LiveBlog: BlackBerry Developers Conference keynotes

ME is liveblogging the mammoth three-hour keynote session at RIM's BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco. A group of execs from RIM are due to take the stage for announcements and big-picture talk, along with key developer partners.

9.05am PST: I'm in place, the Wi-Fi network is creaking under the strain of 1,000+ people trying to check their emails, and there's a dance remix of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit blasting over the PA. Here we go!

JIM BALSILLIE

9.10: Co-CEO Jim Balsillie takes the stage. “We've really been beavering away on a lot of things in the last couple of years, and you're going to hear about them first...” It's at this point I should point you to our stories on the announcements, which just went live.

9.11: He's going to share “fundamental strategic thinking”. Everything's moving to smartphone and connected services – there's no debate on that says Balsillie – 50% next year and “on its way to 100%”. So?... “Transformative experiences” and “constructive alignment”, that's how.

9.13: And into the new development services platform. Advertising service APIs - “you can simply insert advert units into your applications,” says Balsillie, promising “simple and easy revenue” for developers and carriers alike. I wonder how the revenue shares break down between those two groups from these new ad revenues...

9.15: In-application payments – Balsillie says RIM has listened to its developers who want to offer subscriptions, premium content within apps and so on. Matching iPhone 3.0's in-app payments functionality, basically.

9.16: Third up are new geolocation APIs, which will be shown off later during this keynote session working with a social networking app. And finally, RIM is opening up its Push APIs for widgets and apps. “They can sit in the background with an always-on capability, and you can push whatever event happens, and in a context that maintains efficiency both on the network and on the battery life

9.18: He says both of these are mattering more and more at the moment. RIM has been working with eBay on a new auction app that uses the push API, which will be shown off later this morning. “It really does open up the promise of a whole set of transformative services opportunities, and new forms of revenue for you,” says Balsillie, addressing the assembled developers.

9.19: Now onto additions to the BlackBerry 5.0. Again, Balsillie stresses that RIM has been listening to developers' demands for more native access to the BlackBerry hardware and platform. “Applications are no longer an island,” he says. “We want you to create opportunity through this deep, rich transformative experience for your users. This is what we think you want, and this is where we think the money is for you as developers to commercialise your businesses.”

9.21: Today will also see the launch of the new JDE Plug-In for Eclipse 1.1, which lets developers get much deeper into the Eclipse SDK. RIM is also launching a GUI Builder Design Studio to help people create BlackBerry apps using drag'n'drop tools, rather than getting their hands dirty with Java code.

9.22: And support for OpenGL ES. That's big news for games firms – kicking off with the BlackBerry Storm 2. EA are going to show a demo of their Need For Speed Shift game running on a Storm 2. Balsillie points out that games can also use peer-to-peer communication, push notifications, location-based alerts and in-app advertising. It seems RIM is going to be making more of a push for BlackBerry gaming.

9.24: Balsillie hasn't mentioned iPhone yet, but it's the elephant in the room at this conference – RIM has a dedicated community of existing BlackBerry developers, but all of these announcements and improvements will also be aimed at convincing iPhone-focused devs that BlackBerry is also worth their investment. So even if the message is 'we've finally got the stuff that Apple had this summer', it's still important.

9.25: Balsillie also talks about the BlackBerry Browser 5.0, which he says is “a full peer to Java”, as well as the BlackBerry Widgets platform for web apps, which will be able to tie into the various native BlackBerry APIs, including the new services platform.

9.26: He has said “transformative services” about 17 times so far, by my reckoning. It's clearly the Big Idea of the conference. Today will also see the debut of the new BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0 – Balsillie says themes are “a fantastic opportunity to monetise” on BlackBerry.

9.29: BlackBerry App World – Balsillie says operator billing is coming in 2010 for App World purchasing and in-app payments. Now he moves onto B2B stuff, which since this is Mobile Entertainment, I'll spare you while I scribble up some more notes.

9.36: And he's done. Onto the next presenter: chief technology officer of software David Yach.

