Yesterday at BlackBerry® 10 Jam, we held an AppCircus event. Developers registered their apps for the contest last week and three finalists were chosen for each category – BlackBerry® WebWorks™, Adobe® AIR®, and Native – earlier this week. The nine finalists had three minutes each to pitch their apps to a panel of judges that included our own Alec Saunders, Bob Taniguchi and Peter Valin. Also joining the judging panel was Kevin Michaluk of Crackberry.com fame, as well as Peter Hansen, Michael Brooks and Jeremy Adams, some of our most recognized community members. All of the finalists have their apps working on (or being finalized for) the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, and several had a running version on their BlackBerry Dev Alpha device.

The BlackBerry WebWorks finalists:

B’Giftee is a real world social sharing app that lets people gift real-world items to others. If you go to a restaurant and like the burger there, you share that knowledge and offer friends a gift of the burger – a reward that could be for the first to take advantage or for all involved.

2Scoops allows people to find the best gelato in Rome, Paris, New York and London, and also gives pronunciation for ordering in Italian. It includes map integration, business hours and ratings and reviews.

Pesktop creates a desktop feel on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet with video playback, audio playback, note-taking and picture viewing all in one place.

The Adobe AIR finalists:

Cooklet is a guide to cooking that includes recipes with shopping list integration, gesture interation through the camera, photo and recipe libraries and more.

Nobex Radio allows people to listen to radio stations from their BlackBerry® smartphones or BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. They have a selection of over 16,000 stations and have worked to integrate social features for sharing stations and songs.

Nexus is a direct BlackBerry PlayBook tablet to BlackBerry PlayBook tablet file-sharing app that allows people to share content over their local network without using any mid-server.

The Native Finalists:

Training with Messi is a soccer game that uses device motion and hand gesture controls to take Messi down the field. This app has Scoreloop integration with leaderboards and achievements.

DOO-DOo-Doo allows people to play piano on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and goes beyond a normal keyboard with pre-recorded sounds. People can even adjust the tones and harmonics.

Kami Retro is a new game with an old-school feel that takes the fun of 80’s and 90’s side-scroller games and brings it to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

The winners were B’Giftee, Cooklet, and Training with Messi. All three had their apps working and running on the BlackBerry Dev Alpha device. They also had the apps working during their initial pitches, which took place the day that they got the device.

Winners received $25,000 to go see their favorite bands in concert! More details are available at
http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/04/blackberry-10-jam-appcircus/

Congratulations to everyone!