RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins said that the city of Ottawa is “central to its software strategy” and that has implications for both the city and the company. Ottawa is a city with a long history of tech and culture that can bring a lot of value to RIM. But there some obstacles ahead.
Continue reading ‘Ottawa is the Future of Research in Motion’
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Ottawa is the Future of Research in Motion
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Open Data is important because it releases tax payer funded data to those that pay for it, allowing passionate developers and citizens to make better use of the data. The City of Ottawa, Canada, is dealing with a publicly funded transportation chief that won’t release data to the tax payers funding them. In this case, the GPS data broadcasted by busses in Ottawa is being held hostage by the transportation bureaucracy, and your city could face something similar.
Continue reading ‘Encourage Your City Councillors and Government to Make Data Open’
The foursquare global hackathon takes place on September 17th-18th in cities all around the world. This is a great opportunity for developers to get together and work on a foursquare app that you could finish and take to market in just one day. With the help of other coders, foursquare experts and everyone else attending the event, you could end up with a really solid product at the end of the hackathon. Foursquare is hiring so this is also a great time to show off your skills. Continue reading for more info.
Continue reading ‘Developers: Register for the Foursquare Global Hackathon’
An ice sculpture of a BlackBerry at Ottawa’s Winterlude.
RIM has been catching a lot of negative press lately and it’s interesting to see what Ottawans have to say about it considering the city is home to a lot of RIM employees and some development studios that have experience with BlackBerry. It’s one thing to hear what analysts have to say, but it’s another to actually talk to developers and people who are building businesses on the platform.
Generally, it seems the developer tools are both a blessing and a headache. The tools are creating a barrier to entry which has a negative impact on RIM’s ability to attract new developers, but it’s creating big opportunities for those who know how to use them as it’s sheltering their business from new competitors. RIM is definitely working on a new set of tools and how the company executes could result in a big influx of new developers.
Click through to read about what some developers are saying about the platform.
Continue reading ‘Ottawa Developers Talk BlackBerry Development Experience and RIM’
It’s surprising how the City of Ottawa is making headway with RIM’s UX for the PlayBook and upcoming devices. When we first wrote about Teknision, the company responsible for much of the UX work, it seemed people were pretty stunned that it wasn’t TAT, the design firm that RIM is constantly touting in its press releases. It seems another Ottawa company, YOU i Labs, a company that helped work on the HTC Sense UI, has entered in a “significant partnership” with RIM. YOU i Labs works closely with Teknision, as seen in the above video.
Perhaps Ottawa is on the right path to reclaiming the Silicon Valley North title.
Image via G&M
Poynt has announced a partnership with WiLAN that will see WiLAN assist Poynt in the licensing of Poynt’s portfolio of patents related to internet advertising. In Poynt Corporation’s patent portfolio are patents relating to advertising and location and being able to serve ads based on location context. This is a market that’s growing very quickly and becoming more important with the ubiquity of smartphones. WiLAN is a company that specializes in licensing rights to intellectual property and patents so the deal makes a lot of sense. WiLAN also has a lot of technology partners in the laptop and mobile space, so we may see some white label and embedded technology potential with this deal.
UPDATE: It’s also cool to note that Poynt has passed 8 million users across 7 countries.
