BlackBerry PlayBook offers exciting opportunities for Nordic App developers

Research In Motion (RIM) invited app developers in the Nordics to an event in Malmo last week to introduce them to the world of BlackBerry® smartphones and RIM’s latest innovation, the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet.  

The BlackBerry PlayBook is an ultra-portable advanced tablet which offers an uncompromised, high-fidelity web experience for all sites, games and media on the web.  With support for Adobe® Flash® Player 10, Adobe® Mobile AIR® and HTML-5, the BlackBerry PlayBook provides a world-class multimedia experience, multi-tasking and web-browsing - and importantly, exciting opportunities for developers.

Part of RIM’s global “Meet the PlayBook” developer series, the half day event was held at the offices of The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a leading user-interface design and development company in Malmo which was acquired by RIM in 2010.  Attended by over 85 delegates from approximately 30 companies, the session featured presentations and workshop sessions to give attendees a chance to be ‘hands on’ with the new BlackBerry PlayBook and learn about developing for BlackBerry smartphone and tablet platforms.

Amongst the guests were Hampus Jakobsson, co-founder TAT, Håkan Cronqvist, Director of Sales Nordics at RIM and Chris Pelsor, Solutions Architect, CEM, from Adobe.  Danish carrier TDC, which provides BlackBerry smartphones in the region, also talked about driving local interest in developing for BlackBerry. The two representatives from Adobe presented how the BlackBerry PlayBook works with Adobe’s technologies Air and Flash.

Ola Larsén, Head of alliances and developer relations for Northern Europe and Russia at RIM, said: “This is the first event of its kind that RIM has held for Nordic developers and we are pleased with both the turn-out and level of enthusiasm from the attendees.  With over 370,000 app developers in the BlackBerry community worldwide, the Nordic region is an important part of the expanding BlackBerry ecosystem and we look forward to bringing more events like these for developers in the region.

Daniel Wigren, CEO of software developer Seguru, said: “Being a developer, I appreciated the many possibilities available with Adobe and Webworks. It is easy to leverage my knowledge of software development when working on new applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook. I’ve been using the PlayBook for a while now and I’m very impressed by its capabilities. It is fast, I like the form factor and it has really good sound. When looking at the business opportunities available, I believe that we will develop some exciting apps for PlayBook and RIM moving forward as we believe it presents a lot of commercial opportunities.  .”

Coming up next for the BlackBerry Nordic developer community
RIM is partnering The Conference, a media industry event in Malmö on August 24^th and 25^th. For the event, RIM is hosting an interactive developer challenge for developers in the region creating new apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook.  Nominated developer teams at the highly interactive finals will be locked in glass boxes to develop their apps live for the audience, with RIM and TAT experts on hand for support and guidance. 

In addition, BlackBerry is hosting a webcast on Thursday 7 July, 15:00 CET for developers to learn more about the opportunities for BlackBerry 7 OS and the new BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 and 9930 smartphones.  BlackBerry 7 OS enables developers to create deeply integrated, graphically rich and contextually advanced mobile app experiences. New capabilities include AR (augmented reality) and Open GL ES 2.0 support.

Topics covered in the webcast will include:

• How to quickly port your current BlackBerry application to BlackBerry 7OS and key considerations when designing your app for the new BlackBerry 7 OS smartphones
• BlackBerry 7 OS API overview which includes new hardware enabled features on BlackBerry 7 OS devices such as Magnetomer, Near Field Communications, and Augmented Reality
• OpenGL ES 2.0 
• APIs that enhance the Super Apps experience

There will also be an open Q&A with Research In Motion application development expert, Paul Bernhardt.

Simply visit: http://webcast.streamlogics.com/audience/index.asp?eventid=73027544

Date: Thursday, July 7, 2011
Time: 15:00 CET
Duration: 1 hour

For more information on BlackBerry Developer community, please visit

http://www.blackberry.com/developers and http://devblog.blackberry.com/

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Media Contact:

Bite Communications: rim@bitepr.se, +46-8-402 01 00