers simply can’t get enough. If you’re in the region in the cities above, you must not miss the action here!

The event was held Cinnamon Lakeside, Colombo on August 3rd. Over 100 developers gathered at the venue even before registration for the Jam Session started!

To kick start the day, Navin Pieris (General Manager, Mobile Business and Broadband, Dialog) welcomed the developers and the RIM® team. Hitesh Shah (Director, Channel Accounts, RIM India) charmed the developer audience with the possibilities of BlackBerry® 10 as a platform and RIM’s commitment to it.

Next, BlackBerry Developer Evangelist Prakash Sainani took over the stage with a session on BlackBerry 10 architecture. He then introduced Chamikara Jayawardana (BlackBerry Product Manager, Dialog) who announced the launch of a BlackBerry Developer Group for Sri Lanka.

Chamikara shared his plans of making the newly-formed Sri Lanka BlackBerry Developer Group a success with regular meetups, activities around BlackBerry 10, and Dialog’s commitment towards BlackBerry. Hitesh took to stage again with BlackBerry App World™, telling developers about its reach and how developers generate revenue through BlackBerry App World as well as working with the carrier.

After lunch, Dilip Sridhar of Unvired delivered the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ and Native Development sessions. Kalana Meth, an 18-year-old developer, had an app up and running on a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device he received in Orlando at BlackBerry 10 Jam. He demoed the app – which provided tips for treating common ailments and first aid – to the awed crowd.

Last but not least, the Lightning Pitches contest towards the end of the lunch saw over 20 participants present their ideas. The “food locator” idea was judged best by Prakash and Sashimaal Fernando (Manager, Mobile Business, Dialog).

At the end of the day, there were loads of giveaways for the attendees. It was indeed an amazing day and was well-received by the developer community. The first ever Sri Lanka BlackBerry Jam Session was a hit and we look forward to amazing apps from the Sri Lankan developers!

BlackBerry Jam Americas – Sept 25-27, San Jose CA
BlackBerry® Jam Americas 2012 is a showcase for the bold, new direction BlackBerry is heading with the upcoming BlackBerry® 10 platform. The event attracts developers and industry leaders who understand the power of BlackBerry and want to build their success with the platform. Whether you’re a Native, Web, or Android™ developer, don’t miss this opportunity to explore the powerful, game-changing BlackBerry 10 platform.

Join us, September 25-27 in San Jose, California. Register by the August 31 Early Bird Deadline for some incredible savings.

It feels like the BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour stop in Beijing just happened yesterday. Over 300 developers attended at the Grand Millennium hotel on July 6th, including those who made the effort to travel all the way from Korea and Singapore. I would like to extend a special thanks to Bill Jiang, Junyi Ding and the rest of my colleagues from RIM China’s Technical Solutions Management team for making this event a great success.

The event in China was unlike any other, as the RIM team worked hard to localize the content and demos for our Chinese developers.

The event was kicked off by Daniel Tan, Sales VP of RIM Greater China, who drew long applause from the crowd when he said, “The future of BlackBerry 10 in China is in your hands!” It was definitely the highlight of his speech.

Some of you have probably heard of Alec Saunders’ presentation style. Watching his performance for the first time was really something — you could feel the energy and the excitement skyrocket in the room as Alec rocked the crowd. Developers further expressed their passion as they waited patiently for an opportunity to speak face to face, take pictures, and even request autographs!

For those who couldn’t wait to learn more about the BlackBerry 10 user experience, Bill Jiang’s presentation covered some interesting design principles, such as the new intelligent keyboard as well as the intuitive glancing gestures.

During the BlackBerry 10 Architecture session, Jonah Lin, MMMOOO’s CEO, showcased some new games built entirely in Cascades™ on a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha prototype device. The first game was a dice game that provided a fun and interactive way to deal with daily chores. The second one was my favorite, a Chinese Chimes instrument called Bian Zhong.  It beautifully mimics the ancient Chinese instrument experience at your fingertips. Jonah went further and even demonstrated some of his source code through the UI preview feature of the Cascade plugin on stage. Jonah and his team received lots of compliments.

