Attention entrepreneurs of the world! There’s a new kid on the incubator block looking for you. HYPERDRIVE is an amazing program to help people with incredible ideas and the drive to succeed to build competitive and world-leading companies.

Research In Motion (RIM) is a funding partner for HYPERDRIVE, and we’re thrilled to work with the team there to let the BlackBerry® developer community know about this opportunity. At HYPERDRIVE, it doesn’t matter where you’re from – as long as you bring a truly stellar idea and the drive to turn it into a world-leading company.

There are a few important things that make HYPERDRIVE stand out from the pack:

• A three-month “sprint” at the beginning of the program at the Communitech Hub within the Tannery District in Waterloo, Ontario (a.k.a. Canada’s Silicon Valley), where you’ll plug into a rich network of experienced entrepreneurs, tech industry heavyweights, executives-in-residence, and fellow start-up renegades.
• You’ll also spend a week in New York City, meeting with US funders, partners and potential clients.
• Insider access to Canada’s top Angels, VCs and other funding partners, and help in foreign markets too.
• Once you’re back home, you’ll receive hands-on guidance from a global network of mentors who will bring their expertise to your challenges for up to 24 months.
• You’ll have access to $100,000 of in-kind support to keep your business engines firing.

And did we mention it’s open to anyone in the world?

HYPERDRIVE accepts a maximum of 10 companies, three times a year — but you have to be up to scratch. This $30-million-plus incubator program isn’t just exciting, supportive and fun – it is a very real boost to building your business.

The program offers initial funding of $55,000 (equity and loan), plus a $150,000 convertible note when you finish the sprint, AND $500,000 from leading VCs at four-month intervals when you’re ready to scale. Basically, HYPERDRIVE provides the money, the knowledge, and the connections to help you turn your idea into a top-flight company.

Applications close June 4th — apply today at www.communitech.ca/hyperdrive!

The BlackBerry® Jam World Tour has officially begun! Developers in Milan, Italy have been working with our Developer Relations crew all day, attending sessions that they may have missed at BlackBerry® 10 Jam in May, getting hands-on time with our BlackBerry 10 tools and connecting with other developers – all of whom are ready to build apps for BlackBerry 10!

And can I just say – wow. I am completely amazed and thrilled at the response to the BlackBerry Jam World Tour. BlackBerry developers, you are amazing! We’ve already had several stops sell out, including Toronto, which filled up in less than 24 hours. It’s pretty clear to me that people are not only interested in BlackBerry 10 – they are excited to be part of the launch and are already invested in what BlackBerry 10 will mean to the mobile industry.

What is the BlackBerry Jam World Tour?

The BlackBerry Jam World Tour is a series of full-day events dedicated to providing the developer community with insights on the BlackBerry 10 platform; its strengths, the vision, and how developers can make apps that stand out to app-hungry BlackBerry users.

Developers in attendance will:

• Be amongst the first to develop for the BlackBerry 10 platform.
• Discover the power of BlackBerry 10. Learn about the unique capabilities that will set applications apart.
• Collaborate with others in the developer community. Learn, share and network with fellow developers.
• Have access to BlackBerry 10 platform and tools experts.

The Tour events offer one-on-one expert guidance from BlackBerry platform experts, to help attendees build better apps. Sessions focused on HTML5 + BlackBerry® WebWorks™ and Native C/C++ and Cascades QML development for the BlackBerry platform. Developers will be able to interact with development experts who can provide guidance, tips and tricks, and other information to help developers get started building apps for BlackBerry 10.

Check out upcoming dates and locations here, as well as more info on the tour – www.blackberryjamworldtour.com

Thank you for your support

I’m going to take this moment and thank all of the developers who are joining us on the tour and those who joined us at BlackBerry 10 Jam in May, as well as those who were not able to be with us but are already downloading the tools and building. The feedback we have had to date on the tools and the BlackBerry 10 apps that are already underway has been phenomenal. Please keep sending us your stories and letting us know what you’re creating.

For the past several months, the Developer Relations team has been participating in numerous events and activities targeted at the tech start-up community. For example:

