RIM woos developers with new apps

RIM wants to match the success of Apple's App Store

Research in Motion (RIM) has announced a series of software applications for developers aimed at enhancing the interoperability and money-making potential of their creations.

The company has built an advertising service, which will go live next year, to let developers build both subscription and ad-based services into BlackBerry applications. It is also offering APIs for location services based on cell tower triangulation and traffic prediction.

“If you make the platform more applicable to developers of any kind then the rising tide raises all boats,” Alan Panezic told V3.co.uk.

“Lots of enterprise customers are thinking about writing apps for other people who may have a BlackBerry. There's a natural cross pollination with developers.”

RIM wants the BlackBerry developer community to match the success of the Apple App Store and make the company more integrated into the business environment.

At today's keynote at the BlackBerry Developer Conference 2009 in San Francisco, co-CEO Jim Balsillie showed off applications linking the handset to Oracle's middleware systems and also detailed the efforts to get Flash into the BlackBerry platform.

Developer tools for geolocation using mobile phone mast triangulation, and for traffic monitoring using a combination of the BlackBerry platform and US and Canadian transport department data, were also unveiled.

RIM is also setting up an academic programme to provide course materials for developer training at colleges and universities.