MMMOOO has been one of the most active partners of RIM – they’ve developed over 300 apps and reached 50 million downloads in the BlackBerry App World™ storefront. Check out their apps if you haven’t already done so! I am sure you will find some apps to suit your needs.

The lightning pitches held during lunchtime were another highlight of the day. Each developer was given three minutes to present their apps and the audience voted for the best app. The winner would receive a BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, $500 voucher on ShopBlackBerry.com, and best of all, a free pass to BlackBerry Jam Asia! Most developers came fully prepared with slide decks and demos, while others sketched out their ideas on a piece of paper. It was also exciting see the participation coming from young university students who wanted to pitch their ideas. In the end, the lightning pitches were very well received, and the winner by people’s choice was PinBook, from S4BB which allows you to connect with people who have the same interests with you over BBM™.

The afternoon sessions had two parallel tracks. There was much interest in the Native Track presented by Alan Wong and Ramprasad Madhavan, and a sizeable number also attended the Web Track presented by Demian Borba and myself. Developers were extremely delighted to see the Cascades demos in the Native sessions. During session breaks, a few of them came to chat about ideas or apps they developed on other platforms. Developers were also thrilled by the power of BlackBerry® WebWorks™, especially the wide range of open source frameworks it allowed developers to build with, coupled with the smooth hardware-accelerated CSS animations and the ability to integrate with C/C++/Adobe AIR.

Next it was time to give away the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha devices, and a good event never ends without a bang! Yes, the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour Beijing ended with an exciting offer to the developers: Submit a BlackBerry 10 app before the official launch and RIM will swap the Dev Alpha device with a limited edition BlackBerry 10 device!

I hope the BlackBerry 10 Jam event and the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha devices will encourage the developers to produce some great apps for China and the world. I will certainly be sure to follow up and guide the developers should they need any help with their development.

I’d like to sign off by sharing several tweets from Weibo (a popular Chinese social media tool) with translations below. Go BlackBerry 10 developers!

After BB 10 JAM world tour Beijing, we have set up BB 10 Dev alpha discussion board. Provide alpha device test, software installation and usage discussion. Hope everyone can come and share…

Sharing after coming back from the Jam, so much surprise, the entire intro, sharing information showed RIM is confident to use BB10 to change the history, continue the success! Expecting RIM raise again and the perfect apps for BB10!

The BlackBerry® Developer Relations team gathered from all corners of the globe as the BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour hit Asia! It made me feel proud to have the opportunity to host the Jam events and be a part of such a diverse and dynamic team. Every area of the business showed up in full strength to demonstrate our relentless support for our developers.

Our BlackBerry 10 Jam journey started in India. We had worked hard to assemble a team of superstars from across the globe, yet the distances we traveled seemed nothing compared to the expanse our Indian developers covered just to get into our Jams in Bangalore and Delhi. Some came from neighboring cities, others flew in from different parts of the country, and others traveled by overnight train from hundreds of miles away. Before I could even express my gratitude for their perseverance, all I received in return was a heartfelt appreciation for bringing BlackBerry 10 Jam to India. It was simply heartwarming.

I officially kicked things off with a short welcome to a fully packed crowd who expressed their excitement through cheers, especially when they realized that they were part of the first Jams in Asia! After the waves of cheers settled, I welcomed Annie Mathews, Head of Alliances for India. Annie is well-known amongst the Indian developer community for her efforts within the content ecosystem. She re-affirmed RIM’s commitment to India, but especially highlighted the important contribution of thousands of Indian developers that have built and will continue to build applications for not just the local market, but the entire globe!

Alec Saunders then took the stage after an amazing number, and the energy in the room went nuclear! The echoes of hoots and cheers and non-stop applause during Alec’s keynote was simply deafening. It felt like I was at a political rally!

