Echelon 2013 is finally over after a month of nine Echelon satellite cities. More than 100 start-ups vied for the chance to be one of the ten to pitch to a panel of judges at the Echelon 2013 Launchpad event in Singapore on 6th to 7th June 2013. We got the chance to meet over 2,000 entrepreneurs across these nine Echelon satellite cities where our BlackBerry Developer Evangelists were busy briefing start-ups on the BlackBerry 10 platform.

Out of all the participating startups that pitched, only the best 50 were allowed to showcase their solution at Echelon 2013 Startup Marketplace. Several of these tops startups are now committed to building their apps for BlackBerry 10 and were showcased to over 1,300 attendees, investors and media who gathered at Echelon 2013 in Singapore. 12 of these notable start-ups include – Hotel Quickly, Fashtag, GigOut!, Anchanto, RichMediaAds, Cymbidium, LoveByte, PixBento, ChopInk, Carousell, viddsee and Atoma Medical.

Guess what? Atoma Medical with their health portal solution TanyaDok.com were one of the ten start-ups who got the chance to pitch at Echelon 2013 Launchpad! Not only that, Hotel Quickly launched their BlackBerry 10 app in the BlackBerry World on the same day as Echelon 2013!

In addition, four of our top BlackBerry start-ups across the region were invited to showcase their products at Echelon 2013 Tech Alley, where over 30 Echelon alumni start-ups, incubators, and startups in their growth stage were exhibiting to capture further partnership opportunities. These included - PicStory, Toresto, Soccer Ticker and Jagadtrack.

Look forward to seeing these amazing startups on the BlackBerry World in the next few months!

We love working with developers from all around the world and especially if they make cool games that we can play on our new BlackBerry 10 devices! Right after BlackBerry Jam Asia 2012, we had an amazing opportunity to work with incredibly talented game developers from the Asia Pacific Region. To give you an idea on the amount of travelling it took: 16 days, 8 cities, 39800 miles per head!  The best part was we found 260 happy game developers at the end of the trip.  The GotGame Port-a-thon event comprised of locations spanning six Asia Pacific countries including Thailand, Singapore, Australia, Indonesia, India, Hong Kong and China.  During these intense one-day events, we got a chance to work with some amazing talent from the gaming industry.  As a result, almost 800 high quality game titles were submitted over a span of just three weeks!

We would like to give a BIG Thank you to all the game developers who participated in these events and made GotGame Port-a-thon LIVE a huge success!

Developers set a new record for last weekend’s port-a-thons, and devs from APAC definitely contributed in great leaps: More than half of the apps submitted globally were coming out of Asia! We saw great submissions from India, China and the rest of this region.

On Saturday January 12th, hundreds of developers attended the offline Technical Support sessions in eight Asian countries. The sessions included coding, porting, discussions, eating and lots of fun. But most of all, they were about providing technical support to our developers.

In Indonesia, the local Android Community showed great interest for the Android Port-A-Thon, and we can’t wait to see more apps ported after the official launch of BlackBerry 10.

The registration to the Manila offline event went so well that PinoyBBDev community had to host sessions in two different venues. The PinoyBBDev event was such a cool gathering that the developers didn’t want to leave. Photos below from the PinoyBBDev event show that activities were very well-organized with lots of great food and music!

In Beijing, our China evangelist Mike Zhou didn’t sleep the night of January 11th because there were hundreds of questions asked on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) till morning. iiberry, a BlackBerry Developer community based in Beijing, helped to organize the session and provided great technical support by answering questions from developers online.

At the Shanghai session, CNBB Dev Group leader Jonah Lin (CEO of MMMOOO) provided technical support onsite, and Chinese game company finger2finger submitted 260 games! After their big submissions for the last Port-A-Thon, the China Flash Dev Community also managed to contribute a huge number of apps.

The below picture is one of the strategic games submitted last weekend:

MMMOOO’s Weibo tweets on the Port-A-Thon generated more than 5000 retweets and 4000 comments.

Photos below are from Shanghai Port-A-Thon event (courtesy of CNBBDev):

In India, there were also two separate offline Port-A-Thon tech support sessions held – one at Rubus Labs @ Start-up Village, and the other at SV University. Each session had very keen and enthusiastic developers who were really focused on the one goal for the day – to port all their apps onto the BlackBerry 10 platform!

