Popular with major musicians, the Animoog app is an evolutionary step and mobile extension of the original electronic analog Moog Synthesizer created by Dr. Robert Moog in the 1960s. Today marks Dr. Robert Moog’s 79th Birthday, and to celebrate both his birthday and his passion for high-tech toolmaking in the service of creativity, we are pleased to announce that the promotional Animoog app price of $0.99 will be extended until the end of the weekend in BlackBerry World before returning back to its original price of $9.99.

We hope that you will join us in celebrating Dr. Robert Moog’s birthday by heading over to BlackBerry World and making some awesome music!

As developers, when we have an idea for app, we can build it. But what if you’re not a developer, but you have the idea for the next great app? Dandy recently launched their beta where people can share their app ideas with the Dandy community and help build an amazing app together. Last week, I spoke with Karl Allen-Muncey and Taylor Jones during BlackBerry Live to talk apps, BlackBerry 10, and building the next great app.

The things I like to look for at these events are the technologies that have the potential to disrupt the apple cart. These revolutionary movements do more than simply evolve last year’s technology. They beg the question whether whole companies or industries will radically change and shift to address this new force, and whether or not new players will emerge as drivers in this movement. At GDC this year, I could see that such a shift is starting to take place and I’m excited that BlackBerry is actively engaged in this movement. What’s the shift? We’re starting to see mobile devices provide a console gaming experience, anywhere, anytime.

We’ve been playing games on phones for many years, why talk about this now? What’s changed?

Technology Advancement

As with many disruptive forces, a number of normal evolutionary changes take place first that, by themselves, are not disruptive. However, when brought together, they can change the game considerably and challenge an entire once-stable industry. The critical technologies all on mobile devices that are beginning to put pressure on the gaming console industry are the following:

• Multitasking Operating Systems
• High Performance GPUs
• High Definition Video (HDMI)
• Wireless Mobile Game Controllers
• Portable Game Software

When all these technology advancement come together in a smartphone, you have something very close to a game console in the palm of your hand. Each of these plays a vital role. Let’s explore the contribution of each.

Multitasking Operating Systems

A true multitasking operating system is critical for providing smooth performance and interactivity for today’s most demanding games. Not only must the OS manage the game itself, but it must also juggle location information, gyro, accelerometer and other sensors, concurrent voice or VOIP for trash-talking your friends during gameplay, and interact with the cloud and social networks for storing and sharing your results. Neither iOS nor Android has a great multitasking solution here. In contrast however, BlackBerry 10, powered by QNX Neutrino (a leading world class RTOS), is very well positioned to provide all the power necessary for managing the ever-increasing demand of concurrent functionality in the next generation of mobile games.

High Performance GPUs

GPUs render the images. Without them, our game visuals would be slow, blocky, and flat. There’s no question how important these processors are. Over the last couple of years, the advancements made by companies like ARM, Imagination, NVidia, and Qualcomm for smartphones have been enormous. It’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a game rendered by a GPU on a laptop vs. a game rendered by a smartphone GPU. Perhaps the most obvious difference has been the physical screen size. However, when you add a multitasking OS and a high performance GPU to HD Video (the next critical technology), things start to get really interesting.

High Definition Video (HDMI)

One of the things we did in the BlackBerry booth this year at GDC was connect a bunch of our BlackBerry Z10 smartphones (using the standard HDMI port) to large HD monitors. We also did this at our interactive pods in the Unity and Marmalade booths. I can’t tell you how many times people walked up and asked questions like, “Since when did BlackBerry start making game consoles?” When we told them they were looking at a game being rendered and played on the BlackBerry Z10 smartphone they had that mind blown look on their face.

In the picture above, a young gamer is playing “Shadow Gun” on a BlackBerry Z10. This is a great First Person Shooter game built on the Unity3D game engine. You can just see the Z10 on the table in front of him below the monitor. What you can’t see in this picture is the awesome SteelSeries Free game controller he’s using to play the game. That piece of critical technology is next on my list.

