The biggest piece of this effort is RIM's upcoming BBX operating system that will be released on BlackBerry tablets and sometime early next year. RIM is also hosting a series of app development "hackathons" across the country to help developers create applications that work with the company's BlackBerry Messenger program.

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Alec Saunders, RIM's new vice president of developer relations, said at Thursday's Boston Hackathon that RIM was well-positioned to make gains in terms of attracting new app developers despite recent gloomy news surrounding the company (See "") . In the first place, he noted that there are 70 million BlackBerry users around the world, which is hardly anything to sneeze at. Second, he cited research from the Yankee Group showing that while BlackBerry's AppWorld has fewer apps than rival stores from and Google, it actually has more paid downloads than Google's Android Market, meaning that creating paid apps for App World can be a profitable endeavor.

Saunders also expects the number of app developers drawn to BlackBerry to accelerate once they start working with the Webworks Software Development Kit that acts as a guide for companies that want to create HTML5 applications that can then be uploaded directly onto RIM's BlackBerry AppWorld. HTML5 is the latest version of the classic HTML programming language featuring graphics and video capabilities that have been touted as alternatives to Adobe's Flash software (See "").