This photo shows students busy coding in the India Port-a-thon Tech Support Session:

The Port-A-Thon series not only helped developers to start building for the BlackBerry 10 platform, but also got the attention of many regional mobile application companies. Mingdge Technology, a mobile app company, said on Weibo this week: “There was never a platform as generous to developers as BlackBerry 10 and helps startup developer make money. Looks like I will eventually give up on iOS, specialize on BlackBerry 10, RIM rock on!”

Special thanks goes to the awesome APAC BlackBerry Dev Groups for their support on the offline Port-A-Thon Technical Sessions: BBDevID, ID-Android Dev CNBBGroup, Rubus @ StartupVillage, iiberry, BBIndia,  BBVietnamand Pinoybbdev!

Look out for more from the developers here at the Last Chance Port-a-Thon this weekend!

“Port-A-Thon” is now a popular term among Asia Pacific developers. Developers have heard good stuff about BlackBerry GotGame virtual Port-a-thon in November, participated in the All-Aboard Port-a-thon on December, and then went nuts about the BlackBerry Got Game Port-A-Thon LIVE series that was held in eight cities in Asia Pacific.

When this weekend’s Port-A-Thons were announced, we got a really enthusiastic responses from APAC BlackBerry developer communities. They want to make sure quality apps will be ported, and a lot of them volunteered to host offline events across Asia to support developers to successfully port their apps. RIM Developer Evangelists, experienced BlackBerry developers and our BlackBerry Dev Group leaders will all be onsite all over Asia to support developers.

For the lucky developers who live in the below cities, be sure to pop by and get porting with us in the flesh!

Note: all date and times stated are based on local cities’ timezone.

China

Beijing – Pre Port-a-Thon tech seminar

(Organized by Iberry dev group)

Date/Time: January 11, 6:00PM to 9:00PM

Location: Monica’s café (北京市朝阳区大望路万达广场4号楼806)

Registration and more details:
http://bit.ly/13j6bRw

Beijing – Android to BlackBerry Port-a-Thon Tech Seminar

(In collaboration with Iberry dev group)

Date/Time: 12^th 10:00AM to 1:00PM

Location: Monica’s café (北京市朝阳区大望路万达广场4号楼806)

Registration and more details:
http://bit.ly/13j6bRw

Shanghai – Android to BlackBerry Port-a-Thon tech seminar

(organized by CNBBDevGroup, China)

Date/Time: January 12, 10:00AM to 1:00PM

Location: 上海市杨浦区淞沪路270号创智天地广场(KIC)3号楼B1层InnoSpace

Registration and more details:
http://bit.ly/13j5kjB

India

Kochi, Kerala – Android Port-A-Thon for BlackBerry 10 Tech Support

(organized by Rubus Labs at Start-up Village)

Date/Time: January 12, 09:30AM onwards

Location: Rubus Labs, Startup Village, Kinfra High Tech Park, Kalamassery, Kochi-683503, Kerala

Enathur Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu – Android Port-A-Thon for BlackBerry 10 Tech Support

(organized by SCSVMV BlackBerry Developer Group)

Date/Time: January 12, 09:30AM onwards

Location: SCSVMV University, Dept. of CSE, SCSVMV University, Enathur Kanchipuram-631561,

Indonesia

Jakarta – BlackBerry 10 Android Port-a-Thon live Support

(In collaboration with ID Android and BBDevID)

Date/time: January 12, 10.00AM to 8.00PM

Location: Mercantile Athletic Club, Penthouse Floor (18th floor), World Trade Center 1, Jl. Jenderal Sudirman Kav. 31 Jakarta 12920

Registration and more details:
http://bit.ly/13iJblF

Philippines

Manila – PinoyBBDev Port-a-thon Meetup

(organized by PinoyBBDev, in conjunction with Globe, Android and Web Communities)

Date/Time: January 12, 8:00AM to 6:00PM

Location: Globe Valero, Makati City

Registration and more details: 
http://bit.ly/13iLIvX

Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh – BlackBerry 10 Portathon Live Support Session

(organized by BlackBerry Developer Group – Vietnam)

Date/Time: January 11 & 12, 9:00AM to 8:00PM

Location: Cafe Dâu: 1E Nguyễn Văn Thủ, F. Dakao, Quận 1, T/P HCM.