• Since last fall, we’ve held at least 19 Hackathons focused on innovating on BlackBerry® platforms with BBM™, and more recently gaming.
• We sponsored AppCircus pitching contests at BlackBerry DevCon EMEA, and at BlackBerry® 10 Jam in Orlando. In addition, we were sponsors and I was a judge at the Mobile Innovation Awards at Mobile World Congress, put on by AppCircus.
• We’re limited partners in Relay Ventures’ (formally BlackBerry Partners Fund) latest fund, and spoke at their annual general meeting to some of the entrepreneurs present.
• We sponsored the Golden Triangle Network’s LaunchPad 50K event in Waterloo, and I spoke briefly there on the subject of entrepreneurship.
• We sponsored the Canadian Venture Capital Association’s annual event in Montreal last week, and my colleague Martyn Mallick spoke there.
• Last week we also sponsored CHINICT, China’s annual entrepreneurship forum and I spoke there. In addition, we sponsored the CHINICT Hackathon, and saw many great new ideas being built on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet.
• This week in Jakarta, I’ll be speaking at Mobile Monday. On Wednesday, in Bangalore, I’ll be meeting local start-ups, and Thursday I’ll be representing RIM for the opening of the BlackBerry Innovation Centre (also known as Rubus Labs) at Startup Village in Kochi, India.
• In July, we’ll be sponsoring the International Startup Festival in Montreal. In its second year, the Startup Festival brings together entrepreneurs and ecosystems, for a three day event focused on (you guessed it) start-ups.

So why all this attention to startups when the press and customers are relentlessly focused on whether or not the next version of the latest hot game is available on the BlackBerry platform? One word — innovation.

Now, don’t get me wrong – we want the latest hot titles on BlackBerry as much as you do, and we have a dedicated team that does nothing but work to make that happen. But startups are where the excitement is. Startups are the companies that are going make a bet on BlackBerry 10. Startups are the companies that will take apart all of the amazing innovations we’ve built in BlackBerry 10 and conceive of something new that can’t be done on competitors’ platforms. They’ll be the ones who focus on the three key themes of flow, connect, and extend, and will build BlackBerry 10 experiences that the world has never seen before on any platform.

And that’s why we love startups so much.

Got a startup? Come to a BlackBerry 10 Jam session. We’d love to help.

When BBM™ Connected applications instantiate BBMPlatformApplication, they must supply a UUID. The UUID is a 128-bit universally unique identifier for the application that must be 36 characters long and comply with the Microsoft® 8-4-4-4-12 format. Those numbers represent the number of characters in each sequence, separated by a dash. Here is an example of a UUID in the correct format: 4995d07c-13ee-42d1-92bb-90ba6ed33e1d. You can manually create a UUID or use an online UUID generator.

Using a UUID that doesn’t comply with the Microsoft 8-4-4-4-12 format can prevent your application from connecting to the BBM test/pre-production environment. If you do use an incorrect UUID format, you could receive an error of “Unable to connect to BBM. [App name] disconnected by RIM” when trying to connect. This only affects developers using the test/pre-production environment. Consumers who have purchased the application from the BlackBerry App World™ storefront will remain unaffected because BlackBerry App World will assign unique identifies to applications when they are put up for sale.

The UUID is used to uniquely identify an application in the test/pre-production environment. Once you upload the application to BlackBerry App World, it is no longer used. Changing your UUID allows you to perform tests of your application in isolation of one another.

BlackBerry® evangelists met with Android™ developers last week at AnDevCon III in Burlingame, CA to talk about the cool development options of bringing Android apps to the BlackBerry platform, and how to publish them on the BlackBerry App World™ storefront to reach a global audience. The word of how easy the process is started to spread out quickly among conference participants at two full-house events on day one of the conference – the Lightning Talk presented by Larry McDonough, Head of Developer Evangelism Americas at Research In Motion (who talked about bringing existing Android apps to the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet), and at the class taught by Rajeev Mohindra, Director, Handheld App Architecture (about running Android applications on BlackBerry).

More BlackBerry development action was happening at the RIM booth, where developers signed up as vendors to BlackBerry App World and learned from BlackBerry experts how to use some of the tools for BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps to convert their Android “apk” files into BlackBerry-compatible “bar” files. Those developers who completed both these steps became the happy recipients of a free BlackBerry PlayBook tablet on which to continue their development work. That they were all excited to convert their Android apps for the BlackBerry platform is an understatement — not to mention how pleasantly surprised they were to see how easy it was to make their apps work on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet without having to change any code. The BlackBerry team saw all kinds of interesting apps – ranging from games to educational – all successfully ported to the BlackBerry platform.

To top it all off, a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet was in the mix for the AnDevCon III Winner’s Circle Prize, and was won by Erol Yesin from Navman Wireless. Congratulations to Erol and to all the other developers from whom we are waiting to hear back soon with progress updates.

You can catch up with us again in a couple of weeks, as the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour will be making a stop in Santa Clara, California.

“Patrick: ‘I’ve asked you about porting to other platforms, have you had this kind of success on other platforms?’

Danny: ‘I can say in complete honesty definitely not. We’ve never been able to get going on a brand new platform with zero lines of code as quickly as we were on BB10.’”

