The BlackBerry awesomeness keeps on rolling out of Mobile World Congress! Earlier today I showed you a demo of a document sharing app on BlackBerry PlayBook which was created by The Astonishing Tribe, now known as the Design Foresights team at RIM, a company acquired in December 2010. That app is called Confetti and RIM just put up an official concept demo video of it along with a video for another concept app called PitchRocket.

Check out the demo videos and some snippets from RIM’s blog below!

TAT CONCEPT APPS!

You gotta love The Astonishing Tribe and what they’re doing on the BlackBerry PlayBook, which will eventually make its way to BlackBerry smartphones. Captured at Mobile World Congress yesterday is a video preview of an upcoming document sharing app created by TAT for the PlayBook. This app allows you to wirelessly share documents by swiping it in the person’s direction or by placing PlayBooks side-by-side. You can also “power swipe” a doc so that is shows up on a presentation screen, still wirelessly!

Check out the video above and feel free to share your comments below.

via @alexkinsella & bbnews.pl

The BlackBerry Jam and Developer microsites recently received a nice update courtesy of user-interface geniuses The Astonishing Tribe (TAT). Along with new sites for Adobe AIR and BlackBerry Java (with one for BlackBerry Theme Studio in the works), the new developer sites are fast and look great. RIM says they built these microsites to:

• Bring all of the documentation, samples, tutorials, downloads and API references into one convenient, integrated location
• Ensure that the information is presented and organized in a way that makes sense for the community who is using the technology
• Keep it simple! We’ve been working with the design groups from TAT to create a streamlined design to get you the information you’re looking for FAST!

If you’re a developer or are interested in becoming one, check out the BlackBerry Jam and Developer site at blackberry.com/developers or read more at the Inside BlackBerry Dev Blog!

Next up in line to be acquired by RIM is JayCut, a company with focus on video editing and cloud-based services. This acquisition adds yet another unique and skilled team to work on improving the BlackBerry platform. Besides for JayCut, RIM also acquired Torch Mobile, Cellmania, part of DataViz, The Astonishing Tribe, Gist, Tungle and Scoreloop. With all these acquisitions, I’m really excited to see what they’ll bring to QNX-powered BlackBerry smartphones and tablets. Here’s the note from David Yach, Chief Technology Officer at RIM:

Today we are pleased to announce that JayCut has joined Research In Motion (RIM). We’re excited that the JayCut team is bringing their expertise in video editing and cloud-based services to the BlackBerry platform.

JayCut is based out of Sweden and operates a premier online video editor that they have licensed to a variety of companies and websites.

The BlackBerry PlayBook offers users premium multimedia features, including dual HD cameras for video capture and video conferencing, HDMI output and high resolution video playback. By working with JayCut to add video editing capabilities to the BlackBerry platform we can further enrich our customers’ multimedia experience with BlackBerry.

What do you think about this acquisition by RIM? Anyone excited about being able to edit videos and other multimedia with official BlackBerry apps?

via Inside BlackBerry

It’s been a while since RIM first released the free Scrapbook application for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. This scrapbooking app was developed by The Astonishing Tribe and features wallpapers, photos and stickers with “playful” multi-touch gestures for creating scrapbook collections. The latest version available is 1.1.0.4 and includes the following changes:

• Share Scrapbooks on your Facebook wall
• New postcard and summer themes
• Multitasking
• Delete Scrapbooks

For more info and to download Scrapbook find it here in BlackBerry App World.

Now here’s an interesting bit that pretty much came out of no where. According to GigaOM, RIM is not only working with The Astonishing Tribe for the updated BlackBerry user interface but also an Ontario-based design firm known as YOU i Labs. For those of you who aren’t familiar with YOU i Labs, they helped develop the front-end user experience for HTC Sense. Apparently RIM almost acquired this company but ended up developing some sort of partnership. It wouldn’t surprise me if they do end up acquiring them though since they’ve already acquired a few. From Om:

My sources in the mobile design industry have indicated that a deal was in the works between the two companies. Initially it seemed that RIM was going to buy YOU i Labs, but in the end it turned out to be a significant partnership between the two companies.

The deal would be a boost for RIM, which has been focusing more on improving the user experience on its devices. RIM, last December, bought The Astonishing Tribe or TAT, a Swedish UI design firm to help improve tablet and smartphone UI design. YOU i Labs develops user experience and interface technologies for mobile devices of all kinds including tablets, smartphones and other mobile electronics. The company boasts that nearly 500 million devices are running software developed by the company.

Also according to GigaOM, YOU i Labs works closely with Teknision, a Taiwanese company that designs the Playbook UI. For more info on YOU i Labs check out their site at youilabs.com or watch a video about them from Ontario Innovation below. I’ve also included a presentation video which includes a talk by Teknision’s and YOU i Labs Presidents, Gabor and Jason.

What do you think about RIM’s rumored partnership with the developers of HTC Sense? Whatever they end up producing (if this rumor holds true), I hope it’s uniquely awesome.

WATCH THE VIDEOS!

Back in February we saw a demo video of an upcoming scrapbook application for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. This app is called Scrapbook, available for free and was developed by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a company acquired by RIM last December. The Scrapbook app was officially released today for PlayBook owners and can be downloaded from the BlackBerry App World. Here’s the official description:

Create Scrapbook pages from wallpapers, photos and stickers with playful multi-touch gestures

Save your creations and browse them from a cool “clothes line” list

Create, remix and enjoy!

For more info and to download the Scrapbook app for the PlayBook check it out in the BlackBerry App World here. Feel free to share some of your scrapping projects in the comments!

Since RIM acquired The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) back in December we haven’t heard much about them but it looks like they’ve produced in preparation for MWC 2011. Over at the Inside BlackBerry blogs, Douglas posted a pair if videos where TAT demonstrates two BlackBerry PlayBook tablet apps: Scrapbook and Aura. Here’s a bit about each app:

In the short amount of time since joining RIM, they’ve already built a variety of fun apps demonstrating the performance of the BlackBerry PlayBook platform. One application that caught our eye was the “scrapbook” app, which demonstrates advanced four-finger multi-touch controls and rich graphics in the above video.

The “aura” application shown in the video above demonstrates rich graphics and physics engine similar to TAT’s “scrapbook” demo, but was built entirely with web technologies like HTML5 and CSS. Built in a week, “aura” demonstrates how web developers can leverage the professional grade performance of the BlackBerry PlayBook platform just like Adobe AIR and native application developers.

Definitely some nice apps from TAT and it looks like they worked in some of their 3D talent. Seeing what TAT can do with the PlayBook is exciting because I can’t wait to see what other apps get published for the PlayBook and future BlackBerry smartphones. Check out the videos below and let me know what you think in the comments!

WATCH THE VIDEOS!