The BlackBerry Live 2013 early bird registration price of $449.00 USD ends this Friday, March 22^nd. There isn’t a better opportunity this year you as a developer to make connections with mobile decision makers from around the world.

• Interested in enterprise app development? Meet Information Technology admins, execs, and developers from Fortune 500 companies
• Have an app that you know should be preloaded? Meet with wireless operators, dealers, retail partners at our Partner Showcase
• Talk up your app with internation press and financial analysts

If you’ve been to BlackBerry Jam Americas before, you know what to expect in the keynote and breakout sessions (and the tweetup too). Now that BlackBerry Jam Americas is part of BlackBerry Live, you have the added opportunity to meet with our retail, carrier, and enterprise partners – and gain added exposure for your apps.

Here’s a quick glimpse of what BlackBerry Live was like last year. Hope to see you in Orlando this May!

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.

BlackBerry World 4.3 changes the BlackBerry World search algorithm to help make the discovery of your app or game easier for customers. To take advantage of these changes, we wanted to share with you how the following product attributes are prioritized to determine search results. The attributes are listed in order of importance to the algorithm:

1. Product Name
2. Keywords
3. Vendor Name
4. Short Description

It is important to note that the Long Description is no longer considered by the Search algorithm.

Product Name

The most important product attribute is the Product Name – the title of your application shown to the Consumer. Product Names can be specified by Platform and Language. This could allow you to have:

• ‘Awesome App” for BlackBerry 10
• “Awesome App HD” for BlackBerry PlayBook

Keywords

Keywords are the second most important attribute in determining search results and provide new flexibility and creativity to get your product noticed. Introduced to the BlackBerry World Vendor Portal in 2012, Keywords will now be used to determine search results. Keywords can be specified by Platform and Language.

Changing the Keywords from the Vendor Portal takes effect between one and nine hours after saving the changes.

• Number of Keywords.  There are up to ten (10) Keywords per Platform and Language pairing.
  • For example, the BBOS Platform for French has up to 10 Keywords and the BBOS Platform for English has up to 10 keywords
• Maximum Length of a Keyword: Each Keyword cannot be more than 100 characters or 3 words long.
  • For example, “Built For BlackBerry”
• Maximum Length of ALL Keywords for a Platform/Language Pair: There is a 1,000 character maximum length for all the Keywords per Platform and Language pair.
  • For example, the BBOS Platform for French has a 1,000 character maximum and the BBOS Platform for English has a 1,000 character limit.
• Term Frequency within Keywords – the number of times a term appears in the keywords increases the relevance.
  • For example, having “Black” 5 times within the Keywords gives more relevance than having “Black” only once.
• Term Proximity – for multiple search terms, say A and B, the keyword where A is closer to B has higher relevance over keywords where A is further from B. For example:
  • Given:
    • App #1 with Keyword = Built for BlackBerry
    • App #2 with Keyword = Built for the BlackBerry
    • Consumer search = “Built BlackBerry”

• WHY? The number of characters between Built and BlackBerry is less in App #1’s keyword than in App #2’s.
• Relevance – the keywords must be relevant to the product
  • Keywords cannot be competitive products or other product names.
  • Keywords cannot be popular terms for the sake of receiving a high hit rate.

Vendor Name

The third most important attribute is Vendor Name.

Short Description

The least important attribute is Short Description. It is also available by Platform and Language pairing.

Head over to BlackBerry World Vendor Portal and update your app today!