Wireless Mobile Game Controllers

To an awesome multitasking OS, killer GPU, and HDMI out, you add a wireless game controller and you’ve just about got the whole package. Using a controller accomplishes two important things: First, it gets your fingers off the valuable screen real estate freeing up more pixes for game play. The other benefit of the controller is that it adds that real, immersive game feeling you get with console controllers. The controllers we used at GDC are the SteelSeries Free Mobile Wireless Controllers (shown below). The last time I checked, the controller will set you back about $80USD and you can find one here. Other controllers, such as the Wii Remote and the Gametel, are also usable and there’s more to come.

For you game developers out there, you can get more information about how to instrument your code to work with these controllers including samples and tutorials by checking out Sean Paul Taylor’s devblog: “Adding Gamepad Support to Your BlackBerry 10 Game”. You can also read about Ramprasad Madhavan’s experience at GDC this year and the Unity BlackBerry 10 Open Beta coming soon on his devblog: “Unity and BlackBerry Gaming at GDC 2013”

Portable Game Engines & Frameworks

The final critical technology contributing to the end of the game console industry as we know it is portable game engines and frameworks. The easier it is to get your game ported from one platform to another, the harder it is for games to be locked to a single console or device. Companies like Marmalade, ShiVa3D, and Unity3D/Union all contribute here. As a developer, you want the highest quality game experience you can get with the largest distribution possible. This is exactly what these frameworks offer and each has been tuned to deliver a killer experience on BlackBerry 10.

Summary

I confess I own an Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and a PlayStation 3. However, I more often find myself connecting my Z10 to my 46” flat screen, the audio-out to my surround system, and kick back on the couch with my SteelSeries Free remote to enjoy a great game of Angry Bots or Critical Wave. There’s no question that smartphones like the BlackBerry Z10 are providing near console game experiences. This is being driven by advancements in 5 areas: real multitasking OS’s, high performance mobile GPUs, HD Video, mobile game controllers, and portable frameworks.

Consoles will need to adapt and add value to remain competitive. Where does that leave game consoles in the future then? Are they becoming extinct? Will smartphones replace game consoles outright? Will consoles evolve into something even better? Or, will they become the mobile extension of their stationary counterparts? As the great Yoda once said, “Always in motion the future is”.

The time has come to cast your ballots for the 2013 BlackBerry Achievement Awards! Using BlackBerry technology to help power innovation, the awards celebrate ideas coming to life. Everyone is encouraged to vote, so visit the website before April 15^th at 5pm ET to help us determine this year’s winners.  

A special category that is near and dear to our hearts is the App of the Year award. This year, Cine Hoyts Argentina, Cooklet, and PriceCheck Pty Ltd have been nominated as finalists. Make sure you check them out before voting for your favorites.

The full list of 2013 nominees is as follows:

App of the Year:

1. Cine Hoyts
2. Cooklet
3. PriceCheck Mobile

Putting Customers First:

1. ING DIRECT Canada
2. LoyaltyMatch Inc.
3. MMMOOO

Mobile Innovation of the Year:

1. DIRECTV Latin America
2. Mippin (Refresh Ltd.)
3. Waytag

Making the World a Better Place:

1. e-Cycle Solutions
2. Sussex Police
3. University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB)

Entrepreneur of the Year

1. EducationApps Limited
2. Nobex Technologies
3. SkyPark Café

This year’s winners will be announced at BlackBerry Live in Orlando, Florida. The award recipients will receive a series of incentives for their participation. Prizes for first place include: travel and accommodations to BlackBerry Live 2013, conference passes, extensive BlackBerry training, BlackBerry 10 smartphones and more.

For more on the BlackBerry Achievement Awards and BlackBerry Live, make sure you visit our landing pages at
http://www.blackberrylive.com/special-programs/achievement-awards/about
and
http://www.blackberrylive.com/
respectively.

Do you have a nominee that you’re rooting for? Let us know who your favorites are in the comments below!

