The time has come to cast your ballots for the 2013 BlackBerry Achievement Awards! Using BlackBerry technology to help power innovation, the awards celebrate ideas coming to life. Everyone is encouraged to vote, so visit the website before April 15^th at 5pm ET to help us determine this year’s winners.  

A special category that is near and dear to our hearts is the App of the Year award. This year, Cine Hoyts Argentina, Cooklet, and PriceCheck Pty Ltd have been nominated as finalists. Make sure you check them out before voting for your favorites.

The full list of 2013 nominees is as follows:

App of the Year:

1. Cine Hoyts
2. Cooklet
3. PriceCheck Mobile

Putting Customers First:

1. ING DIRECT Canada
2. LoyaltyMatch Inc.
3. MMMOOO

Mobile Innovation of the Year:

1. DIRECTV Latin America
2. Mippin (Refresh Ltd.)
3. Waytag

Making the World a Better Place:

1. e-Cycle Solutions
2. Sussex Police
3. University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB)

Entrepreneur of the Year

1. EducationApps Limited
2. Nobex Technologies
3. SkyPark Café

This year’s winners will be announced at BlackBerry Live in Orlando, Florida. The award recipients will receive a series of incentives for their participation. Prizes for first place include: travel and accommodations to BlackBerry Live 2013, conference passes, extensive BlackBerry training, BlackBerry 10 smartphones and more.

For more on the BlackBerry Achievement Awards and BlackBerry Live, make sure you visit our landing pages at http://www.blackberrylive.com/special-programs/achievement-awards/about and http://www.blackberrylive.com/ respectively.

Do you have a nominee that you’re rooting for? Let us know who your favorites are in the comments below!

The BlackBerry Live 2013 early bird registration price of $449.00 USD ends this Friday, March 22^nd. There isn’t a better opportunity this year you as a developer to make connections with mobile decision makers from around the world.

• Interested in enterprise app development? Meet Information Technology admins, execs, and developers from Fortune 500 companies
• Have an app that you know should be preloaded? Meet with wireless operators, dealers, retail partners at our Partner Showcase
• Talk up your app with internation press and financial analysts

If you’ve been to BlackBerry Jam Americas before, you know what to expect in the keynote and breakout sessions (and the tweetup too). Now that BlackBerry Jam Americas is part of BlackBerry Live, you have the added opportunity to meet with our retail, carrier, and enterprise partners – and gain added exposure for your apps.

Here’s a quick glimpse of what BlackBerry Live was like last year. Hope to see you in Orlando this May!

BlackBerry 10 has launched – but that doesn’t mean we’re standing still. In the spirit of our Keep Moving Project, BlackBerry Jam Americas is not just moving dates – but we’re moving cities too. BlackBerry Jam Americas is part of our BlackBerry Live conference happening May 14-16, 2013.

BlackBerry Live is all the amazing developer content you’ve come to expect – plus you’ll get to experience what we like to call “the big show”. We’ll be sharing the venue with enterprise developers, carrier partners, and more in Orlando  – showcasing the best that BlackBerry and our partners have to offer.

We’ll have more details on the session catalog, keynote and other exciting things soon – but make sure you register today!

• Synchronized audio and slides
• Downloadable PDF files of session presentations
• Search capabilities across presentation titles and descriptions where applicable
• Full mobile access on BlackBerry smartphones and BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets

We hosted more than 50 sessions at BlackBerry Jam Americas designed to help you build and sell apps for the upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform.  Head on over to BlackBerry Jam On-Demand now – no login/registration required!

Our pledge to developers at the keynote on Peek & FLOW means that we’ve updated Beta SDKs for every BlackBerry 10 development environment and delivered dozens of new APIs, frameworks, components and controls. On top of it all, we’ve also released a new BlackBerry 10 OS and system components for Dev Alpha devices and simulators that give you everything you need test your apps fully.

Additionally, we furthered our commitment to HTML5 and Web Technology through our adoption and contributions to open standards and our relationships with industry partners like jQuery, Adobe®, and Sencha.

We are truly committed to building an open platform and partnering with developers. Be sure to check our flight arrival boards to see what’s coming up from us next and watch Don Lindsay & Chris Smith’s keynote for full details on announcements and releases!

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Also, check out our latest blog posts released during BlackBerry Jam Americas 2012 for a deeper-dive into our most recent updates:

BlackBerry Java Plug-in for Eclipse now available on Github!
Ripple renewed: Updates to the Ripple Emulator
Who’s ready for dessert? Android Runtime for BlackBerry 10 Beta
Power up! BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK super-sized
A four-step guide to BlackBerry 10 Flow
The Coming of Age of the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK
BlackBerry Jam Americas 2012: Flight Arrival Boards and Roadmap Updated

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

So ends King Harry’s speech before the battle of Agincourt in Henry the 5^th. It is one of my favorite speeches in all of Shakespeare.  I have been thinking of it a lot recently, because that lofty inspirational speech also is a wonderful metaphor for the challenge ahead of RIM and my team, and beautifully articulates the kind of passion I have for what we do every day.