Next up was Krishnadeep Baruah, RIM India’s Head of Marketing, who took the devs through the BlackBerry 10 UX. To have RIM India’s most senior employee take the stage impressed many in the crowd. Krishnadeep was omeone who had witnessed RIM’s birth in India since 2007 and been a part of every BlackBerry device launch, as well as the various marketing campaigns. Despite being a veteran, he could barely contain his excitement for BlackBerry 10, and when he shared the new experiences and possibilities for developers, it was genuinely felt by everyone present.

Things switched into technical gear at this point with Alan Wong giving the audience a taste of the BlackBerry 10 architecture. It wasn’t just talk, as Alan showcased some interesting demos and samples including from various local developers like Divum, Indience, Spice Labs, DbyDx, who had the early opportunity to build their latest apps and games on the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha.

The final part of the keynote was all about the dollars and cents. This session on monetization opportunities was led by Krishna Tamireddy, who heads the BlackBerry App World™ Content Marketing team for APAC. The insights, trends and tactics he shared were very well received by the audience and came as a pleasant surprise to many who had been struggling to monetize on mobile platforms.

The lightning pitches saw an incredible response.  The winner by people’s choice was Infinite Appz who showcased an new version of their very popular Diary Pro App for BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets.

The afternoon tracks saw the crowd disperse into Web and Native to hear from our platform experts. On Native, we had Ramprasad Madhavan who flew in from Toronto to speak to devs for the first time in his hometown of Bangalore. On Web, AT&T hackathon winner Demian Borba came all the way from Brazil backed by our very own >Chris Saunders from Australia.

I had a chance to connect with many of the attendees. One of them was Chris Martin, a 14-year-old who had submitted an app and won a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet through our free BlackBerry PlayBook tablet offer. Being underage, he had managed to convince both his parents to accompany him for the Jam in Bangalore, and even the media and bloggers had a fun time finding out what motivated him to build apps for BlackBerry! It seems to me that India has this tendency to produce quite a few of such young prodigies. Delhi confirmed this notion: Raghav Sood, one of our BBM hackathon winners from last January, brought his dad along as well. In this case Raghav was not just an attendee for the Jam, but had managed to hack up a BlackBerry 10 Cascades™ app! He put several folks (like me) to shame when he demoed his Twitter® client with Alan on stage. The best part: he had only built it in the past 48 hours and had no prior knowledge of QML!

Overall, an excellent start to the tour that gave the entire BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour team the confidence to take on the rest of Asia. Thank you India! Until next time, keep building!

The team goes on to Jakarta and Sydney next.

Three of our BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour Asia Pacific stops sold out quicker than we expected – and we’re excited to re-open with more seats for Bangalore (July 2), Delhi (July 4), and Jakarta (July 10).

These spot sare still limited, so don’t wait any longer! Register now.

Don’t forget, we still have a few seats open for Beijing on Jul-6 and Sydney on Jul-12. If you’re a developer up-north or down under, head on over to the registration pages now!

Last week the BlackBerry® Developer Relations team was at GSMA’s Mobile Asia Expo 2012. This year the show debuted in Pudong, Shanghai for the first time, at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre (SNIEC) featuring operators, telcom brands, and of course the popular App Planet. Shanghai is quite a fascinating city with an interesting mix of modernity and ancient culture. Despite having the largest population on earth, things (including their metro) seem to move quite smoothly.

