RIM pushes Blackberry software development

BLACKBERRY MAKER Research in Motion (RIM) is extending a helping hand to programmers with the launch of a software development platform.

At the Blackberry Developer Conference the Canadian company unveiled a host of services in a bid to help developers create better applications and make a bit of money from them as well. The added services integrate better advertising, payment, content push and location awareness tools.

As part of the package, RIM is also opening up its Push Service to all registered developers, allowing them to deliver time-sensitive alerts and up to 8KB of data to their applications. Formerly accessible only to Blackberry Alliance Program members, the service will be made generally available in the first half of next year.

RIM is also adding is a set of location services, including the existing GPS capabilities as well as cell site geolocation, reverse geocoding and travel time.

Cellular geolocation provides an alternative to GPS through cell site triangulation, while reverse geocoding converts geolocation coordinates to a specific address for use in Blackberry applications. The  travel time service provides an estimated journey duration, based on distance, speed limits and aggregated traffic conditions, for almost any destination in the US and Canada.

Reverse geocoding is available today and the geolocation and travel time services should be available in the first half of 2010.

On the money making side, there is the Blackberry Advertising Service and the Blackberry Payment Service. As the names suggest, the former will enable developers to integrate advertising into their applications, while the latter incorporates merchant services and customer billing to help companies monetise their applications by selling digital content such as premium content, monthly or annual subscriptions, and additional levels or upgrades for games and other entertainment applications from within their applications.

The Advertising Service taps into a range of well known advertising networks such as Jumptap, Lat49, Millennial Media, Navteq, 1020 Placecast, Quattro Wireless and Sympatico. The SDK lets users interact with the advert, calling a number embedded in it or adding a calendar entry or a new contact, while the developer will have access to several analytics tools.

The Blackberry Advertising Service should be available in the first half of 2010, while the Payment Service and its SDK should be out in mid-2010.

At the conference, RIM also talked up its work with Adobe allowing creative professionals and application developers to use Flash technology and the Adobe Creative Suite content development and authoring tools to create content for Blackberry smartphones.

As part of the collaboration, Adobe Creative Suite 5 will provide the ability for designers to create image and video content, from tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects, which can then be imported into BlackBerry application development tools.

Furthermore, RIM will also enable Adobe Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Device Central software to support the creation and testing of Blackberry widgets and web content optimised for the Blackberry browser.

Full details about the new additions to the development platform can be found here. µ