Intelligent, intuitive, and totally reinvented.The BlackBerry Z10 will be available for pre-order 3/12. soc.att.com/W1vO7J #BlackBerry10

— AT&T (@ATT) March 11, 2013

#BlackBerryZ10 pre-order begins tomorrow at 8am ET and will be available online and in stores on March 28 bit.ly/TaImIz @blackberry

— Verizon Wireless (@VZWnews) March 13, 2013

What’s really impressive is that thanks to you, we’re already over the 80,000 app and game mark in BlackBerry World. This week, we’ll be rolling out enhancements to the BlackBerry World search system to make is easier for customers discover your content.

How will a customer notice these changes? Here’s an example: a customer searches for “Travel” expecting to find “BlackBerry Travel”. Before, BlackBerry Travel would have shown up lower in the rankings based on the number of travel apps in BlackBerry World. With the search enhancements, BlackBerry Travel will now be at the top based on app name and number of reviews.

Keywords – your content title, category name(s), and vendor name will automatically be added as keywords. For example, searches for ‘action games’ will return games in Games > Action category. Searches for “title” ”vendor” will find ”title” from ”vendor” – so searching for “Color ID Motek” will return Color ID.

Boost – With the changes, rankings will now include downloads and ratings information to help boost the ranking of the results. Note, downloads and ratings don’t determine whether your app appears in search results. That’s determined by title, keywords and short description – the search criteria. Downloads and ratings determine the search rank along with the search criteria. For example; all other criteria being equal, the app with the larger number of downloads will have the better ranking.

What else is in the update? We’ve fixed the formatting issue on the product detail page; brought back “Sort by popularity” to the BlackBerry World web store and RSS feeds are back too!

We’re constantly looking for your feedback – let us know what else you’d like to see in the comments.

Helex, a BlackBerry 10 developer, submitted his application – one that was originally rejected because it was missing some key criteria – for the Built For BlackBerry program. His application was ClipMan – according to Helex, it’s “a small clipboard manager. That’s it. It watches for changes in the Clipboard while opened and stores every text that appears in a small database. Such a clipboard history can be very handy while texting.”

ClipMan was a well-built and useful application; however, as per the Built For BlackBerry guidelines, it did not meet the criteria as it stood. In Helex’s words: “This single useful aspect is not enough for the Built for BlackBerry certificate. I tried, trust me. You will get: ‘basically only a single core function’.” In order to qualify for the Built For BlackBerry program, Helex had to update various aspects of his app to get approved.

Here’s a quick snapshot at some of the updates to the original version of the app that made ClipMan Built For BlackBerry certified:

1. Have a clear, functional design from the start. “The old version was for me, as the developer of the app, clear and understandable. The color was indicative enough, and all features worked. But as I learned in a session about good design in Amsterdam, the application should work for everyone, including color-blind people. Those user groups had an obvious handicap at the old version of ClipMan.”
2. Share app details. “The old version was very rudimentary. The new version is clear in the beginning and more detailed in the long text.”
3. Provide a context menu. “It was not really needed since in the old version, every function was available by simply opening an item. But if I understadd the design guidelines correctly, every List View should have a context Menu. The user expects this behavior.”
4. Make it easily searchable. “I added a search function to the list. Personally, I have the list only filled with the stuff I’m currently using, but others may use this application in a different way. So, a search function was needed.”
5. Integrate to BlackBerry 10. “Built for BlackBerry means built especially for BlackBerry 10, and so the application should integrate itself in every aspect into the BlackBerry 10 system. I would say now that we’ve got the BlackBerry 10 flow.”
6. Make sure that it is shareable. “Since the share functionality was a selection criterion at the BFB checklist, ClipMan had a share button even at the first version.”
7. Create a positive store experience. “I had two versions of ClipMan in the store: a free version, and a paid version. Sadly, this is also a bad design. I got this explained at several places so I guess it played a role in it being rejected: ‘Bad store experience.’”
8. Make sure to check for bugs. “My app was unable to handle different text encoding correctly. I found the bug, and it is now able to store and handle Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese and many other character encoding.”

To read Helex’s full explanation (with screenshots) of how he got ClipMan accepted for the Built For BlackBerry program, click here.