DAVID YACH

9.37: Early on, Yach repeats Balsillie's claim that the world is heading towards 100% smartphone penetration. Really? Even emerging markets? There's no denying the fact that smartphones are on the up, but I wonder if that 100% goal is truly achievable. It all depends how you define 'smart', of course.

9.39: Yach talks about the 'BlackBerry Flow' – the way users move between different applications on their handset. “What's fascinating to me, we're seeing more and more third-party applications becoming full participants in this,” he says. So apps interacting with each other and working together. “We don't add applications to a BlackBerry device: We multiply,” he says. Nice soundbite. “This is what makes people get addicted to your applications,” he tells the audience of developers.

9.41: Yach talks about the clash between making it easy for developers to launch apps, and making the app platform itself very rich and powerful. As well as the need to make it an open environment while also making it a safe one for users.

9.44: Now onto the two pillar platforms for BlackBerry developers: Java and Web. “Clearly the mobile web is exploding, but how do you make a transformative mobile web experience?” he asks. RIM has been working hard on its browser, he says, before moving onto the BlackBerry Widgets – we'll apparently see some impressive demos using those at this conference.

TIM NEIL

9.47: Neil is manager of developer tools at RIM, and he's taken the stage to show off some widgets. “What we define a BlackBerry Widget is similar to the W3C definition – a standalone application written using web technologies,” he says. RIM has released new widget development tools this morning, and Neil is going to take the audience through it.

Again, since this is ME, I'll focus more on any examples of widgets he shows during this part of the presentation, rather than the development nitty-gritty.

9.54: He's ACTUALLY coding live on-screen. I think he's missed a comma out there...

IRV HENDERSON, YAHOO

9.57: Irv is VP of product development at Yahoo Mobile, and he takes the stage to show off what Yahoo is up to on BlackBerry. “What we're going to show today is the tight collaboration we've done with the BlackBerry team around notification, the geolocation APIs, and bringing the right experience, look and feel on the device, as well as navigating from the widget into native experiences. We think what we will show you today pushes the envelope of what you can do in a BlackBerry widget.” Rousing words, let's see it...

9.58: He starts by showing mobile search in the Yahoo widget, which is using the geolocation API to identify a user's location and bring them back relevant local results.

10.01: As I listen to Henderson, news has just broken that Google has bought AdMob for $750 million. Crumbs. But it makes it even more interesting that AdMob isn't included in the initial list of partner mobile ad networks used for RIM's new advertising service...

10.02: “We are hoping to go beyond what we have developed here,” says Henderson, stressing that Yahoo's demo was done in just three weeks. More advertising and local features could be coming up in future versions of Yahoo's BlackBerry widget. Sorry for sketchy details of the demo, I was whistling at the sight of the AdMob announcement in my inbox.

10.07: Back to Yach, and into another coding demo. This is really good stuff for the developers in the audience, so I'm not downplaying it, but it's a bit too in-depth for ME – so I'll stick to focusing on the app/widget demos and key executives.

ADAM NASH, LINKEDIN

10.13: Ah, here we go. Nash is from LinkedIn, the business social network that has 50 million users. “When we talk to our members, they ask us frequently for one thing – LinkedIn for the BlackBerry, and that's what I'm here to announce today,” he says. Now this is one app that should be perfect for BlackBerry

10.14: When the app launches, it goes straight into the user's feed of contacts, but they can also access the LinkedIn search engine to look for people they're not already connected with.

10.15: The LinkedIn app ties in with the BlackBerry inbox – a native feature – and it also works with the handset's calendar. “Let's say you have a meeting at 2pm with someone who's from out of town, look at the people who you're scheduled to meet with, click on their email address, and boom – go straight to their LinkedIn profile,” he says.

JEFF BONFORTE, XOBNI

10.17: Another demo now, from Xobni, which started life as a sidebar for the Outlook (desktop) web browser. 3 million people have installed it, and apparently half of them are BlackBerry users. So the company made an app, which will be available “shortly”.

10.18: It's all about contacts. The app builds profiles automatically based on your contacts, including email addresses, phone numbers and even social networking updates – as well as a record of recent communications with those people, and links to other people you might both know.

