Q: Obviously RIM has a lot of prior experience with the Wireless Enterprise Symposium. How do you find that may have impacted how the BlackBerry Developer Conference has come to be? Any similarities? Differences?
A: That’s a good question. The audience is very, very different in that this is much more focused. It was a real fun project to work on because we could get very specific with the content that we were talking about. We did a lot of work with the developer community to figure out what we needed to present, and we found that going deep technically was very much in demand, while at WES we keep it beginner or general level. So we could get really specific and really deep and have some fun with the topics we were going to be presenting: a lot of the technical details of our JDK, and the different tools we have available, and the different options you have for development (whether that’s web or Java).
We found in the organizing we could be a lot more specific and a lot more detailed around catering to a specific developer audience, as opposed to catering to customers, and developers, and carriers, and partners like we do at WES. The audience that is coming to the DevCon will still probably come to WES, because there’s much broader content there, but it’s very much a different experience. We’re taking everything we know about organizing a good conference and applied it from a structure perspective, but the content and the speakers and the program is very much catered to a very specific developer audience.
Q: Do you see any changes happening to WES as a result of the DevCon?
A: Nope, none at all.