Here are three recent 411 developments of note:

Smart 411: Vishwa has released a beta version of Smart 411, a client for the Berry 411 service that runs on any recent Java smartphone. Vishwa’s work is exciting because it will greatly expand the set of devices that can use the service. Give it a try and let him know your experiences.

Sending vCards: You’ll notice a new “Send” link next to white and yellow page results. This will email you or a friend an address summary and vCard that you can add to your Blackberry or PC address book.

Blog search: Technorati’s mobile blog search has been added as a plugin. Just type “t: searchtext” or add “techno” to your plugin menu using Edit Plugins.

“Vnc2swf is a screen recorder.
It captures screen motion through
VNC protocol and converts it into a

Macromedia Shockwave Flash(TM) file.

Pyvnc2swf is a Python implementation of vnc2swf. It runs on Unix/Linux/OSX/Windows. You need at least one VNC server, Python 2.3 or above and Pygame 1.6 or above.”

Read More

Perfect for creating demo movies. I’m especially intrigued by the Python version for its hackability.

I am making the Berry 411 backend available to anyone who wants to write their own not-for-profit client for a mobile device.

A few more details: Berry 411 consists of a frontend client that accepts the users query and a backend web service (akin to the Google WML proxy described here) that reformats results from various search engines to optimize them for mobile devices.

The general format for the search URL is:

http://thebogles.com/cgi-bin/{script}?q=search string&near=street,city,state

where script is one of:
yp.py (yellow pages), google.py, wp.py, answers.py (encyclopedia), movies.py, shopping.py, and weather.py

There is an additional script called plugin.py that can launch any of the Berry 411 plugin; it takes an additional parameter called name which is the name of the plugin to use. Two other URLs worth knowing about are about.py (the about page) and about_plugins.py (which lists the available plugins.)

If you create a new client that uses the Berry 411 web service, please let me know and I’ll link to it.

Berry 411 is branching out to new devices; soon you should be able use the service on just about any smartphone.

I’ve been chatting with Vishwanatha Srinivasan, who is developing a version of the Berry 411 client that will run on any Java enabled Smart phone. Vishwantha has been running it on his Audiovox SMT5600, a PocketPC device that runs MIDP 2.0. The client uses the Berry 411 backend to generate the mobile friendly results pages. When it’s complete I’ll post a link here. Like Berry 411, his version will be free.

Josh Bancroft of the excellent Tiny Screenfuls blog and podcast has also expressed interest in doing a native Pocket PC version. Should be cool.

Adam Doppelt investigated a number of open source AJAX spell checkers recently for Jobster. (His home page, by the way, sets some sort of record for understatedness.)

One of the coolest spell checkers he found was Emil Eklund’s DHTML Spell Checker. It implements background spell checking with red squiggly underlines for mispellings and a drop down menu of suggested corrections. It’s licensed under the MIT license so you should have no issues using it on your own site.

This post and this one describe in more detail how it works.

Want to manage web sites with over 5 million hits a month? Be a part of an emerging company that helps connect quality candidates with the right job at the right time?

Jobster is looking for a sysadmin with solid Linux experience. Oracle experience is a plus. Jobster is based out of historic Pioneer Square in Seattle with a cohesive and fun engineering team and strong market traction.

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I know that many of my readers are technical and interested in wireless innovation so I thought I’d pass this along. Samsung is looking for a director of software engineering for a creative team.

Director, Software Engineering
Dallas, Texas

Involves managing a group of 25 or so creative individuals and being an idea leader for that group. The group is expected to generate approximately 25 patents per year. The candidate must guide the work of some truly creative individuals. The output will be software innovations that will be used in future handsets models. This position gets a lot of visibility in HQ so the candidate must be able to travel to Korea to represent his work.

Requirements

MS or PhD from a tier one university (e.g. Ivy League, CMU, Stanford, MIT, academic Big Ten, etc)

At least 10 years experience with embedded systems design, algorithms and C language programming.

Understanding of software architecture and algorithms

View jobs

Robert Merrill clearly gets it:

In line with the news about Yahoo crawling for free job postings, if you remember Econ 101, you will see that this movement in the market toward free listings and aggregated search engines (Indeed and SimplyHired) is evidence that the “job posting� itself is not really where the value is.

The posting itself is just words, and though it has been used as evidence of the dot-com industry’s legitimacy, and the saving grace (read: only consistent revenue stream) of newspapers all over the world

But in my opinion, the market is realizing that the value behind the ad is the people it connects–the recruiter and the candidate. If an ad will not adequately connect good candidates and the people willing to hire them, it is useless. To that end, since current job-posting technologies are doing little more than spamming recruiters with millions of resumes, the value is dropping rapidly.”

Read More:

Yubnub fans: Berry 411 now supports yubnub as a search plugin (keyword “yubnub”, or “yn” for short). You can add yubnub to your plugins menu, or simply type “yn: gim porsche” to have yubnub execute the given command (which translate to Search Google Images for Porsche.)

I probably ought to back up a little bit, because for many of you that last sentence will make no sense whatsoever.

Yubnub is a “social command line for the web”. The goal is to bring the power of the command line to the web, and to harness the energy of a community to do so.

Yubnub is growing more powerful both socially (with more people contributing to the Yubnub community) and as a command line, with new features like pipes for stringing together commands.

Given that mobile devices like the Blackberry have limited screen real estate and navigation, a command line for the mobile web really makes a lot of sense.

The next step is to format at least some of the output from the different Yubnub commands so that it is more convenient for mobile devices. Someday perhaps we’ll just pipe the results to mobile reformatting command :-)

Word to Wired Dude Dave for clueing me into the efforts towards a mobile Yubnub and Jon Aquino for building Yubnub as a part of the 2005 Rails Day.

In my continuing quest to make mobile search faster and easier, I am pleased to announce version 2.5 of the Berry 411 local search tool.

(If you already know you want to upgrade, you can go directly to the installation instructions.) If not, read on:

The major new features of v2.5 are search autocomplete and improved plugin support.

Search autocomplete

Search autocomplete saves typing and makes search faster by allowing you to easily reuse past queries. The search screen displays a history of matching queries from your search history that filters as you type. Rather than retyping a query, you can simply click on the history item.

Search Plugin improvements

Search plugins allow you to extend Berry 411 with specialized searches, like stocks and traffic conditions. You can now specify a plugin as a part of your search string; for example “weather: knoxville TN” or “stocks: ibm”. As before, you can configure plugin menu items via the “Edit Plugins” item on the search screen menu.

As always, the price is right– a requested donation to the charity of your choice or one of my recommended charities.

Install Berry 411 v2.5