There’s always significant anticipation for the BlackBerry Live keynote general session , and this year was no different as attendees, partners, customers, and developers were able to experience the vision for the future here at BlackBerry. App launches (including Skype for BlackBerry Z10 smartphones!), game demos, the launch of BBM Channels, a reinforced commitment to enterprise with an update of BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, the 10.1 software update for the BlackBerry Z10, a new entry-level BlackBerry 10 smartphone coming for select emerging markets, and the future of mobile computing stacked together to pack one serious punch.

We hit the floor of the Marriott World Center to get reactions from attendees on all of the news, launches, vision, and announcements. Check out the video below for details:

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

The most exciting element for me was all of the discussion around mobile computing. As a bit of a technology geek, I can’t wait to see what the future has in store. What was your favorite part of the keynote general session? Share in the comments below.

Take a look below to find out about what we saw, and what is soon to be released on BlackBerry 10.

harmon.ie BlackBerry 10 Edition

harmon.ie for BlackBerry 10 enables secure mobile collaboration for BlackBerry 10 business users. This allows users to use full-featured SharePoint on-premise and Office 365 Apps across desktop and mobile. By providing fully functional, secure connectivity and offline document access, you can keep work moving from your BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

Gwava’s Retain™ for BlackBerry Unified Archiving

At BlackBerry Live this week, Gwava has announced the availability of its Retain Unified Archiving solution for BlackBerry 10 smartphones. Gwava’s Retain for BlackBerry provides unified message archiving, eDiscovery, and publishing for organizations looking for a mobile archiving solution for organizational or regulatory compliance.

This solution enables organizations to archive email and social messaging into one unified location. All messages are securely stored in a single database and can be easily accessed through the Retain web access archive viewer.

Skype

We’re happy to announce that Skype is available for the newly launched BlackBerry Q10 as well as BlackBerry Z10 smartphones. Skype is an excellent tool to use both for business communication as well as to stay in touch with family and friends.

While you’re on the go with your BlackBerry smartphone and the Skype app, you’ll enjoy the ability to have:

• Free face to face video and voice calls
• Instant messages
• low cost voice calls and text messages to landlines and mobiles over WiFi® or wireless network connections.

BoxTone Mobile Service Management

This week at BlackBerry Live BoxTone announced support for BlackBerry 10. BoxTone’s Mobile Service Management platform enables organizations to proactively monitor and support their end-to-end mobile environment. BoxTone delivers the control IT needs, supportability users demand and reliability the business requires for wide-scale, mission-critical mobile deployments.

The below applications were shown around BlackBerry Live, but have yet to be officially released. Keep your eye on BlackBerry World in the near future to get your hands on these quality apps.

HP ePrint

This week HP was showing off the Hp ePrint app for BlackBerry 10, giving you the ability to wirelessly print from your BlackBerry smartphone to any connected ePrint enabled printer. These print stations can be at your home, in the office or “on-the-go”. There are now 30,000 HP Public Print Locations at partners like FedEx Office, The UPS Store in addition to airports and hotels. This lets you easily print your digital content to your HP Printer via the Cloud or secure business network. This app will be available in BlackBerry World very shortly!

Reuters Eikon

Thomson Reuters Eikon is designed to provide a powerful and intuitive next-generation solution for you to consume real-time and historical data, connect with the financial markets community and execute financial markets transactions. In summer 2013 Thomson Reuters Eikon will be delivered on BlackBerry 10 and fully integrated into the core OS features for a smooth user experience. You will be able to set custom alerts for market data and automatically sync news with your desktop. There are plans for a new dashboard for BlackBerry that will make finding the news and quotes you’re looking for easier than ever.

We are truly excited about all of the releases and announcements at BlackBerry Live this week, and continue to work with partners to bring even more applications and functionality to the BlackBerry smartphones. These top-notch partner apps give you, the business user even more tools to stay productive throughout the day, so you can keep business moving while you are.

With the recent launch of the powerful BlackBerry 10 smartphones, SAP and BlackBerry have been working together to bring even more business critical apps to the new platform. SAP mobile finance apps are now integrated with core features of the BlackBerry 10 smartphone such as the BlackBerry Hub, Calendar, and more, to provide you with an exceptional user experience.

This week at SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW and BlackBerry Live, we’re going to provide a peek at these new tools that are available to increase your mobile productivity.

SAP Customer Financial Fact Sheet

This app gives business customers the ability to stay up to date on their customers’ financial status anywhere and anytime. It connects directly with the SAP ERP system to provide the most relevant customer financial data to a BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

Features include:

• Display a list of all customers assigned to you, customers classified as critical, and recent customers
• View customer sales volumes for the past fiscal year
• View total outstanding invoices, credit info, and the average payment arrears for the last 12 months
• Retrieve original invoices in PDF format and access archived documents stored in the backend

Get a free demo of the app from the BlackBerry World storefront and give it a try.