Since I started with RIM last summer, my mantra has been “not business as usual”.  We have set out to be the best company in mobile for developers. We have built an amazing team of people who work with developers because developers are smart, passionate, opinionated, outspoken, funny and genuinely interesting people.  We know that developers are the ones who understand that it’s OK if you don’t get a UDP joke.  For us, it’s not just a job.  It’s a calling.  Developers are our people.

This week was one of stark contrasts.  Stark.

We kicked off our annual developer conference, BlackBerry® Jam Americas yesterday at the San Jose Convention Center.  The energy in the San Jose conference center was a palpable reflection of the enthusiasm we have for what we do – I shook hands, met people, participated in a meet up with a bunch of Argentinean developers via video link, took photographs, was photographed – I even autographed phones.  It was a huge blast.

We had some gifts for our developer community too.

• The news that BlackBerry 10 is API feature complete – devs can get to work in earnest on BlackBerry 10 apps.
• A preview of BlackBerry App World™ for BlackBerry 10, and how it will drive more sales and downloads for them.
• The news that some amazing big names, like foursquare and Cisco, are building for BlackBerry 10.
• Hard dates that they could build their own schedules for software delivery around.
• The launch of the 10k Reasons to Believe campaign.
• The launch of our BlackBerry Elite developers program.
• The launch of our new BlackBerryDev YouTube channel
• The upcoming BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour for enterprise

And more.

As I said, yesterday was a day of stark contrasts.

One of the gifts we made for our developer community was a music video.  Marty, Chris, and I made a rework of REO Speedwagon’s Keep on Loving You with some tongue in cheek lyrics (how many singers do you know that can croon the phrase “mobile endeavours” with a straight face?).  We did it because we hate those corporate “energy” videos that are such a staple of conference introductions everywhere, and because we knew that our community would love the humour.  It was risky, but we had previously covered another song for BlackBerry 10 Jam Orlando, and the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour and our developer community loved that one.

This time we put it up on YouTube, on our new developer channel.   And for the last 24 hours, our developer community has told us over and over again how much they loved that gift, and how much they appreciated the humor in it.

However, the mainstream media didn’t get it.   Some called it weird.  One outlet said that it would be the reason for RIM’s eventual demise – I had hoped for impact, but perhaps not at that scale.  One commenter criticized my waistline.  I know… I’m 48, and it is time to hit the gym more often.

I don’t expect the mainstream media to get it.   They’re not developers.  They don’t have the context.   And frankly, what most want to write about is the drama around RIM.

My team and I, we wear our hearts on our sleeves for this community. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters, we’re making a difference.  We have more than doubled the applications available on BlackBerry in 12 months.  We announced 105,000 applications approved for sale on BlackBerry App World, yesterday, of which over 25,000 are PlayBook.  We have more than doubled the size of RIM’s developer community in the last 12 months.   And I know that if you ask any developer who builds for BlackBerry today, that our openness, and interaction with this community is dramatically different from what it was a year ago and that they love what we have done for them.   This conference, BlackBerry Jam Americas, is a learning event, but it’s also a celebration of our community and we were there to celebrate their successes and ours.

This morning, reflecting on the situation, I realized that when we launch BlackBerry 10 early next year, the support and success of our developer community is all that will matter to me.

And those critics shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here.

This week we caught up with RIM’s Gregg Ostrowski, Sr. Director of Technical Solutions, and Jeff Holleran, Sr. Director of Enterprise Product Management to chat about both enterprise app development and deployment. Check out the video below:

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

We’ll be sharing more details about the Enterprise BlackBerry Jam events in the coming weeks, so stay tuned by checking back regularly on the BlackBerry Developer blog and the BlackBerry for Business blog.

Do you develop apps for business? What need are they designed to fill? Share in the comments below!

BlackBerry® Jam Americas is less than three weeks away! As you may know, Day 3 is Unconference Day and we need your help creating the agenda. Here’s how it works:

We are now accepting submissions for session topics in two categories: sessions to be led by our Research In Motion® (RIM®) experts, and sessions to be led by you, members of the BlackBerry developer community. We have room on the schedule for eight sessions, of which four will be led by RIM experts, and four will be led by BlackBerry developers.

How do you participate? It’s simple. From now through Friday September 14th, you can propose a session topic via Twitter®, Facebook®, or in the comments below. If you want to send us a tweet, be sure to mention @BlackBerryDev, and remember to include the #BBUnconference hashtag.

