With all the news from the event, one thing was clear: RIM desperately wants developers to build for Blackberry and is now actively enticing them with a slew of new offerings designed to win them over.

One of the biggest announcements made yesterday involved the launch of new APIs (application programming interfaces) for third-party developers. The APIs offered include a new advertising service, a payments service, location services, and the general availability of Blackberry's own Push service, which had never before been made available to outside developers. What this means is that developers now have the tools to build applications that rival those already available on many other smartphones today, most notably, the iPhone. In some cases, the Blackberry APIs even offer something the iPhone doesn't such as is the case with the payments service which allows you to pay for apps on your next mobile phone bill.

The location services include a geo-location API that will use cell tower triangulation as a backup for when GPS fails, making location-based applications more reliable. There are also services for determining your phone's location on a map and another that helps estimate travel time for driving directions. It's obvious to see how these types of services could help build new and useful mobile applications for the Blackberry.

Also revealed was the new Blackberry Advertising Service, an offering designed to help developers generate revenue from their mobile applications. Through partnerships with ad networks, developers can easily integrate mobile advertising within their apps and track the ad's effectiveness with an included analytics package. It's even possible for these ads to access the phone's core features. For example, you'll be able to initiate a phone call from an ad or add a calendar entry from an ad. That's an innovation that many other mobile handhelds are not yet offering. These types of interactions should have a clear appeal to the many business-minded corporate Blackberry users who are often more interested in getting things done than they are with playing mindless games.

That being said, the game-playing crowd isn't being ignored either. Also announced was support for OpenGL ES, a graphics API for 3D games. While this doesn't quite put the Blackberry on par with what's available for iPhone, it's a move that's designed to keep Blackberry at least somewhat competitive in the field of mobile gaming.

Other announcements included new support for mobile developers looking to build applications with the languages and tools they already know and use. Java developers will get a new GUI builder that lets them create mobile interfaces using a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor with drag-and-drop capabilities. Adobe developers will be able to use the company's Flash Platform technology and Adobe Creative Suite tools to build rich, mobile apps as well. This is another area where Apple falls short - Flash still doesn't work on the iPhone. Instead Flash developers have to use special Adobe software to convert apps written in Flash to a format that's iPhone-compatible. Also, designers can now use Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver to build both themes and widgets using the new Blackberry Theme Studio 5.0.

Apps, Apps, Apps!

In addition to the RIM-specific announcements, a number of companies also used the Developer Conference as the launching pad for new Blackberry applications and related announcements.

Ebay, for example, unveiled a brand-new mobile app that lets you search for items, view descriptions and photos, bid, watch items, and more. It will also tap into Blackberry's now open Push services API to deliver real-time alerts as to when you're outbid on an auction. Considering that the company has already generated $400 million this year using eBay's iPhone application, this new Blackberry app should be a big hit among mobile users when it launches next month.

The popular location-based social networking service called Loopt also revealed a major update for Blackberry which includes something the iPhone can't offer due to the nature of the device: it runs in the background to continually update your location in real-time. This is one of the iPhone's biggest flaws according to critics, since so many mobile applications take advantage of always-on connectivity to track your location for the benefit of specific mobile apps. In Loopt's case, the app knows where you are in order to show you nearby friends and local businesses which you can rate. It even offers mobile coupons for the retailers and restaurants in your vicinity.

Finally, Xobni, the Outlook email search plugin that discovers social connections in your inbox, revealed their new Blackberry application, too. As with the desktop software, Xobni for Blackberry will let you find contacts in your address book quickly using Xobni Rank technology which returns results ranked based on frequency and freshness of your communication. The application will be made available sometime early next year.

The Blackberry Developer Conference continues until Thursday, so stay tuned for even more news over the coming days.

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Web Trends

The State of the Smartphone: iPhone is Way, Way Ahead

A new industry report from mobile analytics firm Flurry reveals some unique insights into the smartphone industry as of right now. Because their firm focuses not just on iPhone, but also on Android, RIM Blackberry, and JavaME, they have the ability to see platform-spanning trends, instead of just those tied to Apple. So what can we learn from their deep dive into their company's data? Anything surprising? Actually, what the report confirms is what we've been hearing for some time now: the iPhone is king, smartphones are the new laptops, and iPhone applications can and do make money.

