As IN09 (formally known as the Ice conference) hosted by Interactive Ontario came to a close this year one thing still remains true – content is the key. The annual two day conference draws speakers from different areas of media who discuss and debate about its future.
Websites and cell phones are no longer static devices, they have now been transformed to social networks and mobile devices, both allowing for applications to be developed on top of and consumers to do even more than 5 years ago. Toronto-based Viigo has had tremendous success in this area as they have leveraged Blackberry devices to allow publishers to serve contents to users of the device that is now nicknamed the “Crackberry.” During one session on applications, Viigo CEO, Mark Ruddock shared that while the device is certainly popular, development of applications for Blackberry’s can take as much as 5 times the development time.
The closing session on Day 1 created provided a lot of controversy and debate in the audience as panelists discussed the Canadian government’s desire to add taxes to online video content. Of course no discussion about online video is not complete without someone trying to figure out how to properly monetize this type of content. Heavy.com’s David U.K. has certainly seen his share of video shows, many of which he added simply can not be monetized due to lack of interest from advertisers.
Over all, IN09 was a good event to bring together thoughts and opinions on the future of content in Canada.
While today it can certainly take materially longer to develop some things on the BlackBerry over the iPhone, RIM recognizes this, and is hard at work optimizing the development experience on BlackBerry. They recognize the importance of apps to the success of the platform, and their ISV group is one of the best in the business.
Mark