Apple hires former social media head at Nike

It seems like Apple is looking to boost its social media presence with its latest hire. The Cupertino-based tech giant has just hired the former social media head of Nike and Burberry, Musa Tariq. He was most recently the global senior director of social media and community, digital brand for Nike from 2012 to this year. And he was with Burberry from 2009 to 2012 and served as the global director for digital marketing. He became the head of the social media accounts of Burberry in 2011, which was run by Angela Ahrendts, the current retail chief of Apple. Perhaps, Apple is looking to step up its presence on the different social networking sites, particularly since there are no official Twitter or Facebook accounts for the Apple brand itself.

Source: Mashable

Ford replaces BlackBerry with Apple with 9,300 iPhones for staff

The winds of change are slowly and surely blowing through the corporate space as companies upgrading their systems are making choices on what mobile solutions to run. Ford has seemingly moved away from BlackBerry and has gone with Apple by deploying 9,300 iPhones for its employees for the next two years.

This is a huge commitment and a vote of confidence for iPhone following the announcement that Apple and IBM would be teaming up for an unprecedented mobile enterprise push.

Ford finds the iPhone secure and simple to use. "It meets the overall needs of the employees because it is able to serve both our business needs and a secure way and the needs we have in our personal lives with a single device," said Sara Tatchio, Ford's Manager for Integrated Global Communication. Enterprise is an area that BlackBerry owned but since its decline in popularity, Apple has become the logical choice for enterprise and corporations looking to provide acceptable and secure BYOD policies. 98% of the Fortune 500 are said to already be running on iOS and Apple expects to grow this even further.

Source: AppleInsider

Waterloo uses BlackBerry tech to mobilize disaster recovery efforts during emergencies

After seeing Toronto’s recent issues with flooding, the City of Waterloo created a better way to centralize communications with the disaster recovery teams (transportation team, parks and forestry teams etc.) on the ground, the mayor, the head of public works and other incident groups. They found communicating via email made communications disjointed and delayed.

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BlackBerry Launches mobile app development award at Canada-Wide Science Fair 2014

This year, the Canada-Wide Science Fair launched the BlackBerry Smartphone App Development Award. This continues CWSF’s tradition of fostering interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) among Canadian youth, preparing them to pursue STEM careers, especially in the rapidly growing field of mobile computing. The event takes place in Windsor from May 10^th to 17^th, 2014.

CWSF is the largest science-based competition in the country, and has captured the imaginations of thousands of students since 1962 (approximately 25,000 students compete each year.

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