More details: 
http://bit.ly/13iMMA9

Singapore

BlackBerry 10 Porting Clinic in Singapore

(In collaboration with PlugFest organizers)

Date/Time: January 12, 10:00AM to 6:00PM

Location: “Green Room” in Plug-in@BLK71

More details: 
http://bit.ly/VTUbzw

Last weekend was a smashing weekend for developers in Asia Pacific – almost 500 developers in India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Philippines got together and hacked their way through Friday evening to Sunday morning!

Yes, I am talking about BlackBerry® JamHack 2012, the first simultaneous Asia-Pacific-wide 40-hour BlackBerry hackathon. This weekend’s five simultaneous JamHack events were organized by Rubus Labs DevGroup (Bangalore), BlackBerry Developer Group India (Delhi), BBMYCoders (Kuala Lumpur), and PinoyBBDev and BBDevSG (Singapore)! While the 500 JamHackers were hacking in five different cities, their spirit and goal was admirably unanimous – hacking their way to the best app on BlackBerry® 10.

On Friday evening, participants started their 40-hour with registrations, networking and a series of RIM® -designed sessions, including local market insights session called “Country Vibes”, a “JamBytes” session on BlackBerry 10 design and user experience, and an introduction to the Built for BlackBerry program and the 10K Developer Commitment.

Each developer group helped participants to help form teams to ensure the best-rounded pitch on Sunday.

The hackathon started around midnight, and the dev groups had planned various icebreaker activities to wake up their contestants. If I had to pick my favorite icebreaker, it’d be the BBMYCoders Gangnam Style kickoff! Check out the video:

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

A great start is always important, but what’s better than that? Solid support and non-stop energizing activities to keep awake! Throughout the 40 hours, developer group leaders, co-managers, partners, business development teams and RIM Developer Relations were present to motivate and help our hackers. But it didn’t end at that: Our experts in RIM Canada didn’t want to feel left out, so they offered virtual help-desk hours for our hackers through Twitter® (#BBJamHelp) which saw over a hundred questions and tweets! Special thanks to @Naveenan5, @PratikSapra, @RSSessantotto, and @WaterlooErik for staying up through the weekend to support our APAC developers.

Other than providing support, the developer group managers were also busy keeping the teams entertained (and awake)! If the participants were bored of coding, needed a breather, or just wanted an excuse to have fun, there were exciting activities that kept them up. Let’s take a look at what tactics were used by our group leaders to keep their participants awake:

Massage Corner by PinoyBBDev
Tired from hacking? Teams in Philippines were rewarded by one of the best break activities they can get – a spa treatment onsite!

Quiztions by PinoyBBDev
Quizzes are fun, and even more so when they are done over Twitter. PinoyBBDev planned a social media quiz with small giveaways for the quiztion winners.

Pen in Bottle by BBMYCoders
While the Pinoy Devs were busy getting massages, the KL JamHackers were tasked by BBMYCoders team to complete a task — but what are they doing?

Photo courtesy of BBMyCoders

The deal is that they had to untie a pen from their back and drop the pen into a bottle behind them, with a paper bag over their head. Sounds fun and simple, but they were definitely trying hard to get the special prizes given out!

Some other fun activities:

Game on at the Gamezones

Best DJ

Singing Competition on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet

Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games — the teams had to work hard on getting the apps done within the 40 hours, and their hard work and efforts were all worth it! It absolutely showed during the pitching sessions – more than 100 apps were showcased across the five cities. Here were the teams from the pitches and their winning apps:

Bangalore, India

Winner: Team QEDGE
App: Story Board, a presentation and slides creation HTML application on BlackBerry 10

Delhi, India

Winner: Team Fukraaas
App: UnTANGLED, a complex puzzle game built with HTML on BlackBerry 10

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Winner: Team Websmith ATP
App: 1BB, an augmented reality application on BlackBerry 10
For more event highlights, check out BBMYCoders’ post:
http://bit.ly/BBMYCodersJamHack

