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.

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!

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.

The Research In Motion® (RIM®) Developer Relations team recently hosted a BBM™ Hackathon event in NYC. Developers were invited to apply for a chance to participate in the event, getting one-on-one time with BlackBerry® platform experts and network with other developers while working on integrating social elements into apps using the BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM) APIs.

Attendees told us that they found the direct contact with our social platform experts to be invaluable – and we liked hearing that so much that we’ve decided to host more of these hackathon events across the globe in the coming weeks.

The first of these events happened yesterday in our company hometown of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, with the second event happening today, September 29th. Following this, we’ll be hosting BBM Apps Hackathons in Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Jakarta, Amsterdam, London and more. Here are the scheduled dates:

Updated Dates!

• Toronto: October 6th and 7th
• Chicago: October 10th and 11th
• San Francisco: October 16th and 17th (just in time for BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011!)
• Boston: November 3rd and 4th
• Jakarta: November 14th and 15th
• Bangkok: November 17th and 18th
• Amsterdam: November 24th and 25th (updated)
• London, England: November 28th and 29th (updated)

To enter for your chance to attend one of the BBM Apps Hackathon events, follow this simple process to apply: Visit the site bbmappshackathon.com and fill out an application, outlining among other things (i) why you feel social platform integration adds value to mobile applications; and (ii) give an example of previous mobile apps you have developed.

Developers who are selected to attend a BBM Apps Hackathon event will also receive a BlackBerry gift bag, which includes a BlackBerry® 7 OS device. In addition, those selected to attend the Toronto, Chicago and San Francisco Hackathon events will also receive a pass to attend BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011 and three night accommodation at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis for the duration of the conference.

We definitely recommend that developers of any level apply to attend these collaborative events. The BlackBerry Social Platform gives developers a way to tie existing apps to BBM, or to build social apps from the ground up. One of the benefits to these social aspects is the added viral buzz that an app can gain from integrating with BBM. At these hackathons, developers will discover valuable strategies that will help them add social aspects to their apps.

Would you be interested in this type of event? Let us know which hackathons you’ll be applying to attend!

The long-awaited BlackBerry® “Developer Days” are finally coming to Southeast Asia, where the first stops will be Singapore and Jakarta! Whether you are a beginner who wants to get your feet wet or a guru who wants to engage in advanced discussions with the experts, BlackBerry Developer Days are the perfect event for you. They’re also a great opportunity to network with some of the leading mobile application developers in the region.

Beginning with an introduction and sharing of experience from a local alliance partner, we will deep-dive into a variety of different development topics and also get some sneak peeks of the upcoming BlackBerry® 6.0 features and APIs. We’ll also look at making Super Apps by leveraging the unique features of the BlackBerry® platform. If you are thinking about how you can best develop a compelling application for over 41 million BlackBerry smartphone users, this is an event you definitely don’t want to miss.

Seats are limited and first-come-first-served, so please act now to save your spot!

BlackBerry Developer Day Agenda (Singapore) – Register Now!

BlackBerry Developer Day Agenda (Jakarta) – Register Now!

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!