Hundreds of nerds converged at the San Francisco Blackberry Developer Conference today to listen and learn about new capabilities within Blackberry’s App World. Given the audience, I’ve never felt cooler than I do right now. OK – I’m just kidding about the nerds, but developer jokes are too easy to pass-up. Based on RIM’s announcements I would say the main thrust of the conference is monetization. I have also come away impressed with RIM’c commitment to growing App World.
Monetization:
The four announcements made by co-CEO Jim Balsillie were around the following topics:
- Ad APIs: RIM aggregated a variety of add platforms so developers can simply insert adds into your application using a new SDK
- Payment service APIs: A new payment service SDK makes it quick and easy to enable click to purchase capabilities through virtually any platform (e.g. Paypal, credit card, carrier billing).
- Cell site geo-location APIs: RIM added cell tower triangulation APIs to offer easy access to always on location services.
- Push APIs: for alerts and content on widgets: Can push alerts. Efficiency for network and battery life
The first two of their four main announcements were directly targeted at helping developers do something novel in the mobile app world – make money. However, even the geo-location offers big revenue opportunities. In fact, Yahoo Mobile demonstrated a widget based location aware search app that seemed to marry Yelp’s crowd sourcing capability, with Yahoo mobile search and Blackberry’s new geo-location engine. I know similar capabilities are offered on the iPhone, but I thought the always on capability was a pretty cool added feature. The net-net, this is a developer conference for grown-ups. Show me the money!
Commitment to App World Growth:
This issue may have been less interesting the many of the developers in the audience but it impressed me. RIM talked about its newly announced App World developer training that will take place around the globe in the native language of the country. For those young aspiring developers RIM talked about their its academic developer program that trains college aged kids how to develop for App World. Lastly, all the training material that already resides in App World was moved to YouTube so anyone doing a general web search can find the training materials they need.
All and all the news is a very well balanced mix of improved developer toolkits, initiatives to help continue fueling growth and tactical App World improvements that ease the logistics of development (e.g. persistent log-in for developers, leaving the simulator running while updating applications). The net net is it seems RIM is listening to its developer community and the developers are pleased.