Manila, the Philippines

Winner: Team Rain Creative
App: Realm of Elysium, a strategy game inspired by Battleship

Singapore

Winner: Tiam Yang, Tyler Projects Ptd Ltd
App: Drop Zone, a HTML game on BlackBerry 10

All in all, the participants had loads of fun, were rewarded with giveaways, and walked away with awesome prizes even if they didn’t win. Teams walked away with a bag of great goodies such as water bottles, t-shirts, stickers, and more. Also, all participants who attended BlackBerry JamHack received a BlackBerry JamHack rewards badge on BlackBerry JamZone as well as a free pass to BlackBerry Jam Asia 2012 in Thailand! Spirits were definitely sky high when the events ended and everyone walked away a winner.

This series of JamHacks would not have been possible without the BlackBerry developer groups. To find out more about the developer groups behind the scenes of the awesome JamHacks, check out:

• Bangalore: Rubus Labs DevGroup
• Delhi: BlackBerry Developer Group India
• Kuala Lumpur: BBMYCoders
• Manila: PinoyBBDev
• Singapore: BBDevSG

Registration for the next five cities is still open – so don’t miss your chance to be jammin’ with us on October 19-21 (5-city simultaneous hacks):

• Indonesia – Jakarta by BBDevID
• Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City by BlackBerry Viet Nam Dev Group
• Thailand – Bangkok by @BBDevThailand
• China – Shanghai by CNBBDev
• Australia – Melbourne

All ten winners from BlackBerry JamHack city events will be walking away with an all-expenses paid trip to the BlackBerry Jam Asia in Bangkok, where they will be vying with nine other teams to be crowned Asia Pacific champions and receive the grand prize of an all-expenses paid trip to BlackBerry 10 global launch, amongst other great prizes!

Follow the hashtag #BBJamHack to find out more about the JamHack events – here are some tweets we were pretty proud to see:

Interested to learn more about some program or events mentioned above? Click to learn more about:

• BlackBerry JamHack 2012
• BlackBerry Jam Asia 2012
• How to form a Developer Group in your region
• BlackBerry Jam Rewards program

Be a part of the first simultaneous Asia-Pacific-wide BlackBerry® hackathon! Hack your way through 40 hours of non-stop coding. From ideation to creation, together with our experts, make it all app-en to win cash, devices, trips and more. Indulge on an endless supply of food, drinks, activities and giveaways. Go head-to-head in ten major cities and advance to BlackBerry Jam Asia 2012 to represent your team and country. Whether you are an experienced or aspiring developer, designer or an entrepreneur, you can bring your skills and ideas to turn your ideas into reality. It’s going to be a blast!

Organised by ten Developer Groups & Communities in Asia Pacific, each 40-hour JamHack event will provide an opportunity for four-member teams of developers, designers, marketeers, entrepreneurs to work on an awesome app for BlackBerry 10.  To ensure that each team is properly equipped for the challenge, RIM is providing round-the-clock Global Technical Helpdesk support, by the tech experts from Developer Relations Asia Pacific team onsite, as well as platform experts streaming live from North America.

Don’t miss the great opportunity to hack with the subject-matter experts and fellow brilliant minds, across continents! On each weekend, there will be five simultaneous JamHack events happening:

Jammin’ on Oct 12-14 (5-city simultaneous Hacks):

• India – Delhi (by @skjsaurabh)
• India – Bangalore (by Rubus Labs DevGroup)
• Singapore (by @BBDevSG)
• Malaysia – Kuala Lumpur (by @BBMYCoders)
• Philippines – Manila (by @PinoyBBDev)

Jammin’ on Oct 19-21 (5-city simultaneous Hacks):

• Indonesia – Jakarta (by @BBDevID)
• Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City (by @Louis_Keeper)
• Thailand – Bangkok (by @BBDevThailand)
• China – Shanghai (@immmooo)
• Australia – Melbourne (@csaunders_ca)

Over each of the weekend events, RIM will also be sharing market insights tailored to the respective cities so developers can develop market-relevant applications. Beyond that, the two days will also include sharing sessions aptly named as JamBytes. During these sessions, participants will have the chance to understand in-depth developmental tips and tricks on BlackBerry 10 platform, how to enhance their BlackBerry 10 applications, as well as go to market strategies for their new apps.

