In the United States, the app economy, as of late 2012, had created close to 530,000 jobs and served as a significant economic driver for a number of states. A study released by CTIA-The Wireless Association and the Application Developers Alliance, dubbed The Geography of the App Economy, reported more than 2.4 million apps available on more than 11 different operating systems and the stat that by 2016, mobile app revenue would be more than $46 billion.

Europe wants in. No wonder, when you see stats like the one from ABI Research this year that point to the combined app revenue from tablets and smartphones being projected to reach $92 billion by 2018, and to the app economy growing at 44.6 percent on average annually. But the continent needs some data to help it get its spot in the limelight, which is where Eurapp comes in.

The newly launched venture, Eurapp, was birthed by the European Commission, and is being run by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway in conjunction with tech industry analyst firm GigaOM Research. It’s part of the Startup Europe initiative of the European Commission’s Digital Agenda, which aims to help tech entrepreneurs start, maintain and grow their businesses in Europe.  NUI Galway’s Dr John Breslin, SIOC creator and co-founder of iPad news and social reader app StreamGlider (see our story here) is leading the Eurapp project at DERI.

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Blackberry president and CEO Thorsten Heins with new global creative director Alicia Keys.

The new and long-awaited Blackberry 10 line from Research In Motion (RIM) makes its debut today. The company that once defined the smart phone market has a lot riding on it, and it remains to be seen if the new models debuting today will revive its fortunes. It’s already revived its name: Thorsten Heins, President and CEO, revealed at the launch today that “from this day forward, RIM becomes Blackberry.”

The two models that kick off its re-engineered approach to mobile computing are the Blackberry Q10 with a hybrid touch-screen/keyboard and the Z10 with a full touch-screen and onscreen keyboard, powered by the Blackberry 10 platform. Of the Q10, Heins said, “We built this for all those people who told us, ‘we just have to have a physical keyboard typing experience’.” Given Blackberry users’ well-known attachment to traditional keyboards, getting the onscreen keyboard right is going to be a big concern for tried-and-true Blackberry users.

As on the Blackberry Playbook before it, SwiftKey – the best-selling Android app of 2012— is reportedly behind the virtual keyboard technology on the new models. Though that vendor wasn’t named in the launch presentation during the demo of the touch-screen keyboard capabilities, the features Blackberry demonstrated pointed to the company’s leveraging the cross-platform SwiftKey software development kit for at least some of the new devices’ capabilities.

And what’s behind SwiftKey is natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning technology to speed up touch-screen typing.

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