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Being an event organizer myself with events such as Adobe Camp Brasil and Hackathon San Diego, and also seeing in so many events the big need to:

1) keep track of talks duration

2) show big enough messages from a distance to the speaker (like “Go Faster, 5 minutes left”)

3) do very FUN raffles

In March of 2012 I set the last project for Action Creations under my administration, called “Talk Clock”, to have a very polished design, focused on being very functional. After tons of prototypes and usability tests, it’s finally ready! And I’m proud to show it to you now:

As event organizer, you can have someone holding the tablet (showing it to the speaker) so he/she can see the time left and see your messages. During the raffle, you can plug the tablet to the projector via HDMI and show its screen to the whole audience.

The Talk Clock App is available only for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ (and soon BlackBerry 10 smartphones) and it can be found here. Hope you enjoy it!

The tablets are in a fixed layout and each tablet knows its position in the wall. At a given time, the wall can be used to present pictures in different combinations of tablets, ranging from one picture per tablet to a single picture split the complete wall. The two pictures below show a 3×3 wall of BlackBerry PlayBook tablets displaying 9 different images, and then a single image split into 9 segments.

Have fun with the sample and let us know how you use it, or extend it. And remember, we welcome contributions back to our repositories on Github.

CHINICT is one of China’s largest tech innovation & entrepreneurship conferences. This 8th edition the conference officially starts on May 24th, but the doors opened a day early for the dozens of developers and designers competing for a chance to pitch alongside high-profile early-stage startups a the conference.

Franck Nazikian, the Founder of CHINICT kicked things off with platform sessions from Pearson who talked about their content APIs that offered applications free access to premium content. Everything from Jamie Oliver’s recipes to exclusive travel guides was opened up to participants to integrate into their applications. It was also quite refreshing to see the UN World Food Programme as a main supporter of the event promoting the message of Hackers Against Hunger to enhance hunger awareness in China and throughout the world.

On his first trip ever to China, Alec Saunders was up next to provide the final inspiration and encouragement to developers for the next 24 hours. Mike Zhou from the RIM China team then took the participants into a deeper dive into their platform options for building amazing applications on BlackBerry. The room erupted into excitement when they heard Mike mention the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ prize for all participants. Several came up to me and the team just to check if they had heard it correctly.

Historians say that the Chinese worked on the Great Wall for over 1700 years. It is the longest fortification ever built in history and has left its mark on not just China, but the world. As I sign off it’s hard not to notice the air of dedication and focus in the room as these developers work against time to make their mark on the world.

Alec will be speaking during the main conference as well and you can watch his interview live at 2:30 am UTC.(10:30 am EDT) at the CHINICT website.

Winners of the Hackathon will also get front seats to the BlackBerry Jam World Tour in Beijing on July 6th.

By Rob Pongsajapan (Flickr® photostream) CC-BY-2.0

As Alec mentioned in his previous blog post, we’ve added features to BlackBerry® Tablet OS 2.0.1 to help curb the piracy of BlackBerry Tablet OS applications. I’m going to explain what we’ve done and what you can do to take this protection one step further.

Backup Files Tied to a BlackBerry ID

Backup files created using BlackBerry® Desktop Manager are now tied to a BlackBerry® ID account. This prevents users from sharing backup files between devices, but still allows them to switch devices. If a user needs to move to a different BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, they can restore their backup files to the new device after configuring their new device with their BlackBerry ID.

Backup Files are Encrypted

Starting in BlackBerry Tablet OS 2.0.1, backup files are now encrypted. This not only helps to protect a user’s data, but also your applications. The key for the backup file is also tied to a user’s BlackBerry ID account, meaning each user has a different encryption key for their backup file.

How Developers Can Protect Their Applications

You might be thinking that this is all well and good for the future, but won’t the people who pirate applications just leave their BlackBerry PlayBook tablet at version 2.0.0, which doesn’t encrypt backup files? This is a possibility, but one you can help to mitigate. History has shown us that approximately 90% of BlackBerry PlayBook tablet users upgrade their device within a month of an upgrade being released. This means that in a month from now, most of your target audience will be running version 2.0.1.

And so, the BlackBerry App World™ Vendor Portal comes to the rescue! In a month from now (or when you release the next update to your application), you can set the minimum OS version required by your product to version 2.0.1, preventing it from being downloaded on a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet running a lower version. This will help thwart those individuals who may want to try to extract your application files from a backup made using a lower version, because they won’t see it listed in the BlackBerry App World storefront catalogue on their device, therefore they won’t be able to install it.

How to Use Backup & Restore

If you are looking for instructions on how to backup or restore your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, have a look at How to Back Up and Restore a BlackBerry PlayBook on the Inside BlackBerry Help Blog.