I hope you’ve enjoyed the series and we look forward to seeing you all at BlackBerry Jam Americas in Orlando. Please let us know what you thought of the videos to ensure that we can bring information to you in a way that’s educational, but entertaining as well.

This particular video will give you some information about the current opportunities and upcoming roadmap items that we’re looking at for extending connectivity for developers. In this video we’re joined by Rob Williams who talks about how you can connect BlackBerry 10 to the world around you to incorporate context into your apps.

C2 Development has opened up their application Kaxi for beta testing exclusively on BlackBerry® 10 Dev Alpha devices. Kaxi is a location-based app that simplifies the process of finding taxi companies local to the UK and USA. All you need is a GPS signal and a working network connection (Wi-Fi®/3G/4G). The app will then list local taxi companies nearest your location.

Sign up for the beta to gain access to the latest release before it reaches the BlackBerry App World™ storefront. Accepted beta requests will be given access to the Kaxi beta Portal which may be used to submit feedback and bug reports. The latest downloads will also be available via this portal.

Kaxi is currently only available for BlackBerry 10.

The BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet simulator v2.1 beta includes a new tool to help you work with the simulator: the Simulator Controller. You can run the Controller by executing the controller file located in the controllers sub directory, which can be found within the simulator installation directory. Once you have it up and running alongside the simulator, click on the Connection menu, choose Connect and enter the IP address of the simulator.

The Simulator Controller allows you to simulate rotating and tilting the simulator as well as simulate GPS locations. You can configure a single GPS coordinate or a route using a GPS NMEA data file. We’ve also included some sample NMEA sample data files located in the controllers\nmea directory.

The Simulator Controller coming in the upcoming update for the BlackBerry® 10 Dev Alpha simulator adds some additional features, including the much-requested ability to control the zoom level of the simulator to allow its entire window to fit on your screen. Here is a rundown of all the elements you can control:

• Control Device Orientation – Set Roll, Pitch and Yaw, Tilt on Z Axis and rotate about the X, Y or Z axis
• Control Illuminance and Proximity Sensors
• Set battery charge level, health, temperature and toggle charging on or off
• Set the device PIN
• Simulate GPS Location – Simulate either a fixed location or movement using NMEA data files
• Simulate NFC Tags
• Control Device Zoom level

For more information, refer to the BlackBerry Simulator documentation.

Where, Inc. has enjoyed substantial growth in recent years, establishing itself as a company at the forefront of the booming mobile application industry. WHERE®, the company’s mobile application, allows users to customize searches in order to discover new places to eat, drink, and play in cities around the United States. Where, Inc. was a BlackBerry® Super App Challenge 2011 Regional Finalist and the mobile and web versions of its WHERE application have a combined total of 4 million active users and more than 10 million downloads.

Sarah Hodkinson , Where Inc.’s Senior Manager of Partner Marketing, sat down to discuss the importance of Where, Inc.’s relationship with Research In Motion® (RIM®).

Why did you want to be on the BlackBerry platform?
Our goal is to make WHERE as widely available as possible and RIM is a key player in the marketplace. It’s also easy to follow the BlackBerry user experience and make an application follow that experience. In BlackBerry® 6, the location APIs are more reliable and faster – and now all of our new features are fully supported by BlackBerry® 7.

How integrated is WHERE with the native applications of a BlackBerry smartphone?
The focus for our application has always been about creating an amazing user experience, and a big part of that is not only a high level of personalization, but also ease‐of‐use and functionality. Using a
BlackBerry smartphone, users can save places, contacts, and events to their address book and calendar.
They can share places with friends by email, text, or by connecting to Facebook®, which is definitely more fun and engaging, and creates sort of a mobile word‐of‐mouth function. And the more you use
WHERE, the more we learn about you, which allows us to further customize recommendations in the future. The BlackBerry platform really extends integration possibilities through its Unified Search integration and the robust notification system.