What does this mean for you? It means that you can also build an app that is Built for BlackBerry certified. We’re here to help you achieve it, so please contact us if you have questions about your app. We want you to Build for BlackBerry!

For a closer look at what Marmalade is capable of make sure you check out this demo of Nick using Marmalade Quick to build a 2D application really fast with Lua and Cocos2d.

Have you used Marmalade to create apps for BlackBerry 10? We’d love to hear about how your experience has been so far!

If Remco’s interview piqued your interested, make sure you check out more of Distimo and how you can integrate it into your BlackBerry 10 app.

Has using analytics helped improve your app and app sales? Let us know down in the comments below!

As many of you may be aware, there are essentially two main models for distributing applications through BlackBerry World: paid and free. With paid applications, the gap between a user seeing an application in BlackBerry World and actually purchasing that application can be a bit of a problem, especially for newer applications.

Free applications can spread quickly but don’t generate revenue when downloaded. So how do you get your applications into the hands of the masses without worrying about this gap and still make money? It’s not a trick question – the answer lies with a hybrid of the two models discussed above by use of the Payment Services SDK.

Enter the freemium (free + premium) business model. The freemium model uses the approach of providing free products/services with paid premium upgrades. Using this model, you would be able to provide a version of your application for free, allowing anyone to test your application without paying a cent, and then offer premium items for purchase using the APIs available in the Payment Services SDK to enhance the user experience. Of course, there are many options for how this could be achieved; the best way to proceed may be to use an example and evaluate a few strategies.

The simplest application to use this model that comes to mind would be a game. With a game, you can allow users have a feel for the gameplay, use the controls and get absorbed into the plot by distributing it for free. One great example where the freemium model is being used today is in the games created by the BlackBerry World vendor Ebscer, in particular Xploding Boxes. I will be using this example to draw parallels to a few concepts discussed in the remainder of this blog post.

To monetize, here are a few options which leverage the Payment Service SDK:

Upgrade

• The idea with the upgrade would be to provide a base or lite version of the application for free and provide the means for the user to pay to unlock the full version. In this scenario, you could present the user with an “Upgrade” button which, when clicked, uses the Payment Services SDK to purchase a Digital Good from BlackBerry World. Once this Digital Good is purchased, the full version of the application can be unlocked for the user.

Unlock Levels

• An alternate approach could be to create the application with 10 (to pick an arbitrary number) levels, but only allow the first 5 to be playable for free. The remaining 5 could be purchased in order to become playable and complete the game. For this you could use a single Digital Good to unlock all 5 levels, sell them individually or in bundles.

In the example of Xploding boxes, the first 25 levels are completely free to play when the application is first installed. As you work your way through the game and have exploded the first 25 levels worth of boxes you then have the option to complete an in-app payment to unlock all 360 levels! The first 25 levels do a great job of getting the player hooked with simple, fun and mind-bending puzzle gameplay, so once those are completed, the nominal fee to unlock an extra 335 levels is more than worth it.

Unlock Features

• Suppose the user would like to customize their game character, or access items for use in the game which will help them complete the game more easily. Why not offer the ability to purchase premium features such as clothing to customize character appearances or a charm to speed up character movements? These features could be as simple as a change to a variable value in the game, but could mean increasing the chances of returns and adoptions of your once-free application.

There are many more options to monetize your applications using the Payment Services SDK; the above three are just some ways this could be done. There is also no restriction to choosing one singular approach; you could use multiple approaches in the same application. As well, you can always release updated versions of your applications with new features and new options to enhance the application through paid premium upgrades.

A few minor suggestions when choosing to use the freemium business model: Make the application addictive/engaging and usable on its own without the user needing to purchase premium features. When selling premium features ensure that the end user receives a good return on their investment by making the features add good value to the application. Finally, premium features should be just that – “premium” – so it is important that they meet or exceed the caliber that users have come to expect from the rest of your application. Going back to the example of Xploding Boxes, all three of these criteria are met: the game is very fun and addictive, the extra 335 levels is a great return providing hours (if not days) of more fun, and as the additional levels extend the existing gameplay model, the user knows exactly what they are getting before making the purchase.

