(YouTube link for easy mobile viewing)

One incredibly cool demo that I saw this year at BlackBerry® World™ 2011 was Poynt’s integration of BlackBerry push services to call a number on a BlackBerry® smartphone from their BlackBerry PlayBook™ tablet app. Peter Werry from Poynt, winner of last year’s BlackBerry Partners Fund Developer Challenge, walks me through this new feature and other innovative uses of BlackBerry services in the above video.

Post a comment and let us know what super app features you’re building into your application.

(YouTube link for easy mobile viewing)

One of the highlights for me this week at BlackBerry® World™ 2011 was having the opportunity to showcase some of the amazing work from developers starting to leverage the BBM social platform. Social networking application foursquare is one such example, and was demoed during the Tuesday General Session keynote by Senior Director of Developer Relations (and fellow Inside BlackBerry blogger) Mike Kirkup.

The above video is really three videos in one! First, I speak with Mike about the overall opportunity available to developers that integrate BBM social platform APIs into their application. Then, foursquare developers Pete and Jeff provide a great demonstration of foursquare for BlackBerry integrated with BBM. I then pass the mic to Mike for a brief sit down with Pete about developing for BlackBerry and how the coming BBM social platform integration enhances the foursquare super app experience.

Post a comment and let us know what you think of the integration of BBM with foursquare, and what other applications should leverage the BBM social platform.

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!

Ever wondered how to query for location without being dependent on GPS? Well, look no more: we’ve introduced a brand-new feature that is capable of getting you a location fix in seconds using nearby cell tower information. The new Geolocation service is now part of the Locate Service. The best part? It’s free to developers!

Users can be indoors with no GPS coverage, but your app will still be able to guide them to restaurants or points of interest (POI) around them. Although the accuracy of the fixes obtained from the Geolocation service may not always be as high as with GPS, it has use cases for apps that require highly accurate GPS fixes as well as apps that do not. Apps that require high accuracy can use this service to quickly show the user an approximate location while it waits for a more accurate location fix using GPS. This can offer a huge user experience improvement. For applications that do not require high accuracy, this service can be leveraged as a simple yet effective mechanism to provide location information.

To take advantage of the Geolocation service, you simply need to ask for a location fix via your LocationProvider or BlackBerryLocationProvider using the appropriate Criteria, or BlackBerryCriteria for the Cellsite mode. It is important to note that this service requires BlackBerry® Application Platform v5.0 or higher and users must be signed up with a carrier that has enabled these capabilities.

You can also consider combining the Locate Service with the BlackBerry® Maps Service to offer a variety of features from navigation directions to POIs. The BlackBerry Maps Service complements the Locate Service by providing map displays that can be invoked or embedded to indicate a user’s location. Please refer to net.rim.device.api.lbs.MapField class and the net.rim.blackberry.api.invoke package for details on APIs related to Map Service.

In BlackBerry Device Software, we’ve also enhanced the existing Geocoding functionality provided by the Locate Service. Using the net.rim.device.api.lbs.Locator class, you can now ask for reverse geocoding in addition to the geocoding functionality we already offered. Reverse geocoding is capable of converting latitude and longitude to a meaningful address. One of my favorite features of the new reverse geocoding functionality is that you can ask for contextual location information at a variety of levels from the street address to the state depending on the granularity required by your application. As a developer, you are able to take advantage of this service with a single method call while we do all the heavy lifting behind the scene.

These new features and capabilities are a great extension of all the work we did within the last year on our location-based services environment. In BlackBerry Application Platform v5.0, we introduced an extension API to the standard Location API (JSR 179). This extension API is much easier to work with and creates new opportunities for all application developers to leverage location within their apps. Please refer to the net.rim.device.api.gps package in the API documentation.

In addition to the extension API, we introduced a set of flexible Location Picker UI components that integrate seamlessly with the BlackBerry Maps and Contacts applications as well as with the GPS capabilities of the device. Check out the net.rim.device.api.lbs.picker package in the API documentation for more information.

The combination of the Locate and Maps Services opens the door to contextualized and location-aware applications that go above and beyond what is available today. We are very excited to hear your feedback on these new capabilities and how you plan on using them within your application.

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.