Research In Motion (RIM) has picked a district of London, England to open the first of its global BlackBerry Tech Centers in a bid to generate additional interest in creating applications for BlackBerry 10. Following an announcement at BlackBerry Jam Americas, the firm selected the British town of Slough to build this initial dedicated developer workspace, which will be open from 9am to 5pm and staffed by a BlackBerry developer evangelist team.

Each day of the week will have a "specific focus", which guarantees developers the support that is most relevant to them. On Mondays, the team will focus on helping developers with Native/Cascades/Qt, while Wednesdays will provide guidance on developing with BlackBerry WebWorks/HTML 5. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, meanwhile, will be centered around helping Android, iOS, and Windows developers respectively bring their apps to the new BlackBerry 10 platform, using a range of tried and tested porting strategies.

In addition to the regular stream of activity, the global BlackBerry Tech Centers are also intended to provide a space for a wider range of developer engagement activities, while serving as an open, collaborative forum for developers to share their experiences with, and learnings from, developing for BlackBerry 10.

Alec Saunders, VP Developer Relations at RIM said, "The opening of this first BlackBerry Tech Center underscores our ongoing commitment to actively engage with and support the efforts of our developer community. This new center in our EMEA headquarters designates space where developers can draw on the resources and skill set of our experienced developer evangelist team to help them create compelling apps for the new BlackBerry 10 platform."

Since May this year, more than 5,000 BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha test units have been seeded with developers, enabling them to build and test applications for BlackBerry 10.