Blackberry awards $150K to three mobile apps

Blackberry Partners Fund has awarded $150,000 prizes to three makers of applications designed to work on the BlackBerry handheld.

And the winners are:

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• Multiplied Media‘s Poynt search service, which uses GPS to connect users with local businesses
• Strands’ Social Player, a social-networking music player that connects users and recommends songs based on their tastes, soon to be released
• Nobex Technologies’ Radio Companion, an app that tells users what’s playing on 2,700 radio stations and gives them the ability to buy the songs.

The companies couldn’t be more different in scale. Multiplied Media is a publicly traded company in Canada, venture-backed Strands has received $55 million from BBVA, Dalbergia, Sequel R&D and Debaeque Venture Capital, and Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Nobex is a newcomer (this $150K is its first financing).

The Blackberry Developers Challenge is part of the fund’s Jump Start Financing Initiative. The fund itself is new, having launched in May with support from RBC Venture Partners (a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada), Thomson Reuters, JLA Ventures and BlackBerry maker RIM. Its goal is to speed app development to keep pace with the iPhone and Google’s Android.