Here’s Rich from our Enterprise Mobility Architect team reporting on the recent BlackBerry® Dev Day and Hackathon in Washington, D.C.!

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to welcome a group of developers to the DC office of Research In Motion® (RIM®) for a BlackBerry Dev Day and Hackathon focused on HTML5. We had a great turnout for the full day event, with attendees from federal government agencies, government contractors, and intergovernmental organizations in the Beltway region. Developer skill levels also varied greatly in terms of previous coding experience. Many had never worked web technologies before and were surprised at how easy it was to code using the HTML5 and BlackBerry® WebWorks™ tooling. Participant Darrion Beckles, a contractor for the NIH, said, “I definitely want to learn more about programming! I’m interested in it now – now that I’ve gotten to meet some other programmers.”

I started the day by giving an overview on developing BlackBerry applications, and I didn’t neglect to mention the continued growth of the BlackBerry App World™ storefront over the past year. I also talked about the importance of HTML5 in building cross-platform experiences for both the BlackBerry® 7 OS and BlackBerry® 10 platforms. The Hackathon was a great opportunity for the attendees to gain some hands-on coding experience with tools such as BlackBerry WebWorks, bbui.js, AliceJS, the Ripple emulator, and BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets.

I was very impressed by the apps the various teams were able to produce in just one afternoon! Considering again how many participants were working with bbUI.js for the first time, the developers seemed comfortable with the tooling. They were excited to present their apps, which included one that allowed you to challenge and compete against other BlackBerry users to become the “Titan-Berry” or the “Wack-Berry.”

Our winning team was from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), who used bbUI.js (with no previous experience) to build a GPS-based app that displayed the air quality index. “It gives the air quality for today, tomorrow, and the day after…so that [users] can decide whether to stay indoors and what activities to do,” said Desmond Andrades, a member of the winning team.

The winning app!

In the end, I definitely thought the day flew by, and it was a good balance of high productivity mixed in with lots of fun moments. It is exciting to see the enterprise developer community in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area diving into our latest tooling, and I look forward to seeing more custom apps in the future!

RIM Team and the winning app developers! From left to right: Rich Balsewich, John Mutter, Deepak Srivastava, Desmond Andrades, Hyunjun Jung

Guest post from Chris Saunders – Ed.

Wrapping up the Asia-Pacific leg of the 2012 BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour has left many of us with bittersweet feelings. It’s been an incredible experience to meet so many excited and accomplished developers across the region, to visit new cultures, and to see new sights. For me, it has been especially rewarding to host the final stop in the region out of my home base here in Australia.

For our experts who travelled across the world to arrive in region – the two weeks of trips, multiple red-eye flights, late nights and early mornings – everyone still had their enthusiasm and energy like it was the first stop. Pre-registrations for the Sydney stop took up every available seat, and the excitement and interest was palpable. For many in attendance, they had not had the chance to see the new direction BlackBerry® is undertaking and the exciting new features of the BlackBerry® 10 experience. It was also a great opportunity for them to see the work their peers are actively doing with the platform, and vicariously live through that excitement until they were able to get their hands on their very own BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device later in the day.

The obvious highlight for me was the privilege of having several local developers join me on stage during the technical keynote to discuss their developments. The Voxel Agents (of Train Conductor fame, @TheVoxelAgents) had a great demo and discussion around how easy it is to port existing content and leverage the power of the platform, thereby creating new channels for deploying their games to a whole new global market. Gruden (@GrudenDigital) was able to show us how easy it was to create high-profile, compelling applications on-time and in-budget with the Adobe® AIR® runtime, and we discussed the ease of targeting the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ with their fully integrated news and video portal for Fox Sports. But I have to admit it was Conduct (@conduct) who stole the show and wowed those in attendance with a real-time demo of an application they created to push the limits of the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device. You really need to see it to understand it, but in a nutshell it parses a feed of tweets in real time, and creates a visual display of this information based on the paths that particles take from various keywords (each particle is a tweet and there are emitters that push particles out, and attractors that the particles are drawn to). You can add, delete, drag and move both emitters and attractors, and all particles on the screen are gravitationally pulled towards where they need to be. It makes for a fascinating visualization of an immense amount of data and the subsequent relationships.

The demo was written using the new GamePlay initiative, which is an Open Source library designed to allow users to create visually compelling games and applications that stretch the capabilities of mobile devices (http://www.gameplay3d.org/). And for this demo, it worked wonders — such an incredible way of visualizing the data-mining of a real-time feed, and determining non-obvious and emerging patterns within a massive data set. Exactly the kind of work that would make Edward Tufte (@EdwardTufte) proud!