We were looking forward to meeting MMMOOO at the expo, but we weren’t expecting a special invitation for a visit to their headquarters from Jonah Lin, the CEO for MMMOOO. In case you haven’t heard of them before, let us rewind back to BlackBerry® DevCon Asia last year. MMMOOO won Top Achiever in BlackBerry App World™, and their latest count in BlackBerry App World sits at 375+ applications. We simply could not refuse the invitation as the team, and I was dying to figure out how many elves were coding away at the MMMOOO Innovation Workshop. We looked forward to observing their behaviour, monitoring their habits, and if we got lucky, extracting their DNA to take back with us. What ensued was quite a humbling experience for the RIM team:

As you walk in, the slogan “Enrich Your Mobility” greets you into the world of MMMOOO. The 500 square-metre space took the concept of open office to a new level with long rectangular tables of designers and developers facing each other. You could easily tell one from the other based on the tools and IDEs open on their screens. Several smiling heads turned and greeted the visitors, but the level of concentration within the one-room office space quickly became apparent as the team of thirty or so developers immediately immersed themselves back into their work.

A small ping-pong table in the middle of the room, although abandoned at the moment, showed signs of heavy use. On the left, a modest lounging area, with several photo frames on the wall of various MMMOOO milestones (including BlackBerry DevCon Asia and the recent CHINICT hackathon). As they also sponsor D-Starine, a charity that serves Tibet and Qinghai province, he had every reason to be proud of showcasing their invaluable social contribution. Knowing Jonah and his team, they might even whip up an app to encourage the same.

Jonah introduced us to the rest of his team. They had folks dedicated on BlackBerry® WebWorks™ and HTML5 as well Native and Qt. They told us that they were glad we were supporting the Qt community, and were particularly excited about Cascades™ for its charming UI. There was no shortage of mobile devices on their desks, but the BlackBerry® 10 Dev Alpha was the only rarity, which they were fortunate enough to get at BlackBerry 10 Jam.

The conversation became more casual, and the RIM team went on to share some of their favourite MMMOOO apps ever built (my personal favorite is their BBM GIF Avatar creator), and we got a glimpse of some of the exciting new stuff that they were working on for BlackBerry 10 that I can’t share here yet.

Time flies when you’re with other developers. We had to start heading back, but of course there’s always time for a group picture. It’s quite fitting but paradoxical that the team deployed itself and posed in front of their Wall of Fame. Perhaps this very photograph might end up on that wall as well.

CHINICT is one of China’s largest tech innovation & entrepreneurship conferences. This 8th edition the conference officially starts on May 24th, but the doors opened a day early for the dozens of developers and designers competing for a chance to pitch alongside high-profile early-stage startups a the conference.

Franck Nazikian, the Founder of CHINICT kicked things off with platform sessions from Pearson who talked about their content APIs that offered applications free access to premium content. Everything from Jamie Oliver’s recipes to exclusive travel guides was opened up to participants to integrate into their applications. It was also quite refreshing to see the UN World Food Programme as a main supporter of the event promoting the message of Hackers Against Hunger to enhance hunger awareness in China and throughout the world.

On his first trip ever to China, Alec Saunders was up next to provide the final inspiration and encouragement to developers for the next 24 hours. Mike Zhou from the RIM China team then took the participants into a deeper dive into their platform options for building amazing applications on BlackBerry. The room erupted into excitement when they heard Mike mention the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ prize for all participants. Several came up to me and the team just to check if they had heard it correctly.

Historians say that the Chinese worked on the Great Wall for over 1700 years. It is the longest fortification ever built in history and has left its mark on not just China, but the world. As I sign off it’s hard not to notice the air of dedication and focus in the room as these developers work against time to make their mark on the world.

Alec will be speaking during the main conference as well and you can watch his interview live at 2:30 am UTC.(10:30 am EDT) at the CHINICT website.

Winners of the Hackathon will also get front seats to the BlackBerry Jam World Tour in Beijing on July 6th.

Great people may be able to do great things – but great developers under one roof can achieve even more!

We’re thrilled to be a part of the Great Indian Developer Summit in Bangalore, India on April 17-20, 2012. We’ve got some exciting BlackBerry® Jam sessions, social media contests, and cool giveaways planned to keep developers happy throughout the event. Look for us on all the .Web, .Java and .Workshop days. Check out our speakers and their sessions at the event to learn more:

• Sarim Aziz
• Alan Wong
• Christopher Saunders

BYOSC (Bring Your Own Source Code), come by our booth to meet our speakers, and learn how you can get a BlackBerry® PlayBook tablet to start building right away!

