BlackBerry has opened its third Apps Lab in SA following two already located at Bandwidth Barn in Woodstock, Cape Town and the University of Pretoria’s Information Technology Department.

The Apps Lab now open at the JoziHub, joins those in Cape Town and Pretoria to boost the development of mobile applications in SA as well as create new job opportunities in the local mobile space with its available resources for students, developers and entrepreneurs.

Annie Lopes, community manager at JoziHub, said, “We look forward to working with BlackBerry to mobilise our resident developer community, including students, researchers and faculties adjacent to our premises, the universities of Johannesburg and Witwatersrand.”

As part of the smartphone maker’s extensive developer program more than 1,600 individuals have already benefited to date.

Source: HumanIPO

PriceCheck, Africa’s leading price comparison service, was recently awarded the prestigious title of International 2013 BlackBerry App of the Year.

PriceCheck, announced its selection as one of three finalists up for the award in early April.

PriceCheck managed to fight off some stiff competition in the form of IKS (Poland) Cooklet And Hoyts (Argentina) Cine Hoyts to eventually emerge as the winner in a ceremony held in Orlando, Florida this week.

“We are proud to have won this award after competing with so many great BlackBerry 10 apps from around the world,” said PriceCheck GM Andre de Wet. De Wet further added: “This underlines that South Africa has world-class talent when it comes to mobile software development. We also see it as recognition of the value our app brings to mobile consumers.”

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According to Bloomberg, BlackBerry has fallen the most in a week as stock dropped 4%. This comes after the recent announcements of the BlackBerry Q5 for select markets and now the company’s plan to make BlackBerry’s messaging service (BBM) available to iOS and Android devices.

While shares of the Ontario based company have increased to 28% in 2013, BlackBerry’s decision to ‘share’ its free messaging service, similar to that of WhatsApp, will mean losing control of one of its most exclusive and valuable services, that arguably made BlackBerry such a popular and appealing device when it first emerged.

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BlackBerry has announced its Q5 smartphone at the BlackBerry Live event in Orlando.

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins introduced the new device that runs BlackBerry 10, aimed at emerging markets, describing it as “youthful and fun”.

The Q5, that will be available in selected markets from July,  features the typical BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard with discrete keys as well as a 3.1-inch touchscreen.

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Newly leaked information about the unconfirmed upcoming BlackBerry R10, suggest that the new device will indeed be a budget version of the BlackBerry Q10.

The leaked information that comes in the form of some newly claimed specs were published on technology news site DGtle. DGtle reveals that like the Q10, the R10 will supposedly feature a 3.1-inch screen and 2GB of RAM.

According to DGtle, to serve its “budget” offering the R10 will offer a 5-megapixel camera, 8GB of storage and a 1,800 mAh non-removable battery in comparison to the Q10′s 8-megapixel camera,  16GB storage and 2100 mAh battery.

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According to BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins, the smartphone manufacturer will be selling  “tens of millions” of its new Q10 smartphone, the second of two devices to run the BB10 OS launched in January.

BlackBerry has since climbed to its highest level in more than a month with shares rising to 3.9 percent to $15.61 at the close.  This is the highest price since 21 st March. Add to this that stock has increased by 32 percent this year and it could mean the beginning of a significant comeback for the once failing smartphone maker.

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The SpaceStation, the digital media sales agency who represents GoMetro (read the review) announced that since its launch in October 2012, the platform has grown to just over 528 000 unique browsers in March 2013.

Data from the last 6 months also show that 43% of users spend more than 3 minutes on the service per session, showing great potential for engagement.

The Space Station CEO Gustav Goosen says that “We are all aware of the phenomenal growth of mobile internet access in South Africa. With this in mind we are particularly proud of GoMetro and the success they have had in providing a real service to commuters. These commuters made 1 561 811 queries for real time updates with a staggering 635 221 of those queries made in March alone.”

The platform is designed to provide Metrorail commuters with real-time information including train timetables, line announcements, updates and other key services.

GoMetro was carefully developed to work efficiently on any device with the sole prerequisite that the phone has an Internet connection. That being said an interesting trend has developed over the last 6 months. Over 80% of the users accessed GoMetro on Blackberrys while only 8% used Android, 6% Nokia, 1,5% Apple and the remaining used a Windows Phone.

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While 3D graphics in video games continues to advance, looking more realistic over time, the one element it seems that has not quite been perfected is that of water, with it not looking much like the real thing.

Well, that is all about to change with the development of a new fluid simulation algorithm called “Position Based Fluids” (PBD).

NVIDIA’s Miles Macklin and Matthias Müller-Fischer explain ”In fluid simulation, enforcing incompressibility is crucial for realism; it is also computationally expensive. (…) By formulating and solving a set of positional constraints that enforce constant density, our method allows similar incompressibility and convergence to modern smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) solvers, but inherits the stability of the geometric, position based dynamics method, allowing large time steps suitable for real-time applications.”

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