Facebook Goes International: Sees Impressive Growth Rates in Africa and Asia

According to data compiled by O'Reilly's Ben Lorica, Facebook is currently seeing some very impressive growth outside of the United States. In Africa and Asia, for example, Facebook's active user base grew over 70% in the last 12 weeks, and in Indonesia, Facebook has finally displaced Friendster as the most popular social network. With regards to the basic demographics on Facebook, women still represent the majority of users (51% vs. 45%), and while younger users still represent the majority of active users on the service, users over 55 are driving most of Facebook's current growth.

Nobody is Making Money Online from Susan Boyle Video (Yet)

Unless you lived in an exceptionally dark cave in the last two weeks, you probably weren't able to escape the Susan Boyle phenomenon. According to some metrics, over 100 million people have watched the immaculately edited video of the 'frumpy' 47-year-old's performance on Britain's Got Talent (BGT) by now. While this is most definitely an interesting cultural phenomenon, the Times this week also reports that neither ITV, the network that shows BGT, nor YouTube have really been able to directly profit from this huge hit because the network and YouTube have been arguing about the terms of their advertising agreement.

Jimmy Wales: Social Web Marketing - Good for Some, Not for All

According to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, there are too many Indians and not enough Chiefs in the world of Web 2.0 marketing. "There is a lot of advice about how brands should be interacting [online]," he said in a keynote presentation at Ad:Tech San Francisco this week. "But, unless your brand is information dense, this highly interactive marketing is both expensive and useless." The good news however, is that communities offer the best bang for your buck in this miserable economy and Wales sees return on investment (ROI) as an "incredible steal right now," when it comes to consumer generated media.

Make Your Home Tweet Its Energy Use (Earth Day Project!)

Peter Troast, founder of Energy Circle, a company that sells energy-saving products, has created a new energy-monitoring system that sends his home's energy usage stats to Twitter. Inspired by the open source power monitoring kit from Tweet-a-Watt, Troast's system also sends his home's energy data to the web, but it's not in the form of once-a-day tweets like Tweet-a-Watt provides. Instead, his system uses a monitoring device called TED (The Energy Dectective) to create charts which are annotated by family members then tweeted for everyone to see. If you want to do the same for your home, we've got the info.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

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ReadWriteHire

Who's Getting Hired in Tech? Q1 Numbers from ReadWriteHire

Rapleaf's Auren Hoffman says that hiring is harder in a downturn because the noise goes up but the quality stays the same. That's a pretty strong statement to make, but if it's true then it's all the more remarkable to see which companies are making hires now.

Our site ReadWriteHire covers new hires in tech and new media. We've just published our aggregate numbers for the first 3 months of 2009. Who's hiring? Software and IT companies, social media and social networking companies and marketing and advertising firms.

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Web Products

Now You Can Change What Google Says About You

Google me? I'll Google you! Google has become the de facto public record these days but most people remain in relative obscurity there and/or fear of what past indiscretions Google will expose to people who search for them. This week Google released a product, called Google Me, that aims to change all of that. For a price - though not a monetary one.

GeoCities Closure Signals End of an Era - Will Others Survive on Freemium Model?

Yahoo has announced that its website creation service GeoCities, which it acquired for $4.5 billion in 1999, will close later this year. Existing customers are being encouraged to "upgrade" to Yahoo! Web Hosting, which offers a site-building service and a personalized web address. The closing of GeoCities is the end of an era. Last June, we profiled the rise of "GeoCities 2.0" services, i.e. website creation tools for the Social Web. Many of them will attempt to pick up GeoCities' customers. Although, as Yahoo! itself indicated in its closure message, website building is mostly a 'feature' nowadays rather than a separate product. So, is this a viable business now for the likes of Weebly and Yola?

No Doubt About It - Oprah Brought Lots of New Users to Twitter

Oprah's well publicized first tweet last Friday was definitely a boon for Twitter. According to Hitwise, 37% of all visits to Twitter last Friday were from new visitors, and Twitter's overall share of U.S. Internet visits increased 24% on Friday. It is important to note, though, that Twitter, being the new and growing service that it is, usually gets about 32% new visitors every day, which definitely puts these numbers into perspective. Hitwise, however, also notes that Facebook's ratio of new visitors was only 8% in March.