10.20: The app also ranks your contacts for you by how important they are to you. “Better than any address book you've used in your life,” he says, humbly. The app lets you search by name, but also by company – so he's typing in RIM to bring up a list of all his contacts at RIM. “Everyone I need, instantly is available to me,” he says, claiming that right now, it's only possible on BlackBerry.

CHRIS GIBBS, EA MOBILE

10.30: Ah, the gaming demo, this should be good. Chris Gibbs is executive producer at EA Mobile, which has been working with OpenGL ES on BlackBerry for a couple of weeks.

10.31: “The mobile gaming industry is in a really exciting place right now,” he says. “More people are downloading than ever before, the devices are getting more powerful, and more suited for playing games. In ways like 3D rich graphics, more intuitive ways to control your game using things like tilt and touch, with enhanced audio. CPU speed, GPUs, more memory... we're really able to make our feature sets a lot more compelling.”

10.32: Gibbs shows the demo off, which looks very swish indeed. “We've come a long way since Brick Breaker,” notes Yach, sagely. “How about those graphics, weren't they amazing?”

10.35: Gibbs says that BlackBerry offers a “great development environment”, particularly the touch APIs and the emulator. “So far so good!”

DAVID YACH (again)

10.36: Yach is back, and talking about how multi-tasking is crucial to that 'BlackBerry Flow' he mentioned earlier (one in the eye for iPhone, I suspect – the ability to multi-task and have apps running in the background isn't unique to RIM, but it's famously still missing from Apple's handset).

10.38: And he's done. And next up is Tyler Lessard, VP of global alliances and developer relations.

TYLER LESSARD

10.39: “It's not about number of downloads, or how much money you make,” he says. “Although that is nice! It's about user engagement...” How often can apps pull people into using them, in other words.

10.42: And now Lessard is going to talk about the BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0. “We've seen thousands of themes built over the last few years, and really good adoption from users,” he says. The Studio lets developers create themes for the latest generation of BlackBerry handsets, make richer themes, and also tie in data access – which he says will be good for, for example, sports themes.

10.45: BlackBerry Themes will now be sold through BlackBerry App World as their own category. Developers can submit them today, and they'll start going on sale next month.

10.46: Onto the App World itself, and that carrier billing. “You'll start to see that culminate next year, and it's an opportunity to simplify the purchasing experience,” he says. “I think it's going to really pay off for you developers out there building commercial applications.”

10.47: Lessard says the BlackBerry development community has been growing fast, so he talks about the various developer services that RIM is running, including its revamped BlackBerry Alliances Program.

10.49: Onto the BlackBerry Partners Fund, which is looking to invest in mobile startups. “They've invested in seven different companies in the last year, one of which is Xobni,” says Lessard.

And break for 15. Phew! Note, the Wi-Fi is shot in the main conference hall, so I'm posting this in one wodge halfway through - check back around midday for the second half.

11.17: A man has just pressed an Ethernet cable into my hands. The other end appears to be linked to NINJA-grade internet. So this liveblog can now be actually live!

MIKE KIRKUP

11:18: RIM's developer relations boss Mike Kirkup is on stage now, talking about the BlackBerry developer program. There are now more than 200,000 registered developers, who've downloaded more than 1.6 million tools in the last couple of years. 200% growth in developers in the Asia-Pac region.

11.19: He's going to talk about what RIM is up to to engage more with developers, focusing on two things: the Developer's Blog and Developer's Issue Tracker. The blog is RIM's "new conversation platform" (a blog, then). How-to articles, market insights and monthly webcasts are apparently going down well.

11.20: RIM's Developer Issue Tracker has had more than 100 new feature requests, and 600 bug reports - of which around 250 have been solved. "It's a really fundamental change to our interaction with the community," he says. This stuff could be important - it's another differentiator for someone like RIM against someone like Apple, which is still getting fairly regular brickbats over its developer support.

11.21: There's a new BlackBerry Developer Zone on the RIM website, which has launched today. And "a lot of the marketing junk" has been ditched. "We are finally going to get rid of that ugly, ugly screen that you have to fill in every time you wanna download," he says. This gets LOTS of whoops and applause from the audience.

