BlackBerry Adds Advertising, In-App Transactions, Alerts And More To App Store

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BlackBerry Adds Advertising, In-App Transactions, Alerts And More To App Store

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Research In Motion has announced a slew of updates for developers, who are distributing apps in the BlackBerry App World. The updates are in line with what Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) offers on the iPhone today, and will allow for in-app advertising, in-app purchases and new push and location services. Release.

The announcements were made today at the 2009 BlackBerry Developer Conference, but were foreshadowed in a September earnings call by Jim Balsillie, RIM’s Co-CEO, who was eager to spill the beans about the latest developments, which in his words: “translates into a customer, a client who is really, really happy and really, really ready to consume heavily and get their peers and friends to consume heavily.” More details after the jump…

In-app Advertising: RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) said it will start offering a new advertising service in the first half of next year that will allow developers to monetize their applications using advertising. RIM has partnered with a number of mobile ad networks, including Jumptap, Lat49, Millennial Media, Navteq, 1020 Placecast, Quattro Wireless and Sympatico.ca. The ads will let advertisers initiate a call from an ad, add a calendar entry or contact entry from an ad, and directly link to a BlackBerry app. The service will also report advertising metrics across the ad networks, including impressions, clicks, conversions and earnings. .

New payment services: By mid-2010, RIM says it will enable in-app purchases in the App World. That means developers will be able to sell virtual goods, monthly subscriptions, additional game levels or other items from within the app. The purchases will be tied to the payment system, which for now is mostly PayPal.

Push Services: This is one of BlackBerry’s flagship services that allows information, like emails, to be pushed down to phones. Now developers and content providers can deliver alerts and up to 8 KB of data to applications this way.

New location services: RIM is launching three new location-based services for developers: cell site geolocation, reverse geocoding and travel time. Cell Site Geolocation is very standard today and is commonly used as an alternative to GPS. Reverse Geocoding helps people convert their location coordinates into a specific address for use in BlackBerry applications. And finally, Travel Time allows developers to incorporate estimated travel time within their apps for destinations in the US and Canada. The travel time calculations will be based on distance, speed limits and aggregated traffic conditions. The service returns values for an estimated arrival time, total travel time and total distance that can be used in an application.

Separately, more announcements were made including details on RIM’s partnership with Adobe’s Flash and technical enhancements to the developer environment.

By Tricia Duryee