South African BlackBerry App Master Competition Declares “Salon Queen” Winner

RIM held an App Master challenge in South Africa where developers competed for an all-expenses paid trip to San Francisco for the BlackBerry Developer Conference as well as a carousel feature for their app. The winner of the challenge was Joe Diedericks‘ “Salon Queen” app for the PlayBook. The app is a sales, scheduling and customer relationship management app for hair salons. It makes it simple for hair stylists to showcase their work and hairstyle ideas to their clients as well as the hairstyles the salon has done for them before. The app also enables salons to track their clients as well as schedule hair appointments for clients on the spot. Salon Queen is a great example of how a tablet app can be used for small business and it’s solutions like Salon Queen that will help jumpstart the industry. We’ll be able to show off more of Salon Queen when the app is live in App World.

 

Via:  BBCool

BlackBerry DevCon 2011 Registration Now Open – October 18th-20th

At the end of BlackBerry World last week RIM announced the dates for BlackBerry DevCon (Developer Conference) 2011 in San Francisco.

Registration is now open for DevCon and they have an early bird rate in effect for $699 along with a 4 nights for 3 paid nights special going on. Sadly this year won’t be as international since RIM announced DevCon Europe along with their previous DevCon Asia which was very successful.

You can register for DevCon 2011 Americas at this link. Let us know if you are going in the comments!

via:bbr

Welcome to BlackBerry World 2011 #BBWC11

NHCBBA we’ll be bringing you coverage from the event. We’re expecting the show to be more enterprise-focused than something like the Developer Conference, but there should still be some interesting news bits. It looks like the Bold Touch will be announced and hopefully we’ll get a hands-on. If you’re hear, drop us a line and lets meet.

via:bbcool

2011 BlackBerry Developers Challenge announced

The BlackBerry Partners Fund has officially announced this years BlackBerry Developer Challenge. Although the event doesn’t take place until the 2011 BlackBerry Developer Conference gets under way in October, in San Francisco the prizes and timelines have all been outlined.

This year’s Challenge includes the following three competitions:

• Best Adobe Flash®/AIR app
• Most Innovative BlackBerry WebWorks™ app on the BlackBerry PlayBook and BlackBerry 6
• Most Addictive social app using the  BBM™ Social Platform

This year, both BlackBerry smartphone and BlackBerry PlayBook developers can enter their applications for a chance to win US$3 million in prizes. As always, winners will be chosen across four global regions – North America, Latin America, Europe/Middle East/Africa and Asia Pacific. If you’re a developer and looking to learn more about the prize packs and how to enter, you can check out the BlackBerry Partners Fund website for the full details.

More info available at the BlackBerry Partners Fund website

via:cb

Where's my BLUE (or white or pink?!) BlackBerry PlayBook?

Back at the 2010 BlackBerry Developer Conference where the BlackBerry PlayBook was officially announced, RIM had both black and blue units on display (embedded within glass – click here to see our historic “first hands-on playbook” video). As a fan of gadgets that don’t follow the traditional dark/black motif, the blue teaser unit gave me hope that RIM would launch the PlayBook with more than one color choice. Unlike phones where the traditional physical keyboard allows you to spot a BlackBerry at 400 yards, tablets sort of all look the same, so I was thinking RIM could really differentiate themselves in the space by taking a more colorful and dare I say playful approach on their hardware casing, which based on its fairly straightforward design one would think would be relatively easy to change up the colors on.

With no other colors announced for the BlackBerry PlayBook to date, it’s looking like RIM is going to market with the good ‘ole Henry Ford approach (you can have it any color you want, as long as it’s black!). I guess it’s not too big a deal as for those who want color as we know a ton of brightly-colored BlackBerry PlayBook cases will be available. Despite that being the case, I’d still love to see RIM offer the PlayBook in more colors. Am I alone here, or who’s with me??? What color would you want to see RIM release the PlayBook in next? White? Blue??

If cases are not your thing and RIM doesn’t release any followup colors of the PlayBook anytime soon, I did follow up with the folks at ColorWare to see if they’d be offering custom paint jobs on the PlayBook.  They haven’t announced anything yet, but promised to the Blackberry Alliance readers will be the first to know when they do.

RIM to host Blackberry Developer Conference in Asia on 13 – 14 January 2011

The conference, announced by RIM is slated for January 13th and 14th, 2011 in Bali, Indonesia.

Attendees of the conference will have the opportunity to join over 40 keynote, breakout and hands-on sessions showcasing how developers can use various tools and services to create innovative and commercially successful applications for the BlackBerry platform. Attendees will also get a chance to hear from many RIM technical experts as well as a variety of developers who are already creating apps for BlackBerry® smartphones.

Tyler Lessard, Global Alliances and Developer Relations VP said “The range and momentum of BlackBerry developer initiatives has certainly grown around the world since our first developer conference in Silicon Valley two years ago. We are very pleased to be hosting the first pan-Asian BlackBerry DevCon and continuing to increase the amount of local information, tools and resources available for our developers in Asia.”

prwire

A discussion with Dan Dodge co-founder and CEO of QNX Software Systems

A lot of talk has been happening at the BlackBerry Developer Conference regarding QNX Software. More specifically, the OS that will be running on the sexy new BlackBerry PlayBook. The official BlackBerry blogs were able to catch up to Dan Dodge, co-founder and CEO of QNX Software Systems. In the talks, they discuss QNX, the OS and it’s role in the new BlackBerry Tablet OS ecosystem. If you’re interested in learning more about QNX Software be sure to give it a read through, rather interesting in how the OS works.

• Click Here To Read The Full Interview With Dan Dodge Via The Official BlackBerry Blog>>

Video Hands-On of BlackBerry 6 Running on the BlackBerry Bold 9700, Pearl 3G and Curve 9300!!

[ youtube video link for mobile viewing ]

We’ve seen BlackBerry 6 leak already for the Bold 9650 and Curve 9330 onto the interwebs. We’re still waiting to see it leak (or get officially announced) for the Bold 9700, Pearl 3G and Curve 9300. Hopefully it won’t be long now, as RIM was showing BB6 off on these devices at the Opening Reception at the BlackBerry Developer Conference 2010. Note – free booze was served at this event so it’s not quite as solid of a BlackBerry 6 first look as we did at the Torch launch, but if you own one of these devices and are waiting on BlackBerry 6 for it you’ll want to watch!

Press Release: RIM rebrands widgets as WebWorks; Releases open source code to developer community

RIM announced today their new WebWorks platform (what we knew as widgets) that will allow developers to build full applications in HTML-5, Javascript and CSS. The applications can take advantage of features through API’s and other services as well. RIM is also working with the community to allow for use of open source components to help in the evolution of the platform.

Press Release

Clamshell BlackBerry “Style” 9670 Gets Approved By The FCC

The last time the FCC approved a new BlackBerry smartphone was the Torch 9800 on the day of its launch. Today Engadget got wind of the FCC giving the rumored clamshell BlackBerry 9670 its approval. We recently found out that the 9670’s model name might be the “Style” and since the FCC gave it the green light, we might even hear something about it next week at the BlackBerry Developer Conference.

According to the documents, the 9670 will have 802.11b / g / n and dual-band CDMA so it will work on Verizon and Sprint. For more info check out the FCC docs.

What do you think about the Style 9670 so far?

via Engadget