Bangkok--11 Jan--Hill + Knowlton Strategies
E-Innovation is a developer shop specializing in providing customized applications to their clients. The unique features offered by the BlackBerry platform, such as the BlackBerry PushService and BlackBerryMessenger (BBM), have helped E-Innovation to create robust mobile applications. When BlackBerryusers in Thailand were looking for the latest news, E-Innovation delivered it quickly and simply with their news application for The Nation using the BlackBerryWebWorksdeveloper tool.
Pongsak Thamprapasasadon, E-Innovation’s Owner, CEO and Managing Partner, tells us about the support he’s received from the Research In Motion(RIM) team and his experience using the multitude of BlackBerry developer resources and tools.
Why is it so important for your apps to leverage features like Push notifications?
Push notifications are without a doubt one of the strongest ways for developers to improve the user experience. The immediacy of the BlackBerry Push Service allows us to interact with the user at any time. Using The Nation app as an example, consumers can choose which topics they want pushed to them, so it’s a unique experience. Not only are the right topics being pushed to the right people, but there’s also a very important timeliness factor. For example, with all the flooding in Bangkok recently, BlackBerry users want to know immediately about any alerts concerning their neighborhoods or their commute to and from work. This built-in technology offers that seamlessly.
Your applications are in HTML5. Can you tell us about your development experience using BlackBerryWebWorksand if it helped to enhance your web development?
Our existing team has been studying and working with HTML and browser-based applications for more than three years, and it made working with BlackBerry WebWorks really easy. In terms of the basic know-how of developers who have HTML experience, building an app using BlackBerry WebWorks was not difficult at all, and it means that you aren’t forced to build a native application if you don’t need to. In terms of speed of development, BlackBerry WebWorks has an advantage over other platforms. It is definitely one of the strongest points in terms of developing for the BlackBerry platform.
How important is it to integrate your apps with BBM?
BBM has helped us a lot, especially with Thai users, who are just crazy about it. Integrating the application with the BBM SDK certainly enables our developers to create better features for news sharing. Using the flooding as an example again, if a notification has been pushed to the user, they can then easily share the message with their BBM peers. That’s the kind of functionality people are looking for: the full integration of social media with real-time info. Moving forward, we hope to integrate BBM 6 into games to make them social, thereby allowing users to message each other directly and share information with one another.