BlackBerry World Keynote – 3D, Special Guests, Live Demos and Giveaways!

Earlier today I sat in on the Day One general session at BlackBerry World™. To help celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the show, and since we’re in Orlando, the home of 3D, the keynote was conducted in 3D.
As you know, the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet comes preloaded with a ton of great apps – Facebook®, video chat, Kobo, Need for Speed, Tetris, Docs 2 Go, Podcasts, Slacker and more. In addition to all of these out-of-the-box apps, we already have thousands of BlackBerry PlayBook tablet apps in BlackBerry App World™, and today during the keynote, a number of new and exciting apps were showcased and will be coming soon – including Angry Birds!

We also had special guests join us in the keynote.

Adobe®
There are more than 3 million active Adobe developers, and we’ve done a lot of great things with Adobe to enable the development of high performance mobile apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. So we were really excited that Shantanu Narayen, President and CEO of Adobe Systems, and Danny Winokur, VP of the Flash Runtime at Adobe Systems, were able to join Mike Lazaridis on stage to talk about some new developments and run through a number of Adobe® AIR® app demos for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, including Readers Digest (an app developed using the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite), Facebook, and Adobe Connect.

As part of the keynote, Adobe announced that they are now shipping a major update of Creative Suite, Creative Suite 5.5, which includes the latest version of Flash Builder 4.5 that supports the development of apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. This will be followed with Flex 4.5 in June, an open source framework that will include support for building mobile apps for BlackBerry® Tablet OS. We can’t wait to see all the apps that will be built with these tools for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.
Microsoft®
We also were joined today by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. RIM and Microsoft announced a partnership where Bing will be deeply integrated into the BlackBerry experience starting this holiday season. BlackBerry devices will use Bing as the default search provider in the browser, both here in North America and internationally.

Also effective today, Bing will be the preferred search and maps applications with regular, featured placement and promotion in the BlackBerry App World carousel. Microsoft showed how OCR camera search, voice search, streetside block view, photosynth panorama would work with the BlackBerry platform, and Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft also performed a number of demos including access to contextual info, local restaurant search and Bing deals search.
And to top it off? Mike Lazaridis closed the keynote by announcing that all BlackBerry World 2011 attendees will take home a free BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.