Tell us about the transition to BlackBerry 7 OS.
The transition from BlackBerry 6 to BlackBerry 7 OS is simple for developers, since they can support a BlackBerry 7 OS version of an application with little additional resource commitment. In our case, there was no need for any backend changes and all our primary functionalities, like Facebook integration and unified search integration, were working as before.

How important has it been to develop a relationship with RIM over the years?
RIM developer teams have helped us in terms of visibility and with promoting our app on BlackBerry App World™ and the Regional Super App Challenge. When we get featured in BlackBerry App World, our downloads jump by 10,000 per day. We also take advantage of the resources provided to us within the BlackBerry® Alliance Program and the people at RIM have made some connections to help expand our network and grow our business.

What else would you like to highlight about your partnership with RIM?
The BlackBerry® Torch™ smartphone has been a successful smartphone for WHERE and has performed well in terms of subscription revenue. We are activating on average about 1,000 downloads a day through the subscription‐based service and over 1 million in page views across the app in any given month. Another interesting fact is that 40% of our BlackBerry users are using a BlackBerry Torch smartphone. We believe the touch screen has really improved the user experience.

Thanks for your time, Sarah! Readers, be sure to check out Where, Inc’s website to see what they’re currently up to.

LBS nation, we have good news! The Wi-Fi® geolocation service officially launched on September 9th, 2011. This in-house technology at Research In Motion® (RIM®) uses Wi-Fi Access Point data that’s been collected anonymously by your BlackBerry® smartphone to provide a quick and accurate location fix to location-aware applications globally. This service is a further enhancement to our Cell-site geolocation service, which has been in service globally for more than a year.

Unlike GPS-based location fixes, this service offers a faster and more convenient way for developers to get location fixes via a secure connection with minimum bandwidth usage. Although the accuracy of this service is lower than GPS, it’s higher than Cell-site geolocation, and the speed is expected to be much faster than GPS. One advantage to Wi-Fi geolocation service is that it typically works even when GPS is not available. For example, when a user is indoors or when a user prefers not to turn their GPS on in order to preserve battery life, Wi-Fi geolocation service is still an option.

The APIs needed to acquire Wi-Fi geolocation fixes have been available since the BlackBerry® 6 OS release; therefore, all devices running the BlackBerry 6 OS and higher are able to leverage this service via existing APIs upon provisioning of this service. Please note that service provisioning may take up to a month from the launch date, so we’re asking for your patience and understanding if it doesn’t start working immediately. For APIs and other relevant technical details, please refer to the KB article Location APIs – Start to finish. You can also leverage Simple Location API if you want to get a head-start by skipping the full details.

I am really excited about this service as it opens up a lot of possibilities for innovation and great apps. Let us know when you integrate your app with this service, and let us know how it goes!

I have recently written an abstraction to the Location API that simplifies getting location fixes in different modes, as well as optimizes battery usage. Developers intending to quickly incorporate location technology to their apps can now use the Simple Location API to leverage both GPS and Geolocation-based location services in virtually no time.

Besides pure GPS or Geolocation mode, the Simple Location API comes equipped with an OPTIMAL mode that dynamically chooses between the Research In Motion® (RIM®) Locate Services and on-device GPS, depending on availability. Also, since location-based services can be battery intensive if not handled properly, this API optimizes power consumption by adding increasing breathing intervals between retries when location fixes are not available.

The Simple Location API is designed to include the following features:

• Simplified API with a focus on real world use cases.
• An API that leverages on-device GPS and RIM’s Locate Services.
• Dynamically detects available and supported location modes on the device before trying any of them.
• Has the ability to choose the best location mode based on the modes available on the smartphone.
• Built-in retry mechanism with dynamic delay (to save battery) based on a retry factor set by the API user.
• Performs both single and tracking location fixes.
• Simplified events via SimpleLocationListener interface.
• Capable of starting, stopping and restarting tracking sessions in a reliable thread-safe way.
• Designed to eliminate/reduce misuse of the API

There’s definitely room for improvement to the Simple Location API so, keeping that in mind, the source is fully open and can be downloaded here along with a full demo app. Feel free to integrate this in to your app today, and if you are a passionate BlackBerry® app developer, you know the drill – improve and share!