Sunlight Foundation Funds Six "Apps for America"

Chips, dip and government data are everyone's three favorite things to take to a party, right? Ok, so government data is actually quite boring on its own, but in these exciting times of democratized programming, government data can be turned into some pretty exciting mashups. That's just what the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation is aiming to make more possible with its work to make government and related data more available with its new Apps for America contest. More than 40 open source applications and websites making use of that data entered the contest and this week the six fabulous winners were announced. We've got a five minute screencast tour of the winners below.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Enterprise

IT Consolidation Blues: CHOI Does Not Spell Choice

Oracle is buying Sun, and bankers are looking forward to the next wave of consolidation. To somebody who remembers the innovation and excitement of earlier enterprise hardware and software start-ups, this is a bit gloomy. CHOI (Cisco, HP, Oracle, IBM) does not spell "choice" for buyers, employees, or investors. Choose your behemoth. If consolidation means lower prices -- and it will -- buyers will be happy. But, it all sounds like cost-cutting, layoffs, and less innovation to me.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel, which will soon be getting a re-design.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Perhaps what's most surprising about Flurry's report isn't simply how prevalent and popular the iPhone and iPhone applications are today, but how far ahead they are of the nearest competitors. From an application perspective, the iPhone is killing on all fronts: number of developers, number of applications, and number of consumers using these applications.

Keep in mind when viewing these numbers, we're looking at data from Flurry, a snapshot sample computed from 100 applications, 8 million consumers, and 4 platforms (Apple iPhone, Google Android, RIM Blackberry, and JavaME). While these charts can give you insight into the mobile trends, they can't necessarily be extrapolated to the entire mobile smartphone industry. For example, because Flurry only deals with a small number of Blackberry developers, they can't provide any statistically relevant numbers relating to Blackberry apps. But then again, notes Flurry VP of Marketing Peter Farago, "why haven't Blackberry developers signed up for analytics?"

What you can glean from the info they've gathered, however, is that iPhone has a commanding lead over Android and the others right now. Unless Google has some big tricks up their sleeve, catching up with Apple's iPhone is going to be tough.

Smartphones are the New Laptops

Smartphones are the new laptops - we sort of knew this one already, didn't we? Although historically, only 10% of the installed-base used mobile applications on a daily basis, today, that number is changing... and changing fast. Smartphone applications are now heavily used and many are even used daily. Among those used daily, the frequency of use is also high, with some applications being used as much as 20 times per day.

Are smartphones really replacing laptops and are applications really replacing web sites? Maybe "replace" isn't exactly the right word to use, but there is definitely a shift in user behavior occurring right now where people are using their smartphones more than ever.

Yes, iPhone Apps Make Money

According to Flurry, iPhone applications can and do make money. Not all apps make it, of course, but those that do can actually make good money. A strong publisher with two titles a month can expect $10 million to $15 million in sales through the iPhone channel, if the titles are well-marketed, says the report.

But "well-marketed" is the key word here. The iPhone app industry is beginning to resemble the music industry with its "hit-driven" nature. One "hit" gets a developer on the map and gives them the chance to sell more apps. Successful apps often resemble successful songs: you need a good artist, a good producer, a strong distributor, and plenty of promotion.

Boosting Sales in a "Hit-Driven" Economy

It's also worth noting that you can't live forever off one "hit" alone. With iPhone games especially, users tend to get bored rather quickly. Flurry estimates that the average lifetime for a game is about 3 months. Publishers should keep that in mind when planning for their refresh cycles and updates.

But even still, refreshes provided by updates may not be enough. Flurry is seeing a trend that, to be honest, was surprising: only 10% of users are updating their applications after download. That means new features pushed out via an update aren't being seen by a large group of the app's users.

Instead of trying to drive engagement of your current user base through updates, it seems you may be better off going after new users. Cross-promotion of applications - that is, advertising one app within your other app - is very effective. Giving away a free trial can boost sales of your paid application, too.

About Flurry

Flurry is a mobile analytics firm with a "freemium" offering. Right now their core product is free, but in the future some additional optional services including development support and monetization opportunities will be added. Their company offers some unique measurements for developers of multiple smartphone platforms. One such measurement is user path tracking which is a feature much beloved by user experience designers as it lets them see the path a user took to get through a game or application.

