While I was at CES I came across a live demo Gracenote on a BlackBerry 8300 Curve. Most of you will have no idea what Gracenote is unless you have used it before. Gracenote is a whitelabel software company that provides software for devices to manage and identify music. Whitelabel means that they don’t sell the software themselves rather they sell it to your carrier or cellphone company and they sell it to you.
I got a chance to try out the Gracenote application to identify some music and it worked like a charm on their test 8300. It even gives you the lyrics and bio for each song you identify. I know many of the new Sony Ericsson Walkman cellphones come with this feature FREE and my best friend loves it. The software they showed off at CES was actually smart enough to fix the MP3 files on your device when you sync it with your computer. That means you would get the correct album, artist, and title automatically fixed on your BlackBerry. Talk about cool!
Gracenote is trying to convince RIM to put the application on their devices but they say RIM has a few hangups. The main hangup is that they can’t seem to find a way to make money from it so they were not that interested. Personally I would take a different approach. RIM is trying to target the consumer market so why not offer consumer friendly applications?
You can read more about the Gracenote application on their website or check out the pictures I took from their booth at CES. Personally I think that if BlackBerry users showed an interest in the new application RIM would actually think twice about releasing it.
Send an email to [email protected] and see if we can catch their attention 
Ronen Halevy ( View Profile) - Posts: