Ninja Otter is giving away copies of their amazing Wakeful BlackBerry alarm clock. Wakeful helps you start your day off right by replacing the conventional alarm clock buzzer with a voice that reads out some important daily information including local weather, stock information and the day’s top headlines.
To win, follow the steps below, and you could win your very own copy of the coolest alarm app for BlackBerry.
1) Follow @BlackBerryCool on Twitter
2) Tweet to us telling us why you want a free copy of Wakeful BlackBerry Alarm Clock and include the hashtag #WakeUpBB in the tweet.
3) Tweet as many times as you want!
We’ll be announcing the winners on Friday, June 10th at 12:00pm EST. We’ll let you know via Direct Message on Twitter if you’re a winner, and then Ninja Otter will hook you up with your free app.
GPS Logger II is a free all-in-one GPS solution for BlackBerry. Born out of the success it’s predecessor, GPS Logger II has been fully re-written from the ground up with plenty of new features. This most impressive of these features is the ability to share your location with your BBM friends.
Binary Clock is a clock app with a creative display, its now available for free on App World. This app displays the time as a binary coded decimal, with the hours, minutes and seconds of the day displayed in the colour of your choice.
A binary coded decimal can be read with each column added up with each light worth (from top to bottom) 8, 4, 2, and 1, and the column on the left being worth 40, 20, and 10. For example the time in the above image would be 16 hours, 9 minutes, and 25 seconds.
Sean Parker probably never said “a million dollars isn’t cool” but it’s sort of true.
There’s an interesting angle to the iMessage news and that’s the effect on the carriers and the SMS industry. One of the most compelling and disruptive elements of BlackBerry Messenger is that it’s success has cost the carrier a tremendous amount of money in text messaging fees because users are sending their messages over RIM’s servers and opting our of SMS plans. That’s not to say that the carriers don’t love BlackBerry because there’s obviously a new source of revenue being generated in data plans which they love, but they still must feel the effects of BBM. Last we heard, BlackBerry Messenger users sent 100 billion messages per month. What is going to happen to SMS when users are spread out across BBM, iMessage and other IM apps such as Live Profile. Is this the death of SMS in North America?
Americans sent 2.1 trillion messages in 2010 and the industry has generated 81 billion dollars globally as of 2006. A lot of SMS traffic happens in regions where smartphones aren’t as popular such as China and South East Asia, but these are also regions where BlackBerry has seen incredible growth. It’s only a matter of time until the other smartphones such as Windows Phone and Nokia get turned on to the idea of a BBM-style platform and the carriers and businesses that rely on SMS will have lost that revenue entirely. It’s going to start in North America and eventually the world, but with BBM and iMessage, we’re starting to see a significant dent in global SMS usage.
Will the carriers fight back or embrace it as more users get turned on to smartphones? Carriers could simply raise data costs to make up for lost revenue, or they could begin to sniff out BBM and iMessages in order to try and tax the user.
RIM has announced that it has acquired the social gaming platform ScoreLoop. The company will be joining the BlackBerry platform and bringing their expertise in creating social and collaborative gaming toolkits for mobile developers to the BlackBerry platform. If you’re not familiar with the company, check out the above video. Essentially, ScoreLoop helps developers by helping them create community and loyalty programs within their games. If you have a fun, addictive game, plug it in to ScoreLoop and enable community messaging, rewards, points and more.
So far, RIM has announced the BBM Social Platform as a way of helping developers create a messaging and app sharing community around BBM, and it looks like they’ll be using the ScoreLoop team to help complement this environment. It will probably end up looking like the iOS Game Center but with a mobile BlackBerry look and feel (using BBM).
This is an awesome acquisition for improving mobile gaming on the BlackBerry platform because it will give developers access to more APIs and tools they can use to improve their games. On the other hand, RIM could have acquired a company that was a little more than just gaming. It would be interesting to see something like ScoreLoop but for all apps, not just games.
The PlayBook is a great tablet. Don’t listen to the haters. It’s a rock solid piece of hardware and the software has huge potential. The problems with it stem from the fact that it’s a brand new OS and still needs a few updates. Recently, BlackBerry users were sent a pretty big update to the PlayBook and it improves many of the features you use on the device such as Facebook, App World, charging the device and video chat connectivity. These updates are welcome and we’re looking forward to more. Hopefully the summer vacation season won’t slow down QNX and we’ll see another big update soon.