Once we collect your suggestions, we’ll put it to a vote. The winning entries will become part of Unconference Day at BlackBerry Jam Americas – and four lucky community members will be invited to host their own sessions!

(If you miss the online voting, don’t worry. You can still propose sessions on-site in San Jose using the Unconference Schedule whiteboard.)

We’re committed to you, the BlackBerry developer community. Let’s work together to build an unforgettable Unconference Day that covers the topics you want to hear about the most.

So, what do you think? What sessions do you want to see on September 27th? Let us know on Twitter, on Facebook or in the comments. We’ll be listening.

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 Now and use promo code DJAA45 to register for only $299.00

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Derek Konigsberg, who some of you may know better as @dkonigs.  For those of you who may not know Derek, he’s been developing apps for the BlackBerry® platform since 2006 (starting with BlackBerry handheld software version 4.1), so he’s seen quite the overhaul to the platform.  Long story short, my conversation with Derek about his questions on BlackBerry® 10 development inspired a really neat idea: Stump the BlackBerry Devs.

How do I stump someone and who am I stumping?  Provide us with a design or mock-up that you think would be difficult to be implemented using our Cascades™ UI framework. The Cascades tools development team will try to implement your submission in a flexible manner that involves no hardcoding of values and that is flexible enough to handle multiple screen resolutions and multiple form factors.

Here are the details:

Mock up a design for a screen, making it as beautiful or as ugly as you like.

• It doesn’t matter how you create it – use a professional design tool or draw it on a napkin.
• Don’t worry about a data source, we’ll be using dummy data anyway.

Throughout the month of August, submit an image of your mock-up to the @BlackBerryDev Twitter® account using the hashtag #StumpTheBlackBerryDevs.

• Final day for submissions will be August 31, 2012.
• If an image isn’t worth a thousand words and you feel the need to describe your design with more than the 140 characters of Twitter will allow, feel free to submit multiple tweets to explain your design.

We’ll choose three of the most difficult or creative submissions and throughout the month of September, and then we’ll get to work implementing them using the R8 SDK beta release that Tim Neil talked about here.

At BlackBerry Jam Americas, we’ll host a session during the Unconference Day where we’ll reveal the chosen designs, explain how we implemented them, and walk you through the reasoning behind the approach taken. For any features of the design which could not be elegantly implemented, we’ll do a few things:

1. Implement the solution per the design using hardcoded values.
2. Provide an alternative solution that is consistent with Cascades design principles.
3. Explain the design decisions behind Cascades for why the solution could not be delivered per what you’d submitted.
4. If applicable, add new features to the roadmap which would allow this design to be implemented in future and publicly share the tracking of those features via the BlackBerry Developer Issue Tracker.

In parallel to the activities at BlackBerry Jam Americas, we’ll also post the code for the solutions to our open source repo at blackberry.github.com and will share a detailed walkthrough of the solution to this blog.

Sound like a fun challenge?  I hope so.  Now let’s see what you’re made of…can you stump the Cascades R&D team?

Whether you’re a Native, Web, AIR or Android developer, BlackBerry Jam Americas will be a fantastic opportunity to dive into our open platform. This event is a great opportunity to continue, or start, building outstanding apps for BlackBerry 10. Like our previous developer conferences, BlackBerry Jam Americas will feature a broad, compelling mix of content for beginners and experts alike. A high-level overview of BlackBerry 10 for each platform is just the beginning: attendees can choose from dozens of sessions that dig deeper than ever into the BlackBerry 10 platform, exploring the opportunities it presents for differentiation and revenue generation.

At BlackBerry Jam Americas, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with RIM experts and developer leaders alike. Through deep dive sessions and hands-on labs, we’ll help you realize the creative and business potential of your ideas. We’ll teach you how to engage users with beautiful UI and compelling user experience. We’ll show you how enterprise apps on BlackBerry 10 can change the conversation and take advantage of the BlackBerry architecture. And we’ll connect you with fellow developers and BlackBerry partners to network, collaborate and innovate.

Best of all, BlackBerry Jam Americas is our most affordable developer conference yet! Register by August 31st to take advantage of our Early Bird pricing. The Main Rate is $449 (an Early Bird discount of $150). Alumni – including developers who attended previous Developer Conference events, this year’s BlackBerry 10 Jam event in Orlando, or any of the stops on the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour – can register now for $299 (an Early Bird discount of $150). And we welcome those of you in academia: faculty can register for $299, and students can attend for just $199!

This is an amazing opportunity to get in-depth information and hands-on guidance before the launch of our upcoming BlackBerry 10 devices.

What do you think? Are you as excited as I am?