SAP RealSpend

SAP RealSpend for BlackBerry 10 smartphones gives business customers access to real-time, accurate budget and spend information.

Features include:

• Access to the SAP ERP application
• Access real-time budget and expense information, including trends and projections
• Analyze and benchmark spend data by department, project, or expense type across any period of time
• Receive customized spending alerts
• Collaborate with team members to resolve issues

Download the demo version of the app today.

SAP CFO Vantage

Giving business executives the most timely and accurate information to enable key business decisions can have a great impact on day-to-day operations. SAP CFO Vantage does just that – so executives have the right tools and info to help increase productivity and improve decision-making capabilities.

Features include:

• Access to SAP financial data
• Access to critical media content
• Access to important analyst information
• View social media content in real-time
• Ability to communicate easily with team

We are truly excited about these new finance apps, which are another important piece of the executive’s application toolkit on BlackBerry 10. Currently the apps are available for BlackBerry Z10 smartphones, with BlackBerry Q10 editions on the way soon.

Do you use SAP tools in your work? How would taking these processes mobile speed up your work and provide benefit? Share in the comments below.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that harmon.ie has launched a native Office 365 and SharePoint app for the BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10, part of the harmon.ie 4.0 product suite and available for download at the BlackBerry World store. These apps will be showcased this week at BlackBerry Live in Orlando.

The harmon.ie app provides full-featured Office 365 and on premise SharePoint functionality, including secure connectivity and offline document access. With the combination of Office 365 and a native BlackBerry 10 app user experience, customers using the BlackBerry Q10 or the BlackBerry Z10 smartphones can increase their productivity in the workplace and use their BlackBerry devices as a business tool.

Using harmon.ie, you can now work on contracts, spreadsheets and presentations by securely accessing Office 365 from your BlackBerry 10 smartphone. You can also get real-time updates as colleagues update important documents, save Office 365 on your device for off-line availability, and securely upload documents from email attachments onto Office 365.

“BlackBerry has always been invested in providing enterprise customers with effective tools to get business done”, said Martyn Mallick, BlackBerry’s VP of Global Alliances and Business Development. “We are thrilled to have harmon.ie bring both SharePoint and Office 365 to the BlackBerry 10 platform and are confident BlackBerry users will appreciate the social nature of these business solutions.”

Download harmon.ie for BlackBerry 10

More information is available about system requirements and features. harmon.ie works with existing SharePoint credentials; there is no need to make application changes or server-side configurations.

How does your business use Office 365 and SharePoint for mobile collaboration? Share with us in the comments below.

If you’re developing using the Open Data, or “OData”, protocol then you already know that BlackBerry provides support through our WebWorks development kit. You probably don’t know that we just released an open source OData library for C++ and provided a Cascades sample app to help kick-start your project. If you already know what OData is then just skip ahead a few paragraphs for the link to this library. If you’re not familiar with OData then let me introduce you to a great new Restful data access solution. OData is a REST-based protocol, with both a server and client implementation that lets you make CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) calls for Data.

That’s great… but why do I need this?

Well if you have ever built an app that has to talk to a data source (database, file system, etc.), there are certain things you have to do each time. You typically have to build some middleware to talk to the data source, then you have to offer up that data over http (you do want this to be REST, right?), then you have to build your client, parse and use the data, and so on. Well some engineers at Microsoft got tired of repeating this over and over, and decided to make a uniform way to describe both the data and the data model. You could then apply this to any data source, and in return the client could use a standard way of interacting. OData was born. They have since put the spec under the Open Specification Promise so that anyone can build servers or client tools Royalty free.

Today, OData is supported by SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Citrix and many others. I first came across it as the default server side technology that SAP supports for their ERP system using SAP Gateway, SAP Mobility Platform, SAP HANA and others. If you look around your corporate environment, you might be surprised at how embedded it has become in such a short time.

If you’re building an Enterprise app, this will make your job much easier, as you only have worry about the client. If you plan on building an HTML 5 app with BlackBerry WebWorks, there is an existing JavaScript library called data.js. But, if you’re building for Cascades/C++, there hasn’t been one, until today!

You can now head over to GitHub to download the library in order to include in an existing project, as well as a full cascades sample. We are putting it up as open source, so you are free to use it as you wish in projects of your own.

Don’t forget to visit the Enterprise Development pods at BlackBerry Live & BlackBerry Jam from May 14-16. Also, be sure to check out session JAM59 – Integrating Enterprise Apps with the Open Data Protocol.