The ten winning teams from the JamHack events will receive an all-expense paid trip to BlackBerry Jam Asia, where you will represent your city and compete at the Asia-Pacific Finals.

Final winning team of the “Asia-Pacific Finals” will win the grand prize of:

• Cash Prize of US$10,000
• BlackBerry App World™ marketing for 2 months for BlackBerry 10 launch in Asia, Middle East and Africa (where applicable) & one  week marketing in North America, Latin America and Europe (where applicable)
• App marketing with launch campaign of BlackBerry 10 in market
• Dedicated technical & Business Consultancy for up to third month after launch of BlackBerry 10 in team’s market

Don’t hesitate! Sign up or find out more at: www.blackberryjamhack.com!

The BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour visited the beautiful city of Jakarta, Indonesia on July 10th. Over 300 developers attended the event at the JW Marriott hotel in Mega Kuningan Area of Jakarta. The attendees were a combination of independent developers, students, startup developers, and enterprise developers – all coming together to learn about BlackBerry 10 development.

Local BlackBerry Developer Groups were well represented, including BBDevID and IDBerry as well as regional startup communities like Fowab from Bandung, Bancakan from Jogjakarta, RotiFresh from Semarang, and Stasion from Malang. We were also proud to have government officials in attendance.

The event started with an opening welcome address from our MC: Hasting Singh, Managing Director of South Asia. After that, we continued with speeches from Pak Djoko Agung, the representative from Ministry of Information.

The event continued with the famous video featuring Alec Saunders, Martyn Mallick, and Chris Smith singing “Waiting Is the Hardest Part” in which we even localized the lyrics. Then Alec came to the stage doing his favorite thing: myth busting. The energy and excitement was high!

After that, Sarim Aziz, the Team Lead of Developer Relations in APAC, talked about the user experience on BlackBerry 10. He explained about the cinematic experience and emphasized the moments of charm in the BlackBerry 10 application flow.

Following Sarim, I went on stage to deliver the introduction of BlackBerry 10 architecture in Bahasa Indonesia, doing demos about Cascades™ and HTML5 cross-platform development using bbUI framework.

After that, I introduced our partners: Ibnu Maksum AKA Ibnux; a freelancer calling himself Petani Digital (Digital Farmer) due to his living location on countryside; and NuxRadio, which is already available in for BlackBerry® smartphones and will be available on BlackBerry 10 using BlackBerry® WebWorks™. Ibnux then demoed the advantage of BlackBerry WebWorks on BlackBerry 10, including Adobe® Flash® Support.

After Ibnux, we had our partner, Faizal Adiputra from Ristomobile, showcasing Picstory. The picture-sharing app (which is already available for BlackBerry® OS 5, BlackBerry® 6 and BlackBerry® 7 OS) and the winner of BlackBerry Hackathon Jakarta had been remade from the ground-up for BlackBerry 10 using Cascades, our brand new UI framework. He demoed how Cascades handles animation within application UI very smoothly.

Oscar Kurniawan from Tanoshii Studio then went on stage with his game Room of Disaster, which was easily ported to BlackBerry 10 from Symbian S60. He explained that due to Qt and C++ support, porting to BlackBerry 10 only needs minimal time investment.

Johan Kremer, the Head of Alliance APAC, took the stage dressed in batik and shared tips and tricks on monetizing on the BlackBerry platform.

We had eleven apps showcased during lunch, with Record-It – an application to record voice while talking on your phone, created by Igo – won the lightning pitch!

During the event, QuizHore used their @quizhore Twitter® account to hold a BlackBerry 10 Jam Jakarta quiz by using the hashtag #BB10JamHore. The winner was @dausgonia, a developer from Bandung, who was eligible for a BlackBerry® 9230 smartphone.

All in all, we had a very exciting and successful BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour event in “BlackBerry Nation” Jakarta, with many developers in many cities around Indonesia willing and excited to come onboard with the BlackBerry 10 open platform.

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!

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

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!