ORLANDO
'World' is a word that looms large in central Florida, starting with a certain very large amusement park and moving on from there.
In addition to Walt Disney World, there's SeaWorld, both of which helped give Orlando the world's largest concentration of theme parks and entertainment attractions. As America's most-visited city, Orlando is also home to the world's largest rental-car market (you really do learn something new every day).
This week, at the Marriott World Center Resort on World Center Drive, hundreds of people have converged for the BlackBerry World 2012 conference, for a chance to see where Waterloo-based Research In Motion plans to take users with its brand-new BlackBerry 10 platform, due to debut this year.
Using any word too often can diminish its impact, but after my first day at BlackBerry World, I can confirm that this event is well deserving of the name.
The evidence was everywhere as the conference kicked off late Monday afternoon at the BlackBerry Appy Hour Tweetup, where among others, I met Efrain Gomez, owner of Soluciones Blackberry in Ecuador. Gomez told me how essential RIM's devices have become to smartphone users in his country who, despite access to Android and iOS devices, overwhelmingly rely on their BlackBerrys for communication.
Later, in the Solutions Showcase, where exhibitors displayed all manner of mobile apps and accessories, a food stop at a random table landed me in conversation with a pair of Germans from IBM, an American with the Drug Enforcement Agency and a Texas-based Australian who works in logistics software solutions.
On the shuttle ride back to the nearby Hilton, where the BlackBerry 10 Jam developers conference kicks off on Tuesday, I heard at least three languages other than English being spoken. On arrival, a BlackBerry event staffer in the lobby held up a sign in hopes of flagging down expected guests from Israel, the UK and a host of European countries.
I found my way outside to the patio, where I pulled a chair up to a table with Madhu Kesavan, the Indo-Canadian founder of Card2Contact in Waterloo and a familiar face around the Communitech Hub; Josh Hillis of Hub startup PairMobile, and two Korean-born developers, one of whom has just sold 3,000 downloads of his BlackBerry locking app in the past month.
As we wound down after a long day, I reflected on the diversity of the people I'd encountered in just a few short hours, and the singular force that had led us to meet: a once-tiny tech startup, whose founders dared to imagine a bigger world beyond Waterloo.
This week in Orlando, that world is here.
