ScreamingToaster

While we didn’t win the dev challenge, we met some companies at the event who really like our developerlife.com BB training programs.

In fact, we are going to expand our training programs to Android, and GWT very soon.

We also had some interest in consulting services, so that’s promising as well.

However, most of the visibility for our training and consulting services come from our own marketing efforts and the dev con was terribly underwhelming. There were just a handful of companies who produce BB software present at the conference. It’s not even close to being a vibrant ecosystem. The BB platform has a long way to go, when compared to iPhone and Android. Now given that BB has been around for so long when compared to these newcomers, it becomes clear that growing/nurturing this ecosystem is not even close to being a priority for them and it really truly shows. RIM is free to move in whatever direction they want without acknowledging the impact on ISVs that currently produce BB software. There is no “BlackBerry” platform. Its so fragmented across 4.2, 4.6, 5.0 that you really have to qualify which device and which os/software platform. This fragmentation makes creating BB apps very expensive for ISVs targetting the consumer space. For the enterprise, where supported devices can be mandated by policy, this isn’t that much of an issue. So RIM is going strong in the enterprise space, but their consumer market efforts are laughable at best.

Btw, I’m writing this post on Wicked on a Virgin America flight back from SFO. Very cool .

This post was created at this location.