If you happen to be going to SAP Sapphire Now, which is also in Orlando from May 14-16, come by the BlackBerry booth and I will be available to discuss the OData library in person. See you there!

Woohoo! For all you social media fiends out there, we’re keeping the updates flowing. Both the Twitter and LinkedIn apps will be receiving an update for BlackBerry 10 smartphones today. The apps will be available for free download in the BlackBerry World storefront. These enhanced apps make it easier than ever to stay connected and do more with your social and professional contacts, while on the go.

I’m sure you can’t wait to check out some of the new features and enhancements you can look forward to when you pick them up. Check out all the details below.

New Features for Twitter version 10.0.3/10.1.3

• Enjoy more content with Universal Search –See more content when you’re searching. You’ll be able to view related profiles, tweets and top tweets, photos and relevant searches all on one page.
• Always Fresh Content – Content that is always fresh and up to date. Automatic caching gives you the current information at your fingertips without having to manually refresh your tabs.

New Features for LinkedIn version 10.0.3/10.1.3

• Find your current contacts on LinkedIn: With the latest update, you can import the personal address book from your BlackBerry 10 device to LinkedIn, making it easier to view and connect to your contacts on LinkedIn.
• UI improvements: We’ve updated the overall design of the LinkedIn application for BlackBerry 10 to improve the user experience. These updates include improved visual styling, better pull down functionalities for refreshes, touch down feedback on clicking list items, and more.
• Follow and learn about companies :An important element of LinkedIn is the ability to connect to companies and subscribe for company related updates and content. The latest version of LinkedIn for BlackBerry 10 allows you to view information about the companies you follow in greater detail, such as:
• How you’re connected
• About
• Jobs
• Similar Companies
• News & Updates
• Other Updates: We’ve made quite a few additional updates to LinkedIn for BlackBerry 10. These include inbox enhancements, deleting and archiving messages, people search improvements, and the ability to update your profile photo from within the app. To get all the details, visit the official app page on the BlackBerry World application storefront.

Do these updates have your mouth watering? Download them now on BlackBerry World: Twitter v10.0.3/10.1.3 and LinkedIn v10.0.3/10.1.3 and let us know what you’re most excited for in the comments below.

Please note the apps may take up to 24 hours to appear in BlackBerry World storefront.

We first tipped our hat that Skype was coming to BlackBerry 10 back at the global launch event on January 30th. Now I’m happy to announce that Skype is available for the newly launched BlackBerry Q10. BlackBerry Q10 and Skype are the perfect pair allowing you to chat with other Skype users from the palm of your hand.

While you’re on the go with your BlackBerry Q10 and the Skype app, you’ll enjoy the ability to have:

• Free face to face video and voice calls
• Instant messages
• low cost voice calls and text messages to landlines and mobiles over WiFi® or wireless network connections.

Skype System Requirements:

Skype runs on the 10.1 Operating System on the BlackBerry Q10. As this new version of the BlackBerry 10 operating system launches on the BlackBerry Z10 in the coming weeks, BlackBerry Z10 owners will have the ability to download Skype for BlackBerry from BlackBerry World. We will be talking more about BlackBerry 10.1 on BlackBerry Z10 at BlackBerry Live, so stay tuned and keep it locked to Inside BlackBerry for more information.

Did you just pick up your brand new BlackBerry Q10 and want to give Skype a try? Download it from BlackBerry World and Let us know what you think about the app in the comments below.

The time has come to cast your ballots for the 2013 BlackBerry Achievement Awards! Using BlackBerry technology to help power innovation, the awards celebrate ideas coming to life. Everyone is encouraged to vote, so visit the website before April 15^th at 5pm ET to help us determine this year’s winners.

A special category that is near and dear to our hearts is the App of the Year award. This year, Cine Hoyts Argentina, Cooklet, and PriceCheck Pty Ltd have been nominated as finalists. Make sure you check them out before voting for your favorites.

The full list of 2013 nominees is as follows:

App of the Year:

1. Cine Hoyts
2. Cooklet
3. PriceCheck Mobile

Putting Customers First:

1. ING DIRECT Canada
2. LoyaltyMatch Inc.
3. MMMOOO

Mobile Innovation of the Year:

1. DIRECTV Latin America
2. Mippin (Refresh Ltd.)
3. Waytag

Making the World a Better Place:

1. e-Cycle Solutions
2. Sussex Police
3. University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB)

Entrepreneur of the Year

1. EducationApps Limited
2. Nobex Technologies
3. SkyPark Café

This year’s winners will be announced at BlackBerry Live in Orlando, Florida. The award recipients will receive a series of incentives for their participation. Prizes for first place include: travel and accommodations to BlackBerry Live 2013, conference passes, extensive BlackBerry training, BlackBerry 10 smartphones and more.

