BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) has made it easier
for companies to make money from mobile applications by allowing
them to drop prepackaged advertising and micropayment applications
into their software.
The two new application programming interfaces (APIs) were among
a number of tools RIM
announced in San Francisco at its second developers'
conference.
Overall, the tools were aimed at making it easier to write
applications for the BlackBerry and to integrate them so that
users' experience "flowed", said Jim Balsillie, co-CEO at RIM.
Two other key announcements were the launch of geo-location APIs
based on cellular radio towers, to provide in-building
triangulation of users' whereabouts, and "push" APIs that allowed
tighter integration with alarm, alert and notification
applications.
Taken together, the intention was to remove users' awareness
that they were using technology. "The only thing they should be
thinking is what to do next," Balsillie said.
Some of the 1,300-plus developers at the event said the
announcements were overdue. One who specialised in touchscreen
phones said he was pleased with the announcements as they indicated
RIM's willingness to create tools for developers.
He said the BlackBerry user base of some 32 million was clearly
an attractive market. "The question for us is whether RIM has the
ability to get our applications to market efficiently," he
said.
RIM said it would support Adobe Flash animation and video
management software on BlackBerries. It also said Dreamweaver
developers would be able to create BlackBerry widgets directly.
This turns millions of Dreamweaver web programmers into potential
BlackBerry programmers.
Oracle chief architect Ted Farrell said many firms were trying
to push data to where it was needed, and increasingly this meant to
mobile platforms. Oracle had developed Fusion, a way of collecting
data and formatting it for different mobile platforms.
Oracle worked with RIM on two applications, one a mobile browser
and another a mobile client. Using Oracle Application Development
Framework, developers could target their apps to pre-defined
BlackBerry handsets with a minimum of coding.
Jeff McDowell, RIM's senior vice-president for business
marketing and software alliances, said the Oracle Fusion and Adobe
announcements were important to RIM and its customers as they were
standard tools that anyone could use to write programmes for
BlackBerries.
He said that smartphones were becoming application delivery
systems. "Voice is just another app," he said.
McDowell said there were fewer and fewer "island" apps.
Applications increasingly had to link to others to provide the rich
functionality demanded by users, but without losing the
cost-effectiveness and robust security demanded by CFOs and CIOs
respectively.