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Canada's first self-driving car tests hit Ontario roads
Ontario ambitiously greenlit autonomous driving tests back in January, but nobody wanted to take the city up on its offer. This was likely due to its proximity to Michigan, where American car companies can test similar conditions without having to leave the country. But today brings good news for Canada: three groups are finally deploying the first self-driving cars in the country to Ontario's streets.
RIM releases BBM SDK for WebWorks, injects some chatting flavor into your apps
This year's BlackBerry DevCon might have come and gone with nary a mention of BBM's flagrant promiscuity, but RIM did give us some other BBM news. The Canuck company's BBM Social Platform SDK is now up for general availability after recently hitting version 1.0. The release extends its venerable messaging protocol to WebWorks developers, allowing their wares to initiate chats and incorporate BBM statuses, avatars and personal messages from the service. Also on the docket is "application-to-application background communication," which we presume enables a smorgasbord of behind the scenes cross-application chattiness. Finally, Crackberry developers will be able to start file transfers over the protocol, including virally sharing apps between users. Sounds like the 'Berry of the future is gonna be much more reliant upon Waterloo's messaging platform, so let's just hope there aren't any more outages.
BlackBerry Colt may be RIM's first QNX smartphone, will lack BES support out-of-box?
To many, a colt is a representation of rebirth and a symbol for youthfulness. Research in Motion appears to be in desperate need for exactly that -- a regeneration. It seems appropriate, then, that RIM may be launching the BlackBerry Colt, its first QNX-based "superphone," in the first quarter of 2012. This timeline will ensure the device launches at the expected time, according to rumors by BGR, but there's likely to be a few compromises to ensure it gets pushed out to market faster. The Colt is said to be undergoing internal testing with a single-core chip, contrary to promises of including dual-core CPUs. Additionally, the maiden voyage of the smartphone platform may be completely devoid of BES at the device's launch; it's taken longer than expected to rewrite the proper code to support QNX, and more time's necessary to bring it up to par with RIM's standards. What would the Enterprise customers do in the meantime? The alternative to BES is almost unthinkable: Exchange emails would be accessed by a preloaded version of Microsoft ActiveSync. Will the gamble yield greater returns in the long run, or will it remove the glue that still holds the company together?
