BlackBerry has been on the receiving end of much flak recently, from stock prices and investor confidence taking a tumble to customers shying away. RIM, the company that owns the BlackBerry brand is actively pushing its way to make it through the troubled times.

At a recent media event, for which we were invited, it was great to see BlackBerry have some lovely use case scenarios for the BlackBerry platform. Currently we all look at the BlackBerry platform as this eco system that’s just email and BBM. While that’s not false, there is more to BlackBerry than just those two elements and this event was a great place to showcase those bits.

We had Annie Mathews – Head of Alliance and Developer Relations at RIM India run us through some quick facts and figures regarding the ecosystem that is BlackBerry.

It was rather surprising to hear that over 90% of the Fortune 500 companies were using BlackBerry Enterprise solutions and there were over 250000 enterprise servers in use at last count. BlackBerry App World had seen a billion downloads and interestingly there were 380 apps that were using the BBM api which was made available to developers, the best bit was that they were accounting for 20% of all downloads.Interestingly the BB app World was available in a 108 countries and supported 26 currencies and with the new 3.0 App World update, developers were free to pursue region specific pricing.

With 630 carrier partnerships across the world it is certain that BlackBerry was all out to show that it isn’t a dying star. In India, RIM stated it had more than 26000 developer relationships in place.

We got to see a few developers talk of what they are doing to make a difference to the people who use BlackBerry devices.

First presentation was by Sarla Group. Khyati Bhulla the product manager had an interesting presentation on how their app is making business live for the businessmen and decision makers.

Their app on the BlackBerry App World called the Smart Glance delivers secure information stored on the company’s servers to the people concerned on the move at every step of the way.

SmartGlance™ provides On-demand and Real-time access to continually changing corporate data, reports and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) via mobile smart phones. In addition, SmartGlance also provides analysis tools on the mobile phone so that you can make smart decisions even when you are on the road.

We got a demo of the application and it indeed was amazing to see how it was being deployed and making life so seamless for the BlackBerry user in the corporate juggle of things. The app also allows one to fetch data from almost any Data Source, be it SAP, Invensys, Rockwell, etc. With support for a cloud hosted or a secure server hosted model in place, a user can either have this data available in the cloud or onto the company’s secure servers located anywhere in the world.

Next we had a rather interesting and quite unique demo from Sham Banerji who is the CEO of i2i TeleSolutions a company that’s making it possible for Telemedicine to be a viable form of having healthcare available to the many billions.

Sham Banerji showed us how his application and solution is helping doctors and patients interact without ever coming face to face. His first demonstration consisted of pulling data of a hypothetical patient and showing us his vitals. One could set a range on any given parameter and if any patient was outside of that parameter, it would alert him, once the doctor was aware, he could connect to the other doctors securely using the BlackBerry platform (over the phone or on the PlayBook) and take further action. While this was merely a simplistic scenario, it’s safe to say that the application and it’s implementation was quite unique, interesting and by far the best demonstration on healthcare I’ve seen.

We’ve even got a small video of this rather interesting demonstration, worth a look honestly!

The other presentations revolved around entertainment and how a company called Winjit Technologies had managed to attract customers from across the world. Winjit Technologies has apps in the entertainment and spirituality segment and has seen a lot of downloads coming from the US and South Africa.We also got to hear how appifying entertainment and spirituality was paying dividends to Winjit Technologies.

To end it we had two quick walk throughs of a game from Manthan Studio and the now famous Hangman game developed by Spice Labs which has seen 20million downloads.

What I did carry through from this brief interaction was the gamut of possibilities that exist on the BlackBerry platform. It’s a side that we haven’t explored enough and begs to be explored in detail.