At the 2009 Blackberry Developer Conference, Research In Motion (RIM) unveiled this week a new services platform to help developers build responsive, location-aware and revenue-generating applications for BlackBerry smartphones. The new services platform will offer advertising, payment, content push and new location services.

Location services
The three new location-based services include cell site geolocation, reverse geocoding and travel time. The Cell site geolocation service will provide developers with an alternative to GPS, with an estimate of a smartphone’s location based on cell tower triangulation. This service is planned to be available in the first half of 2010 and it will be supported on BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry OS 5.0 or higher.

RIM is introducing a new reverse geocoding service that converts geolocation coordinates to a specific address for use in BlackBerry applications. Reverse geocoding is available today with BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry OS 5.0 or higher.

Using a simple API call, developers will also be able to incorporate estimated travel time within their applications for almost any destination in the US and Canada. The travel time calculations will be based on distance, speed limits and aggregated traffic conditions. The service returns values for an estimated arrival time, total travel time and total distance that can be used in an application. The travel time service is expected to be available in the first half of 2010. The travel time feature seems to be born from the acquisition of Dash Navigation by RIM earlier this year.

Advertising
RIM is also willing to simplify advertisement integration into Blackberry apps. “The new BlackBerry Advertising Service will enable developers to integrate advertising into their BlackBerry applications, helping them generate revenue and simplifying the business of mobile advertising”, said RIM.

With the BlackBerry Advertising Service, RIM plans to provide developers with access to a large pool of ad units from advertising networks such as Jumptap, Lat49, Millennial Media, NAVTEQ, 1020 Placecast, Quattro Wireless and Sympatico.ca. The choice of specialized location-based ad networks such as Lat49, NAVTEQ and 1020 Placecast reveals a real sensitivity for this topic at RIM.

The service will feature formats compliant with the Mobile Marketing Association's (MMA) guidelines as well as more sophisticated ads that will be able to deeply integrate with BlackBerry applications. Examples of this integration between ads and applications will include the ability to easily initiate a call from an ad, add a calendar entry or contact entry from an ad, and directly link to an application in BlackBerry App World.

In addition to that RIM also announced in-App payment and opened up its BlackBerry Push Service to all developers, allowing them to deliver time-sensitive alerts and up to 8 KB of data to applications.

“With the new services platform announced today we will help developers further monetize their applications and build breakthrough, highly responsive, location-aware applications for BlackBerry smartphones,” said Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO at Research In Motion.