Simon Zwick contacted me few weeks ago asking how to set-up a BlackBerry Developer Group and how to get BlackBerry 10 developer devices to start developing on our platform. We agreed it will be a good idea to build the first BlackBerry Developer Group in Berlin and get in the benefits of having devices, Swag, Networking with us and another BlackBerry developers worldwide… Simon did a great job preparing the first meet-up, he printed flyers, created a Facebook event, a twitter handle, etc… Luckily Till Adam one of our BlackBerry Elites and team lead at KDAB is also based in Berlin and gently offered us their office as the Meet-up location as well as sending some of the devs he knows to the event.
We started at 7pm. Round 15 guys showed up. After a short welcome note from Till, I did some demos showing the BlackBerry 10 experience, then talked about the native development kit and showed Momentics, the IDE with a little of coding. Then my colleague @WaterlooErik from Waterloo/Canada presented our awesome HTML5 platform via video conference. It went very well. Also @Kari_Gow our BlackBerry Developer Group Manager didn’t want to miss the meet-up and joined us from Waterloo/Canada via a video link. She talked about the benefits of being organized in a BlackBerry Developer Group and gave a motivating welcome by showing the growing number of the BlackBerry communities worldwide and especially in the EMEA region.
Then Simon discussed with the guys the next meet-ups: In which form, where, how often, etc… We agreed to meet on every 2nd Wednesday in a month and Simon will look for a nice location somewhere in Berlin. We discussed and talked about BlackBerry and the mobile development space in Germany those days
I closed up by showing a 5 min video of Alec Saunder’s keynote in Orland/Florida/USA last May, where he gave a motivating speech to the devs there to come and to stick to BlackBerry Development.
I am very glad that we now have a BlackBerry Developer group in Berlin, since Berlin is becoming more and more the center of mobile development in Germany. Thanks Simon, Thanks Till and KDAB and thanks to all the guys who joined us and stayed till 11:30 pm. See you soon again.
Kamel