Another feature of Flurry's platform is the ability to track dynamic parameters, which are completely custom parameters designated by the developer. Flurry also sets themselves apart from some of their competitors by what they don't do. They don't do advertising and don't want to be an advertising network.

You can check out a demo of Flurry's full service with live reporting data here: flurry.com/demo or you can view this slideshow of Flurry's analytics platform instead.

Recession? What recession? According to a survey from ABI Research, many U.S. consumers are spending hundreds of dollars per year on mobile applications. Over 15 percent of those surveyed had spent nearly $100 over the past twelve months and a surprising 16.5 percent had spent between $100 and $500 during that same time frame.

With the high level of spending being reported, those unfamiliar with the mobile industry could easily be led to believe that mobile applications must cost a pretty penny. However, just the opposite is true - mobile applications are relatively inexpensive - often only a dollar or two on iTunes for example. That makes the amount of money being spent all the more telling - people aren't just buying apps, they're buying a lot of apps.

Yet it's those App Store prices that ABI analyst Jeff Orr claims are hurting the overall mobile industry. "If you exclude Apple from the mix, applications for other platforms cost about $7-25 each," he says. "Many developers, lacking the resources to author applications for all available smartphone platforms, have to focus on one. That means they have a 'margin vs. volume' quandary: sell many copies for the iPhone at a very low price of which the developer receives 70%, or sell fewer via one of the other application storefronts, but charge a higher price and earn more per transaction."

On the other hand, however, Orr notes that Apple did a lot for the industry with their marketing campaigns for mobile applications. Their efforts led to sort of a 'halo' effect that has positively impacted the sales of apps on non-Apple platforms.

Some Big Caveats About These Numbers

Before everyone takes these survey numbers to the bank, though, it's important to look at them a bit more closely.

First of all, the sample size of this survey was far too small - only 235 smartphones owners were involved. That may be enough to hint towards a trend that requires further research, but it's not large enough to drawn any concrete conclusions from.

Secondly, smartphone users who didn't install an application weren't included in the survey so, obviously, the data is skewed here as well. The survey results seem to imply that application purchases are something all smartphone owners do, but that is not the case. We imagine there are probably tons of executives out there whose Blackberry devices are used for two things only: phone calls and emails. That said, it seems once you cross over to being an application buyer, the sky's the limit when it comes to spending.

One final note about the survey is that the findings are self-reported and most people don't do very well at estimating how much they've spent over a period of time. We could probably ask our readers a similar question and report our findings as "research" too.

Hmm, let's do that:

Big in Japan called the Target store in question and spoke to the manager, who indicated that she was not aware of the policy. We also contacted Target's corporate headquarters to confirm Target's policy, or lack thereof, but we first had to explain the application to the company representative. They had never heard of such a thing before! (As it turns out, Target has no policy whatsoever on barcode scanning their merchandise.)

The same customer also noted they had visited Sam's Club, where they demonstrated the application to a store employee who seemed "confounded that such technology even existed," wrote the user.

Instant Price Match Is Retail's Future

Although this is just anecdotal evidence from one customer, it's entirely believable that without concrete store policies in place, you're going to encounter rogue employees here and there who have no idea what you're doing and will ask you to stop.

On the flip side, stores that do get hip to this trend may decide to implement store policies that ban scanning, once they realize that customers could discover their high prices. A post on AdLab for example, a blog about advertising and marketing, suggests retailers do just that. They also recommend retailers should consider investing in a a cell phone jammer. They even provide a "No iPhones on Premises" sign for printout.

That doesn't seem to be a very proactive way of dealing with the technology. In fact, it reminds us of how both the music and movie industry attempted to quash the pirating of songs and films: they just tried to make it stop. Instead of going a route destined for failure and trying to shut down barcode scanning altogether, retailers could choose to embrace the trend. They could offer easy-to-find barcodes on their promotional items with signage encouraging customers to compare the price instantly with other stores in the area. They could make barcode scanning the new advertising circular.

Hopefully, stories like those of the Shop Savvy customer will remain isolated incidents and no other store employees will bother customers looking to save money. If you've used barcode scanning applications and have experiences to share, please let us know in the comments.