Register now for GIDS 2012.

Can’t make it to GIDS 2012? Check out our events page for a BlackBerry Developer event near you.

We are excited to partner with e27 as a premier sponsor for their Echelon 2012 startup events. e27 is a media organization that focuses on the Asian technology startup community. As part of the partnership, we will be supporting winners with BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets and BlackBerry® smartphones as prizes. Winning startups will also be eligible for free membership into the BlackBerry Alliance Program that will provide additional business and marketing opportunities to help them succeed.

Several representatives from RIM® Developer Relations will be participating at these events to connect with these budding developers, and to provide feedback to these companies. Some veterans from the BlackBerry partner community will also be speaking at the Echelon 2012′s upcoming Satellites to showcase their success on mobile. Join us on the following dates to see some of the most promising startups near you:

Echelon Satellite Events

• Singapore, Singapore – 14 April
• Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – 17 April
• Taipei, Taiwan – 24 April
• Tokyo, Japan – 26-27 April

After the satellite events, the main Echelon 2012 event will be held in Singapore on June 11-12. This promises to be an exciting event that brings together the top brass of the tech industry from various parts of the startup eco-system to facilitate discussion on the hot topics in the web and mobile startup scene. Check out the Echelon 2012 website for more details on the satellites.

If you’ve managed to get your hands on a BlackBerry® smartphone running BlackBerry® 6 (or a simulator of one), one of the first things you may have noticed is the new Home Screen interface. The new slider panes like Favorites and Frequent aren’t just fun to play with, but make it really easy for users to find their most frequently-used applications.

However, the best timesaver of all is the Unified Search framework, which is built right into the interface. Simply tap on the Search icon on the top right to bring up the Search field – or better yet, simply start typing directly on the home screen – and the search field will appear and populate automatically. With Unified Search, a user’s hunting days are over. Just start typing the name of the app on the home screen and the results will filter as they type.

Here’s an example of how I found and launched my “Hello World” app:

Now you might have noticed the additional Search Options within the last screenshot, such as “Search YouTube” and “Search BlackBerry App World™”. These are what we like to call External Search Providers, and luckily for us, the BlackBerry Unified Search API allows any application to register itself as an External Search Provider. In a lot of cases, your application might already have a remote search service accessible over the web or a built-in search engine. By simply implementing the ExternalSearchProvider interface, your application can register and place its own customized icon within the Unified Search Framework. Once the user clicks on your icon, your application gets passed to the search query from the home screen, and it can then perform the search operation in its own way seamlessly. This is what we call Click-To-Search integration, and it’s perfect for search operations that are expensive or might take a while to complete.

The most important thing to remember when implementing the ExternalSearchProvider is to decide what type of content type(s) it will be searching. It is important to specify meaningful and relevant content types as this will directly impact where your application’s search icon appear(s) on the device. In addition, this will assist other third party clients using the Unified Search framework to provide relevant search options from within their applications. If relevant, feel free to combine multiple content types using bitwise parameters.

For example, a music store application should specify its’ content type as CONTENT_TYPE_MEDIA_MUSIC to ensure that its Search icon appears within the music library. Additionally, this allows other applications on the BlackBerry smartphone (like a radio player, perhaps) to query the Unified Search framework for a list of registered music search providers, so that it can extend additional capability (like purchasing) to those applications. This will be covered in more depth in a later post.

Here’s an example of how a music store with its own remote search engine could integrate using the ExternalSearchProvider interface:

Here’s the Documentation and Code Sample for ExternalSearchProvider.

If you’ve had a chance to try developing with the ExternalSearchProvider, we’d like to hear about it. What have your experiences been like?