During the BlackBerry Developer Conference in early November, RIM made a series of significant announcements about how it would be enhancing the technological and business environment for developers over the coming months.

We caught up with director of developer relations Mike Kirkup, as he was passing through London, to talk about how these initiatives would impact game companies.

In part one of the our interview, we discussed the new BlackBerry Advertising Service, which is designed to simplify the process of integrating in-app advertising, while expanding its international reach.

Pocket Gamer: What's the core idea behind the new advertising platform?

Mike Kirkup: The advertising service is the idea that RIM will act as a mediation layer between developers and advertising networks to make it easier to generate advertising revenue through your applications.

It's important, because attempting to do this today is painful. It's difficult to write the code you need in terms of serving ads, not to mention tracking results and doing the analytics. And then there are the business relationships such as dealing with the advertising networks to ensure you have localised adverts. That's very difficult to do: much too much for most developers to deal with.

Why did RIM decide to do this?

For one thing, we need to make sure there's a vibrant and successful ecosystem in terms of developers who are writing BlackBerry applications and so we need to provide them with alternative ways of making money.

More specifically, RIM is in a unique position because we have a global footprint and relationships with over 500 carriers. What we're finding is that in a lot of countries, carriers either have established relationships with advertisers already or they own the advertising network themselves. So we're in a position where we can set up these international relationships and pass along as much revenue as possible to the developer. Essentially we're just covering our own costs when it comes to the service.

How do existing mobile advertising companies fit into the service?

We've announced nine advertising networks that will be part of this at launch [including Jumptap, Lat49, Millennial Media, Navteq, 1020 Placecast, Quattro Wireless and Sympatico.ca]. Simply we'll take the money from the advertising networks and pass it to the developer.

What are the options for developers in terms of integration?

There's an SDK which enables developers to say how much space they're willing to give to adverts, as well as all the back end tracking so we can see which ads were shown in which apps, how many times, and how many people clicked on them.

We've also increased the sorts of interactions you can have with mobile adverts. At the moment, the only action mobile ads can perform is to show you a banner that you click on to see a larger ad.

Because of the cleaner user experience on BlackBerry, we've added four more actions which will enable higher ad rates. The first is Click-to-Contact so you click on an ad and it adds the advertiser into your contacts list i.e. a local restaurant or cinema. The second is a Click-to-App-World, so essentially that's upselling from an ad to link directly to the app via App World. The third is Click-to-Calendar so you can add events such as the opening weekends of movies, or the launch of console games. The final one is Click-to-Rich Media so people can open up a trailer or video of a product.

Depending on the type of game, I think there will be plenty of opportunities to apply these sorts of advertising actions.

Thanks to Mike for his time.

The BlackBerry Advertising Service is due to be rolled out in the first half of 2010.

You can find out more from the BlackBerry developers website.