On behalf of everyone from RIM® in attendance, it was our pleasure to host and share with you the direction that BlackBerry is heading. To finish, I would just like to say thank you for joining us and being a part of such an exciting series of events across the region. We’re all eager to get back on the road, and see you again soon.

All the Best,
Christopher Saunders (@csaunders_ca)
Developer Relations, Australia and New Zealand

The BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour arrived in Dubai today, attracting just over 100 developers from across the Middle East region and providing them with the opportunity to learn more about the unique capabilities of the new BlackBerry 10 OS.

Sandeep Saihgal, Managing Director, Middle East at RIM®, said: “We are proud of our strong connections with the talented community of developers in the Middle East region and believe this cooperation will be taken to the next level by the powerful programming tools that BlackBerry 10 offers.”

Mohamed Ali, Co-CEO of developer partner ZeroWire Labs, said: “There is growing excitement in our company for BlackBerry 10. We have already experienced great success with the launch of our BlackBerry apps in this region, and with the growth in demand for Arabic apps and the high penetration of BlackBerry smartphones in the Middle East, we expect BlackBerry 10 to create a significant opportunity for developers.”

Some of the tweets from the day:

Wonderful event @BlackBerry Jam dubai #bb10jam—
Jesse J Ode (@TechCircleDxb) July 10, 2012

Queue of devs waiting to get their hands on the dev BB10 device… #BB10Jam http://t.co/74hhDgXF—
M.Saleh Esmaeili (@dot1ne) July 10, 2012

You can build a more beautiful UI with @BlackBerry 10 Cascades UI elements. #bb10jam #Dubai @BlackBerryDev—
Maher Al Jendasi (@maherj) July 10, 2012

And some additional quotes from developers at the event:

Aman Ali from Insomniac Dev: “BlackBerry10 means everything to me right now! The keyboard and the camera will exceed all other platforms. BlackBerry 10 will be absolutely massive! It’s something I’ve never seen before and I’m really looking forward to develop apps on!”

Kessienda D. Majemiif, Coo FastFindIt Solutions: “I think BlackBerry 10 is the future of user experience. BlackBerry 10 will make development faster and easier. I’m really looking forward to exploring and developing with the BB10 device! It is really going to add prestige to BlackBerry.”

Hamza Nasir, LiveAdmins: “I’ve been a BlackBerry hard-core fan since the inception. It’s not about the software, it’s not about the hardware…it’s the experience you get. BlackBerry10 will give developers a lot to work with. The cascade functionality and camera functionality is state of the art, plus more. I am looking forward to getting my hands on a BlackBerry 10 device!”

Here’s William from our BlackBerry Developer Relations team in EMEA to report on the most recent BlackBerry® 10 Jam tour stop! – Ed.

The London BlackBerry 10 Jam was our largest event to date, attracting developers looking to see what the BlackBerry 10 development tools are capable of. This was another great event to experience, as both the sheer number of developers and their positive attitudes alone were amazing. The venue, Vinopolis (a massive wine bar/conference center home-extension project bunker), was somewhat odd in its complex levels and floors and winding passages, but we didn’t lose one developer all day. They came, they saw, they enjoyed what they saw of BlackBerry 10 – now they want more!

Stephen Bates, Managing Director Europe, kicked off the proceedings with an excellent keynote job that covered all the points effortlessly and gave the day an energetic buzz that kept building after each presentation. Andy Tipton was our MC for the day and kept the flow going on schedule.

Vivek Bhardwaj presented a seamless “Experience of BlackBerry” presentation, generating ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the audience when they saw the demos of the photo correction app and new virtual keyboard UI. Michael Weitzel continued with an animated trek through the BlackBerry 10 architecture and was assisted by Luca Sale on the demo device showing Cascades™. Later, Nick Smith of Marmalade provided his magical demonstrations of games running on both a BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet and BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device.

Rana and Suavek both introduced what they were going to cover in the afternoon breakouts, and following their brief introductions we stopped for lunch and managed to move the almost 500 developers through the labyrinth to be fed and return for the lightning pitches.

The afternoon split into its native and web tracks, and we repeated the formula of Suavek being assisted by Nick from Marmalade. Yet again, this combination provided a lot of information and excitement. At the end of the day, we’d given out the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha prototype devices to a delighted audience of both new and established developers.This was another wildly successful day, and I was excited by the developer comments on Twitter®.

