In one of the most anticlimactic (and likely ineffective) marketing campaigns in history, RIM has today launched its “Wake Up. Be Bold.” campaign in Australia. It began with a group of “protestors” disembarking from a bus outside of Apple’s Sydney store with signs that read “Wake Up.” But don’t get too excited — that’s the most exciting part of the story.
After the long and vigorous rivalry between Samsung and Apple, both in marketing and in the courts, the South Korea-based company was originally blamed for the seemingly out-of-the-blue protest. RIM, of course, kept quiet.
But it was in fact RIM that staged the shit show, which all culminated in the launch of the wakeupbebold.com website, wherein an Australian man explains how business has changed and that to be different you mustn’t just “think different,” but “do different” (which I’m fairly certain is grammatically incorrect), lest you end up “floating through life like a cork in a stream.” → Read More
At RIM’s keynote earlier this week, CEO Thorsten Heins unveiled a brand new camera app that will ship along with BlackBerry 10. It was quite impressive. It basically lets you snap a pic, select a subject’s face, and sift through frames captured before the moment you pressed the shutter button to make sure everyone looks their best. Perhaps the person on the left had a huge, wonderful smile while the person on the right was blinking. With the BB10 camera app, you will be able to fix that.
But the tech seemed awfully familiar. So familiar, in fact, that we had to do a little digging to satisfy our curiosity. Come to find that a company called Scalado, known for their super badass imaging tech like Remove and Rewind, actually invented this tech a while back. At the time we were unsure what the relationship between RIM and Scalado was, but RIM has since responded and clarified that this is, in fact, a licensing deal. → Read More
Just because the first day of BlackBerry World is over doesn’t mean we mobile geeks have run out of BlackBerry-related tidbits to pick apart.
Oh, far from it — in fact, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins took the stage (again) earlier today for a long-running chat with the press, and he has since outed a few juicy new details about the company’s strategy going forward.
First, let’s take a quick look at the things RIM won’t be doing, shall we?
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Remember that retro time-defying camera app that RIM unveiled alongside a few other BB10 features? You should — it happened this morning.
Well, it would seem that the ability to search back through frames captured before the actual moment you pushed the shutter button has already been done. Nope, not by Apple. Not by Motorola, HTC, Samsung, or Nokia either.
It’s been done by Scalado, an imaging technology company known for their Remove and Rewind tech, among other things. → Read More
Even though we still don’t know when RIM will get around to launching it, CEO Thorsten Heins gave us a few brief glimpses at what BlackBerry 10 would be able to do during his keynote address at the BlackBerry World conference.
But what’s that? You missed the keynote? Well, just for you, here’s the video that Heins played during his time on stage that shows off what the company’s forthcoming mobile operating system could look like when it officially launches later this year.
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Freemium visual voicemail service YouMail never forgot their roots — they first launched in late 2007 with the mission of making visual voicemail available to the masses, but soon focused their attention on what was then the market-leading smartphone platform: BlackBerry.
I don’t need to tell you that RIM’s fortunes have changed since then, but the YouMail crew dutifully updated their BlackBerry app even though registrations from users of that platform began to dip. Until now, that is. With one final (and seemingly substantive) update in place though, YouMail has officially decided to call it quits on BlackBerry. → Read More
BlackBerry fans in India had best stay on the up-and-up lest they want to draw unwanted attention from the country’s security agencies. India Today reported over the weekend that the country’s government is on the verge of being able to capture messages sent though RIM’s formerly iron-clad BBM service.
Unnamed Indian officials were quick to point out to India Today that their forthcoming ability to capture and crack BBM messages will be used strictly on snoop on devices whose users are suspected of engaging in criminal or terrorist activity.
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The folks at RIM can see the writing on the wall — they’ve historically enjoyed plenty of enterprise love, but the recent “bring your own device” trend means headaches not only for RIM, but for the companies that have to manage all of them. In a move to hang on to relevance in the business market, the Waterloo company has officially released their Mobile Fusion device management platform, which aims to simplify how businesses manage a fleet of iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices. → Read More
An errant tweet points us to the news that Research In Motion CEO Thorsten Heins is “clearing house” and “SVP/VP-level execs” are being fired. What does this mean? Hopefully a turnaround and, more cynically, an effort to reduce costs. Either way, RIM is changing.
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This just in folks: RIM has released their Q4 2012 earnings report, and it paints a pretty bleak portrait of the ailing company. RIM posted quarterly revenues of $4.2 billion, down 19% from the previous quarter, and down 25% from the year-ago quarter. The Waterloo company also reported a net loss of $125 million or $0.24 per share diluted in Q4, along with earnings per share of $0.80.