For more on the BlackBerry Achievement Awards and BlackBerry Live, make sure you visit our landing pages at http://www.blackberrylive.com/special-programs/achievement-awards/about and http://www.blackberrylive.com/ respectively.

Do you have a nominee that you’re rooting for? Let us know who your favorites are in the comments below!

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Enterprise developers have embraced the new BlackBerry 10 platform – in fact, we recently announced that BlackBerry 10 now offers more than 100,000 applications. Amazon Kindle, OpenTable and The Wall Street Journal are available to BlackBerry 10 customers and in the coming weeks CNN, The Daily Show Headlines, eBay, eMusic, Maxim, MLB at Bat, MTV News, Pageonce, PGA, Rdio, Skype, SoundHound and Viber will be available for download or purchase.

At the BlackBerry Experience Forum, companies like SAP, Citrix, IBM and CISCO and many more, were in attendance to connect with many of the enterprise business leaders and IT decision-makers to showcase how their powerful apps can enable business innovations and empower mobile employees.

According to Adam Linford from Truphone, “If you are a mobile application developer and you’re looking to bring BlackBerry 10 into your existing portfolio, it’s so cheap and easy to add.” Adam also remarked that, “BlackBerry made some very sensible decisions in adopting technologies that are known – you are building on the shoulder of giants, a lot of the work is already done.”

Howard Travers from the Formicary Collaboration Group commented, “We’re pleased to work with the BlackBerry 10 application – we see it as a next step and evolution of mobile collaboration.” When asked about how the BlackBerry 10 platform enables enterprise customers to balance both work and personal data, Howard stated, “One of the biggest asks of all our top customers around the globe is the separation of personal and business. The fact that BlackBerry has now been able to merge the two is a great step forward.”

The BlackBerry 10 platform has empowered global businesses to embrace enterprise applications that enhance productivity, increase collaboration and connect their mobile employees with the important resources they need on the road.

Have you personally tried any of the apps mentioned in this blog post? Any app developers or partners you would like to see us connect with in the future? Let us know by commenting below!

A few weeks back we took a look at some of our favorite, or most anticipated apps for BlackBerry 10 and Melanie M. mentioned that she can’t wait to get BlackBerry Travel on her new BlackBerry Z10. Good news for her (and everybody else who’s picked one up) BlackBerry Travel is now available for BlackBerry 10.

If you’ve been using previous generations of BlackBerry Travel, you’ll know that it is definitely a must have for travelers. I’ve written a few times in the past about how the app makes your life easier while on the go. You can plan, book, manage, and share their travel arrangements with friends, colleagues and on social and professional networks while on the go.

BlackBerry Travel for BlackBerry 10 includes all of the great features that make travel simple for BlackBerry customers including: Automatic Trip Scanning, Travel Notification in BlackBerry Hub, Hotel and Car Rental Booking, Itinerary Management, Social Sharing, Search Flights, and Time-Saving Tools. On top of that there are also some new features added as well.

Check them out here:

• Trip Status Sharing – It’s now even easier to post your trip updates on BBM, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. With Trip Status Sharing, you can keep your friends and colleagues up-to-date on your travel adventures immediately as they unfold.
• Flight Status Sharing – BlackBerry Travel has always kept you up-to-date with real-time flight statuses and with BlackBerry Travel for BlackBerry 10, you can share this information with your colleagues, friends and social networks. If your flight is delayed, cancelled or changed terminals, you can easily and quickly inform others and make sure they know when and where to pick you up from the airport.
• Price Alerts, Change Offers and Upgrades – The new Price Alert service with BlackBerry Travel for BlackBerry 10 helps ensure you’re always getting the best hotel deal. It will put your mind at ease and automatically notify you if there’s a better price for the hotel room you booked, a comparable hotel for a cheaper price, or if there’s a much better hotel for slightly more. In many cases, you can cancel your original booking without penalty and re-book the better deal through BlackBerry Travel.
• BlackBerry ID – With BlackBerry ID, you’ll never have to login to BlackBerry Travel again. You’ll have instant access to all of its features as soon as you launch the app. Even on your first time using BlackBerry Travel, BlackBerry ID will automatically fill in the registration form for you.

If that’s got you excited, you’re not alone – and better yet it’s available as a free download on the BlackBerry World storefront. Planning any trips in the near future? Be sure to share the excitement with us in the comments, and if you’ve got any tips for using BlackBerry Travel, we’d love to hear your story.

Please note the app may take up to 24 hours to appear in the BlackBerry World Storefront.