Blogs

We’re globetrotting this month, taking PhoneGap to various conferences in Europe and the US. I’m headed to BlackBerry DEVCON September 27-30 in San Francisco.

BlackBerry DEVCON is a great opportunity to see what’s new with BlackBerry apps and check out some new technologies for the first time. The conference is all about sharpening skills, meeting peers and learning about the latest developer tools, which is why we’ll be showcasing PhoneGap at the conference.

If you want to be there, you can get a $150 discount off the current registration price when you use the code DD6SSC when registering.

Conferences are also a great chance for us to meet more of the PhoneGap developer community. If you’re going to DEVCON, I hope you’ll come say hello. We’ll be demoing PhoneGap at a booth on the showroom floor. Hope to see you there!

Earlier this month we were selected to present at the Web 2.0 Expo’s LaunchPad event, and even better we won the people’s choice award!! I was stoked, the whole team was! It was a big honor. I think my presentation was OK, but it’s really the team, the idea and the community behind PhoneGap that made it a winner!

Here’s my 5 min talk:

Here’s the questions from the judges:

The media, customer and investor interest we’ve had since has been nothing short of amazing.

There was a very nice post by one of InfoWorld’s open source bloggers, Savio Rodriguez, this morning about PhoneGap. It was the last paragraph calling our RIM that really caught my attention though…

“If I worked at RIM, I’d take a trip out to Vancouver to talk to the Nitobi dudes. This framework is exactly what RIM needs to counter the trend of developers targeting the iPhone/iPod as the premier environment for mobile device applications. RIM has the brand and market share to persuade developers that writing once and targeting three key mobile platforms is the best use of a mobile developer’s effort. RIM would need to adopt WebKit as the rendering engine for their browser, but that is going to happen anyway. ;-)”

No doubt Rodriguez! My thoughts exactly. Coincidentally we just got a email from someone at RIM:) We think because easy iPhone/iPod Touch development is the carrot and closs platform is the true long term value in PhoneGap every other mobile platform (Window Mobile, Nokia/Symbian, BlackBerry, Android and Palm Pre) should be bending over backwards to help us get PhoneGap running with their OS and APIs. Maybe they all appear to be laggards today for a reason? ;-) *gloves off*

The first PhoneGap sprint wrapped up this weekend. We started Friday with about 15 folks squished into the Nitobi boardroom for Pizza, a quick explanation and game plan delivered by Brock Whitten.

Here’s a quick summary of what we accomplished on the various platforms now in the PhoneGap umbrella.

iPhone
Added network detection
Notify user if no network is detected
Memory clean ups
Made default image/screen more intelligent

Android
Accelerometer
Basic camera support
Offline support
Bugs fixed

Blackberry
GPS is totally working with the W3C API (maybe some error states don’t work but we’ll get there)
Camera works
Mapping works
Phone calls work
Vibration works

*Not all the Blackberry stuff is checked in yet.

We also cleaned up wiki the wiki a bunch. The new PhoneGap site is almost ready to push live too.

What’s next? We need to get all the JavaScript APIs in sync. Check the roadmap for more info. The website will be up shortly. Stay tuned for the Translink case study too.

Nitobi sends a big thanks to the Handi mobility guys , EffectiveUI and everyone else who came out!

BlackBerry announced a new fund to encourage mobile applicationand development.

Research In Motion (RIM) (TSX: RIM; NASDAQ: RIMM), RBC (RY: TSX; RY: NYSE) and Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI; TSX: TRI; LSE: TRIL; NASDAQ: TRIN), today announced plans to launch the BlackBerry® Partners Fund, a US$150 million venture capital fund, to invest in mobile applications and services for the BlackBerry® platform and other mobile platforms. The Fund is to be co-managed by JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners.

Agnostic to both stage and balance sheet, the BlackBerry Partners Fund will not restrict the development of mobile applications and services to any single mobile platform or any specific industry segment. The Fund will be designed to advance the industry by fostering development and driving the entrepreneurial spirit to create the most innovative mobile offerings for customers.

There’s not much more than that. The have official site with a link to the press release and an email address. I sent them a message about a cool project we’re working on here but haven’t heard anything yet.

[Update] Rick from JLA (VC involved in the fund) they will support biz plans focused on any mobile platform and they are getting a lot interest, 845 msgs to date! I’m stoked Rick’s blogging about this, it just went from a weird big co blank page plus press release shutting me out to a human on the inside with a blog talking to me.