This weekend during the BlackBerry Community & Android Port-A-Thons we witnessed something very special happen, something which can energize all our developer community!

We had over 1,000 people around the globe come together for 37.5 hours and submit over 15,000 apps for BlackBerry 10. After five hours we had over 4,000 apps submitted and after nine hours we had over 6,300 apps submitted. One of the developers put this into perspective when he tweeted

@lougazzola Impressive. I remember it taking over a year for AppWorld to get its first 6,300 apps…

— Eric Harty (@Ebscer) January 12, 2013

The Twitterverse was a buzz with over 1,200 #BB10Portathon mentions. 15,060 apps submitted shows that it’s easy to build a BlackBerry 10 app.

We’ve witnessed a huge transition of developers who now believe in the potential for success on the platform and take the time to create an incredible number of apps. The RIM team creating our developer SDKs and tools have made it easy for developers to bring their apps to BlackBerry 10 – in the language you like writing in. Here’s what our community is saying:

@lougazzola @leinir @4shelbysdevs I agree with this. I can even port my android app/webworks/phonegap in under 1 minute really.

— NemOry Oliver (@NemOry) January 14, 2013

@nemory @lougazzola @leinir @4shelbysdevs agreed.. I ported my Adobe Air app in around a minute packaged and signed.

— Stephen (@NZCoderGuy) January 14, 2013

Erik Oros (Application Development Consultant) fielded questions in his area of expertise (HTML5) and I (Lou Gazzola, Senior Marketing Manager) hosted the event. Both of us were on for the complete 37.5 hours. RIM had over 20 experts from around the world that helped developers and I am blown away by the community support with “Oliver”, “K Cheung” and “Michael K” spending most of the time porting apps AND helping the community.

We also had our partners available with representatives from Marmalade, AppendTo (jQuery), PhoneGap, and Appcelerator participating. After witnessing what was happening many of our partners stayed well beyond their scheduled hours.

What an incredible effort from the entire community!  I want to extend a very heart felt Thank You to everyone that participated!!

Our friends at VisionMobile have just launched their Developer Economics 2013 survey. The survey “focuses on the best practices for the tools, services and APIs that developers use to build, market and monetize their apps.” The survey takes just ten minutes and there are awesome prizes to be won! Fill out the survey on app development and developer tools and enter a draw for a chance to win a BlackBerry® 10 Dev Alpha testing device and a BlackBerry® PlayBook™ LTE/4G 32GB tablet.

RIM® is one of the gold sponsors for this survey and we really want the voices of the BlackBerry developer community heard. Take the survey and help us make sure that BlackBerry developers are counted.

BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour – Montreal – July 11, 2012

A recent report by Baird Equity Research is getting some pick up today on the interwebs. The report shows that developer intent for BlackBerry 10 is on the decline. Needless to say, I was pretty shocked by the findings. I was shocked because the numbers in the report do not gel with what we’re seeing in the real world. The report contradicts much of what we are seeing and hearing in our developer community.

In the past year our BlackBerry App World ™ vendor base has grown 157 percent. We have developers submitting amazing apps for BlackBerry® PlayBook™ users. In fact, the BlackBerry PlayBook app catalog has grown by more than 15,000 apps since January 1 of this year. We just announced that more than three billion applications have been downloaded from BlackBerry App World since launch.

But much more importantly, the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour we are currently hosting in 23 cities across the globe has seen over capacity registration in almost every city, including New York, Santa Clara, Toronto, Jakarta, Singapore, Delhi, and Montreal. We have already spoken to almost 5,000 developers and the feedback has been phenomenal (don’t take my word for it, search Twitter for the hashtag #bb10jam).

I have been receiving a lot of feedback from developers personally and I can tell you that I am hearing again and again that developers are amazed by how easy it is to work with the BlackBerry 10 tools. They appreciate the open nature of our platform, which allows developers to bring their work and their skills and find a toolset that will work for them. The other thing I hear consistently is that RIM simply treats developers better than anyone else in the mobile industry. That is music to my ears! I want to once again thank our developer community. You see what we are doing to increase our support for you. You see what RIM is building with BlackBerry 10 and the amazing opportunity to be part of our new platform and you have shared your enthusiasm and excitement with us.

To all new developers coming on board, we are building something amazing and we know you will be impressed by the open nature of our platform and our commitment to you. Welcome!

The numbers we have provided speak for themselves. Developers around the world are seeing that BlackBerry is here to help them build a successful business.