Well it was another hectic week at WES 2008 and we had our fair share of work to do, both on and off the show floor.

I took part in Alan Brenner's opening session on the Future of Mobile Applications which was delayed due to the room not being large enough to hold the audience. Once an additional room was setup with a video feed I did a live demo of our version 3 application including InkSearch. I was fortunate enough to be using WiFi - some of my presenting colleagues weren't so fortunate and were victims of a severely overloaded AT&T cell site at the venue that sent many an email addict over the edge during WES week.

Paul also gave a live session on our updated release in the Demo Theatre and Vodafone presented a Barclays Bank case study for DevelopIQ, our new custom development division launched at the show. DevelopIQ provides customers and partners a blank slate when it comes to ideas they may have for a BlackBerry solution - whether it involves Anoto Digital Pens, Bluetooth Barcode scanners, custom push applications or large scale consumer content applications.

As always, the Solutions Showcase was the buzz of the show with some great new applications taking the BlackBerry platform to a new level. As a Philips Pronto veteran of many years, having Unify4Life as our booth neighbour was particularly memorable - I can now control my entire home AV setup from my BlackBerry! Impatica also took their video-out solutions to a new level by previewing their in-vehicle screen interface for law-enforcement applications, allowing policemen to easily use their BlackBerry smartphone on the move.

And finally, the fun. DevelopIQ launched WES After Dark at the show. We always felt that the evenings at WES needed a little livening up, so why not leverage the BlackBerry platform as a social networking tool to co-ordinate the evening venues! We took the opportunity to show-off another one of RIM's latest technologies - Web Signals. This allowed us to push a custom icon out to every WAD subscriber that was updated automatically via custom push when new venue content was updated on the WAD live blog. Needless to say this was a hit with all WAD-goers and bigger plans are already afoot for next year. Now you have no excuse not to join us at WES!