11.25: There's also a new BlackBerry Academic Program designed for students and training. There's also a BlackBerry Developer Training program due to debut next year, offering courses and labs for existing developers. And these tie into another new program - the BlackBerry Certification Program. "A professional designation designed for the real world," says Kirkup.

11.27: Kirkup highlights RIM's sponsorship of the App Planet at next year's Mobile World Congress too. And he's off.

ALAN BRENNER

11.33: Now Alan Brenner takes the stage - he's senior VP of the BlackBerry Platform. Expect more partner demos coming up. "It's really not so much about application development as it is about application integration," he says, referring to the same concept of 'BlackBerry Flow' that was talked about earlier.

11.34: He talks about how the BlackBerry Platform is working for both consumer and enterprise apps. Now Oracle is going to give a demo of what it's up to with BlackBerry - again, this being ME, I shall politely skip this. Back in a mo.

11.50: And we're back in the room! Kirkup talks about the three big advantages of BlackBerry - 'immediate, relevant and convenient'. We're back to the new location, payment, push and location APIs that have been announced today. VP of product management Curtis Sasaki is about to come on-stage to talk more about this.

CURTIS SASAKI

11.53: Kicking off with Connectivity, and web signals. He's showing off Air Canada's application, and how its icon changes colour on the BlackBerry homescreen to show information has changed.

11.55: But now onto push, and the CNN Money app, which is pushing data to the handset, complete with alerts in the BlackBerry inbox. "A lot of applications already are using push services," says Sasaki, citing the U2 Mobile Album as one example.

11.56: This should be interesting: eBay takes the stage, to show off its new BlackBerry app. James Barrese, VP of architecture and platform at eBay is up. It's a "sneak preview" of an app that'll be out "soon". It's integrating the BlackBerry Platform with its own.

11.57: "People build an application and try to take a desktop application and move it to a mobile device. But they really need to take advantage of context and some of the new capabilities that developers are experiencing," says Barrese.

11.59: The app looks pretty good, with a nifty carousel interface to browse photos of items. Users can bid from the app, but also set reminders for themselves, adding the item deadline to their BlackBerry calendar. "I wanna make sure that I win this item," says Barrese.

12.02: It only took eBay a couple of weeks to get the app up and running, apparently. "It'll be out and available later this month," says Barrese. Very nice indeed.

12.04: Sasaki explains that the new push features will be free to use for app developers. That gets applause from the audience.

12.06: And he introduces Loopt CEO Sam Altman and COO Brian Knapp. The mobile social network is presumably also using the new BlackBerry APIs, so they're here to explain how.

12.06: "We are really excited about the new geolocation API," says Altman. "You want always-on real-time location, and that's something that's hard to get on some platforms." IPHONE IPHONE IPHONE thinks the room. So the app will be constantly updating a user's location when it's running in the background.

12.08: There's a new version of Loopt, including its new Pulse feature which - I believe - was unveiled last week. It's all about "social local discovery" - finding a restaurant to have lunch at that's great, or a cool concert. Loopt is mashing up information from online listings, friend recommendations and other data.

12.09: A recurring theme - Altman says it was "incredibly easy" to get the app up and running. It's out today on the App World. One interesting point he makes is about battery life - the fact that RIM is using cell ID rather than GPS means these kinds of apps can run in the background without draining the BlackBerry battery too much.

12.11: Now Ken Kershner from RIM takes the stage to show off a new BlackBerry Dash app, that pulls in traffic and location info to figure out how long it will take a user to get to their destination, and what the traffic is likely to be. But it also ties into the BlackBerry messaging app to send a message to a friend in two-clicks saying something like 'stuck in traffic' (users choose from a list of possibles).

12.13: It'll launch as a public beta in January in the US and Canada. It'll run on GPS-enabled BlackBerries, which will anonymously report traffic data to the central server. There will also be a platform API to let third-party developers tie into this data too.

