BlackBerry World 2011 Keynote

Professional Edition of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, tablet publishing solution to include Playbook

The keynote started with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen who praised the performance of Flash and Acrobat Reader on the Playbook. He ended his speech by announcing the new Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, then he praised how fast Acrobat Reader for Playbook is and demonstrated Flash capabilities on the RIM tablet. He announced Adobe’s tablet publishing solution that powers digital publication deployment across Android, BlackBerry PlayBook and iOS. The product enables publishers to create, distribute, monetize, and optimize magazines and online media for tablets.

RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis Introduced BlackBerry Bold 9900 – 6000 PlayBooks Giveaway – Native Email running on PlayBook

The big news at BlackBerry World yesterday was the launch of the new BlackBerry Bold 9700 with touch-interface, enhanced keyboard, new BlackBerry 7 OS  and NFC integration; the thinnest BlackBerry smartphone to date (10.5 mm).

Mike Lazaridis gave a detailed overview of the device, praising the amazing keyboard and the new “Liquid Graphics” a marketing term coined by RIM that refers to the “powerful” graphics acceleration on the hardware side, combined with the display’s high responsiveness, the great image quality (high contrast with high pixel density at 287 dpi) and the fluidity of the touch interface.

Mike Lazaridis was proud to mention several times that BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) counts over 40 million users worldwide, and  then he announced the availability of BBM on the Playbook, a new feature integrated in the Playbook OS latest update (version 1.03.1868) released during the night. The new release included a new version of Blackberry Bridge, the Facebook native application, and the Video Chat.

We also got a demo of the native email, calendar, contact apps running on PlayBook, they will be available this Summer. Andorid apps running on Playbook were demonstrated, they will be available directly from the App World, consumers will have no way to know they are Android apps, the process is transparent to the end users.

Later in the session, he came back on stage to announce that his company will give away a PlayBook to each BlackBerry World attendee. For the 10^th anniversary, the attendance reached an all time high with over 6000 attendees, who will each get a playbook starting at 1 pm ET – we hope that the WiFi network will be able to support such the traffic load when everyone will play with the new toy.

 

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Announcing Partnership With RIM with Deep Bing Integration

The appearance of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a splash at the conference, he was proud to day that was his first attendance to BlackBerry world. He did not forget to mention Windows Phone 7, and then demonstrated the deep integration of Bing Search and Bing maps both in the Playbook and the new BlackBerry 7 OS. (picture below)

 

Carolyn Everson, VP, Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook

The keynote closed with Carolyn Everson, VP, Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook. She explained how great the Facebook partnership with BlackBerry is, and gave us a long list of metrics: facebook currently counts half billion users who upload over 30 billion photos per month and click 50 million time on the like button daily. BlackBerry on Facebook has 13.7 million fans and was the first brand to cross the 10 million mark and to join the top 10 brands featured in the number one social network site. 250 million people access to Facebook on the mobile phone.

She closed her speech by giving advices to developers on the key drivers of Social Design, reminding them that to achieve the success of an app, they have to put the people at the center of their concepts, just like Zynga did with their not so-good looking online game Cityville that reached 60 million users in less than 5 weeks. Her advices are listed in the picture below.

Facebook loves to always require developers to develop for their plateform, no wonder why she was giving away ‘free’ advices!

 

Disclaimer: we have been invited by RIM to attend BlackBerry World with many other journalists/bloggers. Our trip and hotel accommodation have been arranged by, and paid for, by RIM. We always pay for our travel expenses to events like CES, MWC, CEATEC, etc… but when we are invited, we want to be transparent about it.

Eliane Fiolet
Categories: Cellphones, Events, Top Stories, Uncategorized