BlackBerry eyes Indian developers for future mobile apps

Bangalore: Seeing the potential of the mobile based application developers in India, Research In Motion (RIM) has introduced first in the series of developers interaction planned for the fast growing community. The company has launched a one day event "BlackBerry Developer Day", in association with SiliconIndia.

Invitation from RIM to attend such a session resonated well with the developer community. The day long sessions involved discussions, valuable insights, tips and a sneak view of the latest offerings from the company.

The main purpose of the event was to educate developers on the profitable business opportunity they can leverage by developing applications for the BlackBerry and how to get started. Throughout the day there were various ideas shared by the experts to help developers understand on how to monetize their applications and bringing them upto date with the latest offerings and capabilities of RIM. "India crossed the 500 million wireless subscribers mark recently. The BlackBerry platform provides unique opportunities to develop and deploy applications for local as well as global markets and developer events like this will help the community to understand and leverage the BlackBerry platform to build successful applications in future," said Annie Mathew, India Head of Alliances, RIM.

With the growing competition in the smartphone space, the demand for application developers to create exciting application has increased. If the developers choose to make application for BlackBerry then they are creating it for an audience of over 32 million subscribers in 170 countries. The BlackBerry smartphone has a 55 percent market share in North America. Developers can leverage their skills to develop with industry standard tools such as Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio, and choose from a number of development approaches, including Java and web. Developers also get an opportunity to have access to self-service tools and paid support programs, and the ability to interact with the developer community through forums and blogs.

Speaking at the conference Hossam Bahlool, Director of Platform Product Management, RIM, says that applications are maturing according to industries. There are also horizontal application that are offered in all industries. But what really got Hossam excited is the new age of Super Applications. Super Applications can seamlessly integrate between native as well as third party application. It is always-on and can be contextualized and is efficient and intelligent. Taking example of Poynt, a super application used by BlackBerry users in North America, Hossam explained how convenient user life becomes with use of these Super Application.

Poynt let users find people, businesses, movie theatres, retailers and restaurants near their location. Poynt uses GPS or cell-site locations to pinpoint where user is and quickly deliver the information they need. It can not only book movie tickets and make dinner reservations but also add it to user's calendar.

Indian developers have great potential to make such super applications and the enthusiasm and barrage of post session questions for the experts was evidence to the point. RIM has planned many more of such conferences for Indian developers to help them make a name on the global front.

Apart from Mathew and Bahlool, other experts from RIM included Barnes Lam, Director of Alliance AP, Alan Wong, Application Development Consultant and Larry McDonough, who is the team lead for development tool platform. Developers were able to tap to the in depth expertise of these global experts.