BerrySearch v0.9 is now available for free over-the-air download. BerrySearch is the only mobile search application that features interactive autocomplete for Google, Wikipedia, and Dictionary searches– the autocompletions in each mode are suggested based on the particular content of that site.

Podlinez has an ingeniously simple system for listening to podcasts on any phone– every podcast gets its own phone number, and users can add their additional podcasts simply by entering the feed URL.  

Unfortunately, the Podlinez directory of podcasts is currently hard to navigate even from a PC and especially from a phone. 

For this reason, I’ve put together my own small directory of links to news related podcasts on Podlinez, available here: http://thebogles.com/berry/podcasts.  This directory is optimized for viewing on a mobile device; you should be able to listen to the podcast on the phone simply by clicking on the phone number links.  The mini-directory is also linked to to from the news and weather pages on Berry411.

 I am pleased to announce the release of BerrySearch 0.8beta, a free web search tool for the RIM Blackberry.

BerrySearch does for web search on the Blackberry what Berry411 did for local information, making key web reference sources fast to access and easy to use. 

Key features:  

• Google Suggest saves typing
• Single click access to Google, Wikipedia, Dictionary, Thesaurus, and more.

To install over the air, point your Blackberry at http://thebogles.com/berrysearch.jad.  And please do send me your feedback, it will help improve the final release.

The Berry411 app enables mobile web pages on the Blackberry to do several things previos otherwise possible only from native apps, including directly adding entries to the Blackberry address book.

Below is a brief sketch of how this works for single address entries; I will document in another post how to add multiple entries if there is demand.

(1) Look in the HTTP-ACCEPTS header and see if you see the string “text/xml-berry411”.   If you find it, this means the user has Berry411 installed.

(2) Construct a link like the following, replacing the bold values with the appropriate URL encoded values.

http://thebogles.com/berry/yp/add_contact?f=business_name&p=phone &a=street&c=city&s=state

Berry411 version 3.6 is now available for download.   This version features a Local Info page with links to Weather, Sports, and Yelp guides for your city. 

Yelp and Urbanspoon reviews are also linked to directly from hits in yellow page search results, allow you to find the most highly rated businesses when you’re on the go.  (Most large cities are covered by Yelp.)

Version 3.6 also fixes two bugs affecting certain phones: an exception on powerup on some 7100 phones and multiple listings for the Berry411 menu item in the address book.

Urbanspoon is a new vertical search engine for restaurant info and reviews, which, thanks to an external API, has now been integrated with Berry411 search results. 

I’m a big fan of Urbanspoon, and not just because it was started by my friends and former coworkers Adam Doppelt and Ethan Lowry. Urbanspoon collects the key information and links to all of the reviews for a restaurant in a single page, and allows users to easily vote on and share their favorites.  (It’s currently Seattle only, but additional cities are planned.)

Adam and Ethan really get the importance of mobile access to entertainment info and have already built mobile versions of Urbanspoon pages. The site’s REST api allows Urbanspoon content and links to be integrated with Berry411 yellow page search results.  If you’re in the Seattle area and use Berry411, try searching for your favorite restaurants– thousands of restaurants are in their database already and automatically integrated.

Below are a few screenshots to give you a flavor of how it works; I’m excited about the potential of this sort of integration. 

I’ve designed the backend to also allow other kinds of external info to be mixed in with yellow pages, so if you have any good idea of sources of content please share them with me.

Berry411 version 3.50 is now available for free download and over-the-air install. The major new feature in this release is improved handling for addresses, as frequently requested by users. 

• The “Pick from recent addresses” feature allows you to easily manage more than three addresses. 
• The City/State field now accepts zip codes as well.
• The phone numbers of items you click on are now automatically added to search history.
• There have been a few of subtle usability improvements to address editing.

There are now 111 Berry411 mobile search plugins

Some of plugins are for everybody. For example:

• yelp: sushi find reviews of nearby sushi joints via Yelp mobile.
• kayak: lets you find the best prices for flights and hotels.
• movieratings: star wars displays movie ratings of Star Wars from Rotten Tomatoes.
• digg: displays recent digg headlines.

Other plugins make it easy to search for specialized information:

• epocrates: tylenol will look up dosing and drug interaction information for tylenol.
• law: hearsay defines legal terms. Uninteresting to most of us, but fascinating to a few.
• urbandict: crunk looks up crunk in the urban dictionary (crunk=crazy+drunk)
• taf:KDEN will display the travel aviation forecast for the KDEN airport.

Check them out and create your own.

Full screen maps are now included on the business details page in Berry411, replacing the small Mapquest thumbnails that were there before. These mobile-friendly maps come courtesy of the Yahoo Maps Image API, which allow you to construct a map image of arbitrary dimensions for any address or latitude/longitude, and the ym4r Ruby gem that wraps the Yahoo web service. Google currently doesn’t have anything like it, and the Yahoo service is free for up to 50,000 web service hits a day. 

Probably the number one feature request I get for Berry411 is integration with Google Maps. In fact, many applications could benefit from such integration; imagine being able to map addresses in your Blackberry address book, for example.

There currently exist Blackberry specific APIs which could allow this sort of integration to happen today, specifically
BrowserContentProvider.

I’ve traded emails with someone from Google regarding this possibility. Google will probably allow integration but only via the official Java specification, the JSR-211: Content Handler API now in Final Release. Implementations of JSR-211 will no doubt be widely available Real Soon Now.

Google could allow the five million Blackberry users to enjoy Google Maps integration today via a relatively simple mapping layer to the RIM API. Google’s limited budget seems not to permit phone specific development, however.

In the meanwhile, there is an alternate, easier to integrate mapping implementation I’m looking into.