BlackBerry, which is considered to be the phone of the businessmen and professionals, seems to have set its eyes on the youth.

While launching models to attract them, the Canadian company Research In Motion has begun an initiative to keep the youth engaged in developing apps (applications) for the BlackBerry community across the world.

The company has decided to tap the engineering students in India to strengthen the developer ecosystem. “We have already 2,000 applications specially developed for Indian market by local developers. There are over 26,000 developers in India,” Ms Annie Mathew, Head (Alliances and Developer Relations) of RIM India, said.

Addressing a press conference, she said the company had launched a pilot in Tamil Nadu where in engineering students from 10 universities were invited to take part in the BlackBerry Summit. “They will be given relevant tools to develop Apps. They will get prizes at the end of the competition,” she said.

No sabotage

The company, which covers 625 telecom networks across the world, saw no act of sabotage in disruption of services that had kept millions of users out of the Web for a few days. The firm was getting to ready spend a fortune on the applications that it was going to offer for free for its users beginning Wednesday night.

The $100 candy of applications was aimed at pacifying the outraged users across the world. The BlackBerry users were getting messages from the firm about the freebie. People could choose from a bouquet of applications drawn from various segments of utility.

When asked what could be the financial impact of the outage, RIM representatives said that they were yet to estimate that. “But we will have to pay to developers of the apps that we are giving free of cost,” they said.

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