The Payment Service SDK is already supported in current BlackBerry smartphones (OS <=7.1) as well as the BlackBerry PlayBook OS and BlackBerry 10, so no matter what development approach you use (BlackBerry Java, WebWorks HTML5, Native, Cascades Framework, Adobe AIR, Android) there are APIs to support in-app purchases of Digital Goods.  The only thing left to do is implement the freemium model to your existing* or upcoming applications! Oh, and if you would like to have a good example of how this is done, then I would highly recommend giving Xploding Boxes a try on your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet as well as BlackBerrysmartphones (OS <=7.1 and BlackBerry 10) – it is free, after all.

Ready to get started? Here are some resources to help:

Cascades Framework
Native SDK
HTML5 WebWorks
Adobe AIR
Runtime for Android Apps
Java (BlackBerry OS <= 7.1)

BlackBerry World applications cannot change between paid and free models

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it now – you ask, we listen. We’ve heard your concerns over the status of the Built for BlackBerry program and I want to address your questions and tell you what we’re going to do to make sure building for BlackBerry is an amazing experience.

The first thing we did when we set out to rebuild the BlackBerry Developer ecosystem for BlackBerry 10 was to ask our dedicated BlackBerry developers what they needed. First, they asked for actual hardware – and we delivered that with the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha program. Next, they asked for support for promotion, marketing and revenue. That was the spark that led us to create the Built for BlackBerry and $10k Developer Commitment programs.

An app or game certified as Built for BlackBerry means it not just adheres to our BlackBerry 10 UI Guidelines, but it delivers a customer experience that is highly engaging, high caliber and demonstrates the beautiful, social, integrated essence of BlackBerry 10.

I’ve been told that the Built for BlackBerry criteria are pretty strict – and that’s true. They should be. When RIM approves a title as Built for BlackBerry it means we’re putting the full weight of our brand behind that app or game. These are the titles we will be looking at promoting and holding up as examples and we have an expectation about those apps. Apps and games for BlackBerry must:

• Focus on delivering intended content, keeping the screen as uncluttered of controls as possible.
• Implement gesture and flow techniques, such as peek gestures, for fluid user interaction.
• Provide effective processor, memory, and power management.

To be as transparent as possible, there have been many apps submitted that do meet these criteria. We’ve had over 900 Android apps submitted to the Built for BlackBerry program – and Android apps do not qualify for the program in any way. Neither do web launchers, simple apps that mobilize content with RSS feeds, flashlight apps, et cetera. The expectation is that apps certified as Built for BlackBerry have been designed, developed, and polished to provide an amazing experience for our BlackBerry 10 customers. I say “our” because BlackBerry 10 customers are your customers too.

We’ve also heard requests to add more detail to the Built for BlackBerry emails so that you can make changes necessary to achieve the Built for BlackBerry certification. Our team is working now to update what details we provide and you’ll start seeing those changes this week.

You might be wondering in a more literal way what we are looking for in Built for BlackBerry apps. We have now started to notify the first group of approved Built for BlackBerry apps and I can show you what we mean.

Yay! FancyTran just passed the Built for BlackBerry certification! Best apps are coming to you with #BB10—
FancyApps Limited (@FancyApps4BB) January 17, 2013

FancyTran from FancyApps Limited is a good example. FancyTran brings their highly rated app to a new level with FancyTran on BlackBerry 10. The entire app can be navigated with just your thumb – allowing you to quickly dictate and translate from 14 languages to over 60 languages. FancyTran also leverages our BlackBerry Payment Service to easily allow customers to purchase the full version of the app once it’s downloaded from BlackBerry World.

It is simple, easy to use, high-performing, built in a native BlackBerry environment (no Android folks) and integrated. It leverages BlackBerry platform services and syncs to native voice features seamlessly.

The mark of quality is important to us, as it is to you. We know that quality applications will make the difference in a crowded marketplace and we want you to continue to tweak and build your apps to be part of this program with us. Stay tuned for further evolutions of the Built for BlackBerry program and new incentives.