The BlackBerry DEVCON 2010 team was really excited to partner with the fine folks at foursquare for the BlackBerry DEVCON foursquare Challenge. Judging by the amount of attendees that lined up at the Social Media desk to claim their limited edition tee shirt, you were too! I had the opportunity to sit down with Peter Nofelt, lead developer of the foursquare BlackBerry app, and talk about the Challenge, Peter’s DEVCON 2010 session, and the future of foursquare. Check out the video above and don’t forget to upgrade to the new version of foursquare that was released during the show!

While covering CES for our sister blog Inside BlackBerry, I also had an opportunity to interview some BlackBerry® developers for the Developer’s Blog. For example, I was able to talk to social LBS developer Loopt about being a startup company, lessons learned from launching apps and necessary choices in BlackBerry development. Check it out below!

Who are you and what is your role at Loopt?

My name is Eric Carr, VP of Products and Location Technologies at Loopt. I am responsible for managing the development of Loopt applications across all of our mobile client platforms and wireless carrier partners.

Talk to me a bit about the process of launching Loopt. i.e., what tactics did you use when you launched, what did you hope to achieve, etc.

To launch Loopt we chose to focus on BlackBerry App World™ and launched at this year’s BlackBerry® Developer Conference. Given the buzz around the new BlackBerry® OS 5.0 capabilities and this being a major revision to the Loopt app for BlackBerry® smartphones, we felt the conference was the best platform at which to launch. Releasing a new app in time for the holiday season and carrier marketing activities was also very much top of mind.

We also did a significant amount of outreach to press and BlackBerry-oriented blogs to help spread the word about our new app and major new features. We also posted to a number of BlackBerry-interest user forums, and leveraged our own social media followers on Facebook and Twitter.

Since Loopt is very much a communications tool with your friends, we do leverage virality in terms of users inviting other potential users within the service itself. We also continue to experiment with other forms of user acquisition channels to continue to grow the Loopt user community including off deck app stores and various ad campaigns.

What feedback have you received from end users? How did you collect the feedback from end users and how did it change your product strategy?

BlackBerry smartphone users have always been one of our most active communities on a user metrics basis. We have really benefitted from using Flurry (a mobile client analytics tool, www.flurry.com) to track where users spend time in the app and how they get there. With the new v2.0 features, we have narrowed in to what is most appealing to our customers and are working on making it easier for users to keep doing more of what they are doing.

We also receive traditional user feedback from a number of sources:

• (a) We conduct end user usability tests both before and after the release of major versions. Observing users is always enlightening in terms of seeing how people expect or want the app to behave.
• (b) There is a core set of external Loopt users that we constantly stay in touch with and get feedback from about upcoming product ideas and releases. Even after launches, this crowd tends to provide the most constructive in feedback and share with us the various ways they use Loopt in their daily lives.
• (c) We leverage GetSatisfaction (www.getsatisfaction.com) heavily to address user issues and obtain user feedback. A lot of good feature ideas and device prioritization decisions start from user feedback that we get from here.
• (d) We also closely monitor comments on the web from sites like Facebook, Twitter, BlackBerry App World reviews, blogs, etc. These are harder to quantify since they end up being more binary positive or negative than other sources. It is important to stay on top of real-time user (and potential user) feedback.

What were some of the major challenges you have faced being a start up company?

Being a start-up company, we are really focused on driving low-cost user acquisition, without big marketing budgets. But just posting your app to BlackBerry App World is not going to cut it. Discoverability and distribution fragmentation is a big challenge, and there really is no silver-bullet. We have focused on leveraging our carrier partnerships, building a relationship with RIM, staying top-of-mind with key press / bloggers, and worked with our end users to help evangelize the Loopt service.