In the days leading up to the release, analysts expected earnings of $0.83 cents a share on revenue of $4.56 billion. → Read More
Once upon a time RIM was the shining star of Canada. Hailing from the Great White North, BlackBerry phones were the country’s dominant smartphone. But times have changed and RIM has not changed with them. That’s a recipe for failure and it seems that based on data compiled by IDC and Bloomberg, Apple shipped more phones in Canada last year than RIM. → Read More
Jailbreaking, a term that has come to encompass several practices but generally refers to a user obtaining root access on their device, is controversial in a strange way. Companies like Apple and Nintendo hate it, and most users don’t care about it. Yet it’s constantly in the news because it is, in fact, a philosophical conflict.
RIM has posted an official response to the habit of jailbreaking BlackBerry devices, particularly PlayBooks, though the post doesn’t mention the product by name. Probably because it would be hard to argue against users creating functionality for the device that should have existed there in the first place. → Read More
By most accounts there aren’t very many people out there in the world using PlayBooks, but for those that are, or are considering the purchase of one, comes some good news: RIM has finally updated the OS to include two services that have been long discussed and much anticipated: integrated email support and Android app availability.
The OS could serve to give the device a boost in the market, after many people slammed RIM for shipping the tablet too early when it debuted last year without these and other features. → Read More
We’ve seen handset makers like HTC, LG and Nokia all warning of declines in smartphone sales. But if there is a slowdown affecting some, it’s not because people are not buying smartphones; it’s because they’re all buying iPhones.
Figures out from Gartner today say that smartphone sales totalled 149 million units in Q4 2011 — 47.3 percent higher than the same quarter a year ago, led by none other than Apple’s iPhone, which its analysts noted “saved” the smartphone market after two quarters of declining sales. → Read More
Microsoft and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) are teaming up today on the public release of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, a name which surely Microsoft itself had a hand in creating. The new service will allow corporate customers to manage their deployed BlackBerry devices using Exchange Online, the hosted version of Microsoft’s messaging platform.
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On Monday of this week, RIM’s new CEO made a statement that set off a bomb on the blogosphere, and I’m not sure he understood its repercussions at the time. “I don’t think any drastic change is needed.”
If you’ve been paying attention to RIM and its numbers, you know that what the company desperately needs is change. Sales are declining, platform market share is dwindling, and the BlackBerry brand, to a large extent, has lost the power it once had behind it. So in a recent interview with CrackBerry, Heins made sure to clarify exactly what he meant by “no drastic change is needed.” → Read More
Whenever a company appoints new leadership here in the tech world, the blogosphere seems to unanimously post about what the new top dog needs to do to make his or her company better. I promise, you’ll see dozens of headlines today talking about what Thorsten Heins must do in order to save BlackBerry.
In many cases, I agree with what’s being said. RIM’s in trouble, and without a new vision the company risks slipping even further behind the competition. You know… “the other fruit company.”
So rather than list out all of the things Heins needs to do to save the company (which, we can all agree, would take a really long time), I’m going to tell you guys the five things that Mr. Heins absolutely must not, without a doubt, under no circumstances… do.
That is, if RIM wants to keep selling smartphones. → Read More
RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins has only been at the reigns for an evening, but he did a very “BlackBerry” job of presenting himself to the media this morning on his introductory media call.
It felt a lot like the media calls of yore, with Balsillie and Lazaridis at the helm. Especially when Heins referred to Apple as “the other fruit company,” noting the two companies shared strategy of vertical integration. Unfortunately, vertical integration of software and hardware is about all that these two fruits have in common.
Remember folks, Heins is coming off of a four-year stint at RIM. At the relatively young company, Heins worked under founder Mike Lazaridis and his partner in crime Jim Balsillie. That said, you can basically hear Lazaridis-style hubris in Heins’ comments.
When asked if there was anything Heins wanted to do in the past, but was held back from by his position, Heins confirms that he (along with the freshly removed prior leadership) doesn’t see much wrong with RIM. → Read More
Peter Rojas published a thought-provoking piece about RIM and BlackBerry 10. He said, in short, that the Canadian company should wipe out Blackberry OS and run Android or Windows or, barring that, sell out completely and offer a software package running on another OS. While both of those are logical positions, I think RIM will end up in far worse shape than those options allow.
RIM is popular for three reasons: the keyboard, BBM, and the back-end software. For most of this decade, IT shops have been able to send out fleets of BlackBerry products without concern simply because there was nothing better for email and messaging. Over the past three years, however, that claim has gone completely out the window. I would reckon that a nice IMAP server install is far easier and cheaper than any BB Enterprise Server ever was and, given this screenshot from the actual BBES “purchase” page, there is a lot of sales pressure involved. → Read More
When RIM first launched the BlackBerry PlayBook last spring, we were all rather shocked to find that RIM’s stand-out core services — secure messaging and productivity related apps like calendar and contacts — were… absent. The company promised an update to fix it, and after eight months said update has finally been unveiled here at CES. → Read More
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