We generated a huge level of interest through this one-day event, but don’t take my word for it – take a look at what our developers are saying:

@BlackBerryDev I've already sat down to work on BB10 app today after yesterday's London #BB10Jam! Excited by range of development options!—
Kate Glover (@lifson) June 15, 2012

@Derrickerrol Surprisingly tiring! So much good information and guidance! With #BB10Jam BB are really showing they care about devs – I did!—
Julian Clark (@B1uehoo1igan) June 15, 2012

Yesterday's WebWorks session at #BB10Jam was awesome and even got my 14 year old inspired to create apps. @BlackBerryDev—
DJ Reyes  (@djr3yes) June 15, 2012

@ardiri I did, thanks to all the staff at #BB10Jam today! They sorted out us devs who are keen to get apps out. Appreciate this opportunity.—
Matt (@blackberry_matt) June 14, 2012

@blackberrydev I love using my BlackBerry dev alpha thanks to #BB10Jam thanks —
Ben Smith Bortey (@BensmithB) June 14, 2012

My BlackBerry 10 hands on fun. Pure sweetness! crackberry.com/hands-blackber… #BB10Jam—
James Richardson (@j4mes73) June 14, 2012

Next stop, New York City (sold out!) on Tuesday June 19th.

On June 12th, it was BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour stop #5, 300 meters a way from the fabulous Eiffel Tower.

We showed a technically engaged audience of developers what it was like to create apps on our new platform and what a bright future was in store for them all. The day was kicked off by Christophe Lefort, Research In Motion® (RIM®) France Managing Director, and was followed by great technical content presentations. Nick Smith from Marmalade showed how they ported several games over to both the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet and BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha.

There were developers in attendance not just from France, but also coming from overseas. Salma and Sana, both university professors from Tunisia, didn’t want to miss the BlackBerry 10 Jam day in Paris, as they are introducing BlackBerry development in their mobile computing course starting this September.

Lunchtime was a mix of need for food and great conversations, then back in to listen to the apps pitches with amazing energy in the room. There were 13 awesome lightning pitches – all the applications we saw were amazing. The audience voted for Romain Dubuc and his funny fluid innovative game Celluloid. Congratulations Romain!

There was a pretty even-steven split between the web and native tracks in the afternoon sessions. The great audience was completely attentive to what our presenters had to say, with each one trying to out do the other in level of applause.  We also presented guidelines, code snippets and did many live demos.

At the end of the day, we distributed the long awaited BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha devices and enjoyed those happy developer faces. I really enjoyed it being here in France and meeting a lot of new and already known faces. Thank you Paris, and thank you to all the great developers who jammed with us.

Registration for the BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour is now open for Bangalore, Delhi, Beijing, Singapore, Jakarta, and Montreal –

July 2 – Bangalore, India
July 4 – Delhi, India
July 6 – Beijing, China
July 9 – Singapore
July 10 – Jakarta, Indonesia
July 11 – Montreal, QC

We’re really excited about bringing the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour to these cities. For Montreal, we’re lucky to be in town during the International Startup Festival!

BlackBerry has added Montreal to their list of Int’l #bb10jam cities, to coincide with @startupfest.bit.ly/LvbzbA @asaunders

— Startup Festival (@startupfest) June 7, 2012

#BB10Jam. <– Go ahead, search for it on Twitter. Developers ARE excited for #BB10.

— CrackBerry.com (@CrackBerry) June 8, 2012

Head on over to the BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour page now to register.

[YouTube link for mobile viewing]

[YouTube link for mobile viewing]

We’ve just updated the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour page with new cities and dates.

A limited number of BlackBerry® 10 Dev Alpha devices will be available to qualified developers at each city in the World Tour. During the event registration process, apply to receive a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device, available only to developers attending BlackBerry 10 Jam. If you received a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device at a previous BlackBerry developer event, you do not qualify for this offer.

We’ll have more updates soon  - keep checking back here to the Inside BlackBerry Developers Blog.

From Kony Solutions’ press release:

“Kony Solutions, the leading mobile application development platform (MADP) provider, announced that it is one of the first mobile platform providers to support the new BlackBerry® 10 platform. Kony customers and partners can expand their mobile applications to support BlackBerry 10 users immediately, with just a few clicks of a button.
Kony’s flagship product is its KonyOne mobile enterprise application platform. Kony’s patent-pending “Write Once, Run Everywhere” technology enables developers to deploy their apps across more than 10,000 mobile smartphones/tablets/kiosks and operating systems from a single code base. All Kony applications can be delivered in native and mobile web (HTML5 and non-HTML5), across every mobile channel. Kony offers the mobile industry’s most comprehensive Service Level Agreement, ensuring support for new versions of existing platforms or OS within 30 days of code release, and within 90 days for any new device or OS.”

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]