The BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour that is now taking place in Singapore, it is a full-day event dedicated to providing the developer community with insights on the BlackBerry 10 platform. As we have heard, more than 300 participants actually pre-registered for the now sold out hands–on event which is held at the Hilton Singapore Hotel, Singapore. With more positive statistic for the long run, there is little reason to feel pessimistic.
So far at the keynote, its been pretty similar as to that from Orlando earlier this year, but of course, with updated statistics which shows how strong we are. with a week, 2.6 billion downloads to 3 billion downloads in AppWorld, it sounds like our next billion could actually come in a months time.
We have a BB10 Alpha Developer Device refresh coming in a while, with 2-3 more planned in the pipeline. The Key reason to the delay of the final BB10 is due to the large scale integration that RIM has been planning, taking much longer than expected. There was not much other information RIM could share with us at this point, however.
There are a total of 12,000 BlackBerry 10 Alpha Developer device that are churned out, with 6,000 given during this world tour, and another 6,000 later in Summer (USA time frame). Also, a total of 23,000 PlayBook’s have been given away as part of the developer seeding program.
We also learnt that RIM is actually pumping in us$100 million into the BlackBerry EcoSystem, investing in the developers and applications. (and yes, the us$10,000 application guarantee comes from this fund too). Also good to note was that PlayBook is the #1 Revenue & Application download force for the BlackBerry AppWorld (which happens to be the only way users get to use this platform).
Looks like WebWorks will be the basis for backwards compatibility for now.
At the end of the day, it is very easy to develop for BlackBerry, with their constant support for more languages in the platform, it will cost less to develop as well, and you get a very responsive market. You will be surprised at the response to your applications, especially when RIM is being so committed and supportive to your application. We will, of course, start hearing from more of RIM soon! 🙂
