You can find the latest World cup scores on Berry411 by typing “wc:” or (for example) “wc: brazil”, courtesy of Google Mobile.

Preview the World Cup Results

The Berry411 Plugins page is a new feature of the Berry411 service. It provides a categorized directory of all Berry411 search plugins, including previews of the results from each plugin. You can also add new plugins and share them with the Berry411 community.

Some of the best ideas for plugins, like the recently flight tracking plugin, come from users, so this is an easy do-it-yourself way for any user to add a plugin. (A plugin can point to the results of search form, or simply be a convenient name for a page to save users to trouble of typing a long URL.)

Personalization features like Berry Plugins will now be much easier for me to implement, now that I have rewritten the core of the Berry411 backend in Ruby on Rails. It’s possible there will be a few bumps in the road with this significant transition, so please share with me any problems you might encounter as well as suggestions for improvement.

And please do create some plugins!

A Berry411 user has contributed an EBay search plugin for Berry411. After doing a search, the results pages allow you to conveniently view and bid on items using your Blackberry.

If you wanted to find antiques on ebay, you could type “ebay: antiques”. If you do a lot of ebay searches, you can add EBay to the Berry411 search menu using “Edit plugins” and entering ebay as the name of the plugins.

Berry411 v3 has now shipped; read the Berry411 project page for details and installation instructions. I’ve had the new version out there quietly for several days now and it seems like few issues are being encountered.

The most significant new feature is address book integration. You can get driving directions to any person in your address book, or do a reverse lookup to get their address based on their phone number, or set your Berry411 “Other” location to their address.

Moving forward, I believe this functionality is a hint of the way in which the built-in software and data on mobile devices will be merged seamlessly with additional, live data out on the web. Using the mobile web will no longer be a separate, unnatural activity.

There is also an important bug fix which resolves the class cast exceptions [*] that AskMeNow and 8700 users were seeing.

V3 is the first version of Berry411 that requires OS4.0+, but my logs show that the vast majority of Blackberry users are (surprisingly enough) running an OS this recent.

[*] It turns out that the Blackberry PersistentStore implementation depends 100% on the goodwill and competence of software developers not to trash each other’s setting. Each persisted item is supposed to have a globally unique key obtained by hashing the class name, but RIM doesn’t specify the hashing function or emphasize strongly enough the importance of uniqueness. Both AskMeNow and Berry411 choose “1″ for their first key, leading to predictably bad results.

For everyone who has seen class cast exceptions during Berry411 startup, especially on the 8700 and 7100, thank you for your patience; a verified fix is now available

The latest beta build of Berry411 (version 3.02, released April 30th) has been verified to fix the problem for everyone I’ve talked to.

You can install the new build by following the instructions on the Berry411 beta page.

(Developer’s note: the surprising thing that seems to be at the root of the problem is that other applications (e.g. AskMeNow) can stomp on objects persisted by Berry411. My reading of the documentation suggests that this shouldn’t be possible, but nonetheless it seems to happen. The application now handles this condition gracefully.)

Thanks to David Shane for suggesting 5 new Wikipedia related searches to add as plugins to add to Berry 411.
These plugins will help you read wikipedia articles, define words, find the scientific name for tigers (try “wksp: tiger”), or even read Hamlet (”wks: hamlet”)when you’re on the go.

wk: Wikipedia
wkd: Wictionary word search
wkb: Wikipedia textbook search
wks: Wikipedia open source book search
wksp: Wikipedia species search (enter latin or common names)

If you’re an experienced product manager in the mobile space, the following position might be of interest to you. T-Mobile is hiring an experienced Product Manager in Bellevue.

(Disclosure: T-Mobile is a Jobster customer and I’d like to help connect them with someone good.)

This product leader is responsible for driving the product strategy in conjunction with the Product Development group for Broadband business.

What does that mean to you?

It means you’ll work with Sales and Product Development groups on rigorous analysis of customer needs, definition, and evangelism of customer/partner/market requirements with a focus on business. You’ll develop detailed MRD and PRD documents with defined screen navigation. And, you will provide analysis, identification and strategy regarding new product and service integration in close coordination with Product Development group.

If that’s not enough to keep you challenged, you can drive the development and management of business cases, including financial modeling, to provide strategic management to drive marketing and revenue targets. Then, after lunch, you can take responsibility for the delivery of actionable go-to-market plans that efficiently leverage all elements of the marketing mix across all channels within a specified budget.

If you’ve done this before, most likely you’ve got an MBA and a strong background in consumer business marketing (6-10 years). That experience will help you succeed in this role, as well as a clear understanding of the retail channel.

Ready to talk? So are we.

A new version of the Berry411 mobile search tool is now available for beta testing for general use (Update: Version 3.05 was released on 5/17/2006.)

The main new feature of this version is integration with the Blackberry address book application. A new menu item in the address book allows you get driving directions or do a reverse phone lookup for any contact. You can also set your current Berry411 location based on an address in your address book. Address book integration works on all phones except the 8700.

I am also hoping that this version will eliminate This version eliminates the incompatibilities that AskMeNow and 8700c users have reported; though I have not been able to test this yet.

Berry 411 version 3.0 requires version 4.0 or later of the Blackberry OS. (If you have a recent phone, you’re probably running this already.)

To give version 3.0 a try, point your Blackberry browser at http://thebogles.com/berry411.jad, or click here and enter your email address to send yourself an install link.

subSilver_mobile provides discussion forums that are optimized for mobile devices — it’s a phpBB template based on subSilver.

Adfh Au was kind enough to point out that I’d earlier uploaded the wrong file, an error which has now been corrected. See the Project Page for more info.

Rich Tong reports that T-Mobile has nearly completed their Edge Network, which will be four times faster than GPRS.

As a user of T-mobile’s unlimited data plan on the Blackberry, I’m excited about this. It will make the Blackberry much more effective both for mobile data apps and as a tethered modem.