At the Hackathon Tyler Lessard and the head of the BBM SDK initiative (didn’t catch his name) talked about why BBM is so important and why this BBM Social Platform is exciting for RIM. Tyler bases his reasoning on Ray Kurzweil and his “Law of Accelerating Returns” which boils down to proving exponential instead of linear growth in technology. He talks about how companies are now building on today’s technology. That means they are building their apps assuming things that never existed just a few years ago. For example, the big push into the cloud means operating systems are now assuming that the cloud exists and building on top of it. Its the same thing for Social, NFC, connected Gaming, etc.
RIM found that apps that were socially connected were 8 times more sticky than their non connected versions and bring higher levels of engagement. All in all that means they are opening a huge new social graph to developers that is only available for BlackBerry developers. That is why I am really looking forward to RIM’s first BBM Hackathon. RIM let us know that they plan on doing many more Hackathons with possible other locations in North America and around the world. They have done some in Asia and Europe in the past but those were mostly a sponsorship of another companies Hackathon. They are counting on these 30 Hackathon contestants to tell them what they are doing right or wrong and provide feedback directly to the managers and developers involved in the BBM SDK and the BlackBerry dev platform in general. Anybody noticing a paradigm shift in how RIM is reaching out to developers?
On a side note the slides RIM was using to show off the BBM SDK and its features all showed off screenshots of Wordmole with the BBM SDK features built in. That includes chat and a few other features. I did not have a chance to check the BlackBerry 7 devices to see if they have this new version. Check the screenshots below to see what I mean:
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