12.14: So this is allowing developers to use 'Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) to their apps, and hook it into messaging. A boon for satnav apps, I'm thinking.

12.15: Now RIM develoepr Ray Mendoza comes on stage - he's been working on a Doctors Without Borders app for BlackBerry using push and location. "You can imagine doctors receiving real-time updates about the status of their patients, and the ability to navigate directly to them could save lives," he says.

12.17: This isn't really entertainment, obviously. But it's interesting nonetheless.

12.18: No sooner did I write that, than Mendoza brought up a window full of hardcore code. Good for 98% of the audience, of course. "The new APIs hide the complexity, but they don't limit any of the power," he says by way of conclusion.

12.22: Back to Sasaki, and the new advertising service. He says developers have told RIM that it's hard to get up and running with mobile advertising, especially when it involves working with different SDKs if they want to work with more than one ad network.

12.23: "What we're introducing today is a different way of thinking about integrating advertising in your applications," he says. "We are providing an aggregation of many world-class leading ad networks." All through a single RIM-supplied SDK, and a single business relationship - through RIM.

12.24: Adobe subsidiary Omniture is on board to provide analytics. Again though, in the light of Google's $750 million acquisition of AdMob earlier today, it'll be interesting to see how (or if) they fit into this.

12.25: Now news app-maker Viigo is on-stage, "We don't wanna do all that," says its executive, referring to the hassles of working with multiple ad networks. "We just wanna make the money!"

12.27: It's using the new BlackBerry ad engine, and demos a pizza ad, which when clicked on opens the BlackBerry contacts to save the company's number. Meanwhile, another ad launches the App World to download a financial application from Bank of America.

12.29: Another ad for the 2012 film lets users put a reminder in their calendars of the release date. And another ad for the same film launches a video trailer.

12.32: And now Sasaki moves onto RIM's new payment platform, which allows in-app payments and subscriptions. Bloomberg is already using it for its BlackBerry app, and has provided a video demo for this keynote. "Coming soon" is premium news content within the app. A pop-up gets users to sign in with their BlackBerry account, choose a payment mechanism, and pay to view the content.

12.35: Just thinking, while this all goes on. The fact that RIM is matching some of the key iPhone 3.0 features is big on this score - because it means there will now be two major smartphone platforms offering in-app payments. It may nudge more developers, brands and media organisations to start using in-app payments - and it ties neatly into the grumbling coming from a certain Mr. R. Murdoch about news having to be paid for.

12.37: In other words, when you could only do this stuff on iPhone it appealed to a lot of developers, but now it'll be possible on BlackBerry too (and by the time it's introduced, quite possibly on Android as well) may speed the launch of these kinds of pricing models.

12.38: If that makes sense.

12.41: That's three and a half hours of keynote so far, albeit with different speakers tagging in and out. Still, I think it's possibly a record. The technology conference equivalent of those 12-hour DJ sets Sven Vath used to do.

12.42: That may be the first and last Sven Vath reference you'll read on the ME site, obviously.

12.44: Everyone starts to leave, thinking the keynote is over. But it's not! Co-CEO Jim Balsillie appears again, ready for the big Adobe reveal.

SHANTANU NARAYEN (ADOBE)

12.45: Yep, it's Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, getting keynote time with RIM even if Steve Jobs still won't return his calls. "What we are finding is our customers are telling us the innovation is really happening on smartphones," he says.

12.47: Stop. Demo time. Greg Rewis is the "Creative Suite evangelist" at Adobe - "good news and bad news: we're the only thing that stands between you and lunch". He's showing off Adobe's Device Central tool, which helps creative types to create creative stuff for different handset models in various Adobe applications.

12.50: More code on-screen. The point comes across though: Adobe and RIM want to get more designers working on BlackBerry apps and content, so they're trying to make it as un-hellish as possible.

12.55: Rewis shows off a version of Adobe's Dreamweaver web design package, with a dedicated BlackBerry menu at the top to help people start making BB widgets. Is that how it'll work? Will they end up with separate menus for Android, Symbian, iPhone (maybe) and so on as well?

12.57: LUNCH! And that is most definitely a wrap.