One other big user acquisition risk layered into this dynamic was our business and technical decision to only target BlackBerry OS 4.6 and above. . This was a difficult decision because of the number of “legacy” BlackBerry smartphones out there (BlackBerry Device Software v4.5 and below). But we were convinced by (1) faster speed to market from an engineering perspective from being a lot more focused with our initial device and OS support, (2) the newer devices have much better hardware capabilities (screen, CPU, memory, etc.) and (3) the large number of new BlackBerry smartphones that are sold through each quarter.

We were very happy with how quickly the new Loopt app came together for BlackBerry smartphones. We have also been encouraged that soon after initial app release, we have been able to quickly pivot to support BlackBerry OS 5.0 and BlackBerry® Storm™ smartphones. We think this positions us well for 2010 and beyond on the BlackBerry platform.

What does your new release solve?

Loopt has focused on connecting you with what your friends are up to and where they are. Through customer research we found out quickly that if Loopt users gain over 3-4 friends, then there is a step function in terms of how often those users use Loopt. However, historically, if you did not have any friends within Loopt, then there was not much you could do with the Loopt app. So Loopt v2.0 was really focused on trying to solve that chicken and egg “single player” problem of the Loopt experience before you had friends connected within the service. We decided to extend the app with “social local discovery” and search. This evolution of the service adds value to any BlackBerry smartphone user that downloads Loopt in that they get an introduction to the Loopt service and are able to see a set of the places and events that other Loopt users are interacting with, around where they currently are located.

We look forward to continuing to listen to our BlackBerry users and improving the Loopt service.

The NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge is back and underway for 2010. This is a great opportunity for developers to showcase their latest innovations in the LBS space. The challenge has expanded to five regions this year, so be sure to check out the LBS challenge website for more contest details, prizing, and for your local region registration timeframes.

Research In Motion is excited to support this year’s challenge. We’ll be involved in the regional judging and providing BlackBerry® Curve™ 8900 smartphones to qualifying contestants. Register today for the LBS Challenge, visit the BlackBerry® Developer Zone and then begin developing the next ground breaking LBS app!

2010 NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge Registration

At RIM, we spend a lot of time thinking about how location based services (LBS) continue to revolutionize mobile applications. After 10 years of innovation in the location-based services sector, the opportunities are nearly limitless for application developers and vendors on mobile devices. LBS are really starting to gain traction now because of the ability for developers to map location information to other types of data with additional context. If you think about your “location”, it is really just a numerical representation of where you are standing on Earth (i.e. longitude and latitude). Unless you can translate that information into something useful like a street corner or city or country, you simply don’t have sufficient context. It is the additional context that provides value within LBS today and as more data sources become location enabled it is creating an entirely new set of opportunities for mobile application developers.

For the past 10+ years, efforts have been focused on creating the vital framework to effectively determine the location itself within a reasonable amount of time using as little power as possible. Initially, this approach focused on hardware and ensuring that mobile devices were integrating GPS chips to effectively determine location. Once the necessary hardware was available, efforts shifted to optimizing the hardware and software to:

• Reduce the amount of power used.
• Reduce the amount of time to obtain your location.
• Improve the conditions under which your location could be obtained.
• Map additional location points such as cellular tower data and WiFi access points to provide alternate sources of location when GPS isn’t possible or necessary.

With this base framework providing the mechanisms to obtain location from a variety of different sources established, the opportunities to couple that information with “location enabled” data points are nearly endless.

Examples of next generation location enabled applications:

• An RSS reader could provide local stories relevant to your current location rather than requiring a postal/zip code.
• A media player could stream music that incorporates local artists, encouraging people to support artists in their own backyard.
• A travel application could help you find flights automatically knowing which airport you are stuck in.
• A CRM application could provide you with a seamless experience in moving between your clients on your calendar for that day using turn by turn navigation and the locations stored in the CRM database.

The key to realizing these opportunities is the ability for application developers to provide additional value and context within their applications by mapping the current location of the user to existing data sources. We want to foster an environment on our mobile devices that will allow third party application vendors the ability to query other applications on the device and invoke their services so that vendors can provide an excellent experience. Post a comment and tell us what LBS opportunities you are working on.