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!

Communitech HYPERDRIVE – a $30+ million incubator program that aims to takes tech startups from seed level to Series A-ready in 24 months – has kicked off their ‘Get Your HYPERDRIVE On’ tour. Join one of the sessions below to learn more about the program and how it can help you. The HYPERDRIVE team will be on hand at these sessions, along with other startups, mentors and experts, to answer your questions, trade tales, and give you the low-down.

If you are in Vancouver: Join Communitech and the BCTIA at Steamworks Pub, 375 Water Street, on Wednesday November 14th. The fun rocks from 5:30pm to 7:30pm with free food and drink! Register here.

If you are in Toronto: You can meet the Communitech team AND Polar Mobile CEO Kunal Gupta as they co-present this tour stop on Tuesday November 20th at the Polar Mobile office at 156 Front Street West, from 6pm to 8pm. Food and drinks will be served. Register here.

If you think you have what it takes to apply for HYPERDRIVE’s amazing 24-month program, come and have a drink with the team and quiz them about all things startup.

For the past several months, the Developer Relations team has been participating in numerous events and activities targeted at the tech start-up community. For example:

• Since last fall, we’ve held at least 19 Hackathons focused on innovating on BlackBerry® platforms with BBM™, and more recently gaming.
• We sponsored AppCircus pitching contests at BlackBerry DevCon EMEA, and at BlackBerry® 10 Jam in Orlando. In addition, we were sponsors and I was a judge at the Mobile Innovation Awards at Mobile World Congress, put on by AppCircus.
• We’re limited partners in Relay Ventures’ (formally BlackBerry Partners Fund) latest fund, and spoke at their annual general meeting to some of the entrepreneurs present.
• We sponsored the Golden Triangle Network’s LaunchPad 50K event in Waterloo, and I spoke briefly there on the subject of entrepreneurship.
• We sponsored the Canadian Venture Capital Association’s annual event in Montreal last week, and my colleague Martyn Mallick spoke there.
• Last week we also sponsored CHINICT, China’s annual entrepreneurship forum and I spoke there. In addition, we sponsored the CHINICT Hackathon, and saw many great new ideas being built on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet.
• This week in Jakarta, I’ll be speaking at Mobile Monday. On Wednesday, in Bangalore, I’ll be meeting local start-ups, and Thursday I’ll be representing RIM for the opening of the BlackBerry Innovation Centre (also known as Rubus Labs) at Startup Village in Kochi, India.
• In July, we’ll be sponsoring the International Startup Festival in Montreal. In its second year, the Startup Festival brings together entrepreneurs and ecosystems, for a three day event focused on (you guessed it) start-ups.

So why all this attention to startups when the press and customers are relentlessly focused on whether or not the next version of the latest hot game is available on the BlackBerry platform? One word — innovation.

Now, don’t get me wrong – we want the latest hot titles on BlackBerry as much as you do, and we have a dedicated team that does nothing but work to make that happen. But startups are where the excitement is. Startups are the companies that are going make a bet on BlackBerry 10. Startups are the companies that will take apart all of the amazing innovations we’ve built in BlackBerry 10 and conceive of something new that can’t be done on competitors’ platforms. They’ll be the ones who focus on the three key themes of flow, connect, and extend, and will build BlackBerry 10 experiences that the world has never seen before on any platform.

And that’s why we love startups so much.

Got a startup? Come to a BlackBerry 10 Jam session. We’d love to help.