BBM is going cross platform

Canadian firm BlackBerry (formerly known as RIM) plans to make its popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) application available on iOS and Android platforms later this year.

In the first version of multi-platform BBM, iOS and Android users will get access to instant messaging; multi-person chat; voice note sharing; and BlackBerry Groups of up to 30 people able to share calendars, photos and files.

BlackBerry claims more than 60 million monthly active BBM users of which more than 51 million are daily active users connecting with friends or colleagues an average of one and a half hours every day. The firm said that BBM users send and receive more than ten billion messages each day, which is nearly twice as many messages per user per day as compared to other mobile messaging apps and almost half of BBM messages are opened within 20 seconds of being received.

In a bid to turn BBM into a more social platform, BlackBerry also announced BBM Channels, designed to allow users to connect with businesses, brands, celebrities and groups.

Pending approval from Google Play and the Apple App Store, BBM should be available on other platforms later this summer and will be updated to include BBM Channels as well as voice and video chatting for iOS and Android later this year.

Andrew Bocking, EVP, software product management and ecosystem, at BlackBerry, said: “For BlackBerry, messaging and collaboration are inseparable from the mobile experience, and the time is definitely right for BBM to become a multi-platform mobile service. BBM has always been one of the most engaging services for BlackBerry customers, enabling them to easily connect while maintaining a valued level of personal privacy.”

RIM

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RIM CEO Thorsten Heins

Canadian device maker BlackBerry is showing signs of stability after posting a $94m GAAP profit for 1Q13, representing an almost seven-fold increase on the $14m posted in the previous quarter, and up from the $118m loss it posted in the same quarter last year.

A bank in Indonesia has developed the first mobile payments service for Canadian handset maker BlackBerry’s Messenger service (BBM). PermataBank has teamed up with British mobile banking solutions provider Monitise to roll out a commercial pilot of BBM Money in the country ahead of a full launch.

BlackBerry users will have the option to access a Mobile Money account from their smartphone and make secure real-time payments from within BBM to their contacts who are also signed up to the service, check balances, buy mobile airtime credit and transfer money to bank accounts.

Monitise group CEO Alastair Lukies believes that by launching the BBM service in Indonesia, which has the fourth largest population in the world, job opportunities in mobile payments will open up in Britain. Last year, Lukies met with UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Britain’s Trade and Investment Minister Lord Green in the South East Asian country.

“Indonesia, as the largest economy in South East Asia, is one of the leading high-growth markets identified by UK Trade & Investment,” said Lord Green. “We see great potential for the further expansion of our trade and investment relationship, and the country is on course to become one of the ten largest economies by 2030.”

He congratulated Monitise for securing the deal with PermataBank, adding the firm has created British jobs and shown that UK companies can lead the way in bringing innovative technologies to customers across the world.

Monitise has been working with PermataBank in Indonesia since mid-2011.

BlackBerry, formerly known as RIM

Canadian handset maker BlackBerry has appointed two industry veterans to its board of directors. Richard “Dick” Lynch, retired executive VP of US operator Verizon, and Bert Nordberg, former CEO at Sony Ericsson, join the firm as it looks to reverse its decline, with all bets on the newly launched BlackBerry 10 platform.

Lynch is currently president of FB Associates; a consultancy firm that focuses on technology, marketing, and business operations. A Fellow of The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), he has also sat on the boards of organisations including the GSM Association (GSMA) and the CDMA Development Group (CDG).

Nordberg was chairman of Sony Mobile from May to December 2012 and president and CEO of Sony Ericsson from October 2009 until May 2012. He is also currently the chairman at Vestas Wind Systems in Denmark and director on the Board of Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget in Sweden, and serves as director on the board of Kcell Joint Stock Company in Kazakhstan.

“We are very pleased to add the talent and industry knowledge of these two respected executives to our board,” said BlackBerry Board chair Barbara Stymiest. “We are looking forward to their contributions as we continue to drive for long-term shareholder value and seek opportunities to leverage the extraordinary BlackBerry 10 platform launched last week.”

Stephen Bates, European MD at BlackBerry

Blackberry – the Canadian handset maker formerly known as RIM – has had a tough time in the months leading up to the launch of its long-awaited BlackBerry 10 operating system. Financial struggles, fading market share, service outages, management overhauls and the delays to the launch of the new platform have combined to generate a good deal of unfavourable media coverage for the firm.

At the end of January, Stephen Bates, European MD at BlackBerry, endured criticism for the firm’s recent hardships from national media in the UK, but he believes BlackBerry 10 will silence the firm’s critics.

“We’ve been going through a transition and we’ve been building up to today, and one of the things is that it is important is that we show people what we can do, rather than tell them,” Bates explained to Telecoms.com at the BlackBerry 10 launch event on January 30th. “We’ve been waiting for this point so that we can demonstrate the platform and articulate what it’s about.

“We take criticism all the time. It’s very fair – we as a business have gone through some tough times,” he acknowledged, “but we’ve made some major changes to address the issues that we’ve had. [CEO] Thorsten Heins has been there for a year and has rejuvenated the company, and we’re on course to bring BlackBerry back.”

In Bates’ view, the communication element of BlackBerry 10 is the most exciting aspect of the platform. The BlackBerry Hub – the name given to the way BlackBerry has brought together POP3, webmail, SMS, BBM, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare identities seamlessly as contacts – improves communication between business acquaintances, family and friends, he said. The platform’s touchscreen keyboard is a close second, though.

“I’ve used QWERTY keyboards for ten years,” said Bates, “and now I’m not sure I’m going to go back to it, because the touchscreen keyboard is such a good experience.”

“It’s one of those things that is hard to explain – it’s better to show it, and once you’ve used it, you’ll start to see the uniqueness in the keyboard experience.”

Indeed, Bates acknowledged that it is difficult in general to articulate the nuances of an operating system by simply describing it. It’s not a matter of simply trumpeting hardware specs, the unique elements of the user experience are much more subtle than that – which makes it difficult to promote the platform to media and to the market. It is for this reason that BlackBerry has been touring the world meeting developers to show them the platform through its BlackBerry Jam tour.

“Historically, the way our devices became prevalent was through word-of-mouth, so that’s one channel that is very important to us,” said Bates. “We’ve been engaging with BlackBerry fans and with the BlackBerry Facebook community as well, trying to show them the potential of the platform.”

“We’ll also be using above the line and below the line marketing channels. Ultimately though, we’re looking to show people, rather than tell them, how good this platform is.”

He added that BlackBerry has also engaged with operator and retail partners to train shop and call centre staff. The objective is “to make sure every single person selling a mobile phone understands the benefits of BB10 and can articulate the key messages.”

One of those messages is that BlackBerry 10 is not an enterprise platform; rather it is a consumer platform for enterprise users. The enterprise was fundamental to the rise of Blackberry, Bates said, and the firm is not about to step away from that legacy. Instead it hopes to cash in on the BYOD trend that sees employees using their own smartphones for corporate function and access. Hence BlackBerry Balance, a sandbox that separates and secures corporate applications and data from personal content on BlackBerry devices.

“We’ve seen in the enterprise market that there’s a conflict of desires. There are people as users or employees; we want to do our work things, but we also want to browse the internet, tweet, use Facebook, connect with our friends and so on,” said Bates. “But the companies that we work for want to secure our data make sure that the device is managed—and the market has not yet found a nice solution to those two worlds. Uniquely with BlackBerry Balance, we’re delivering the first real answer to this coexistence of us as businesspeople and us as consumers and living in both of those worlds on the same device.”

It is likely that the much of operator community also wants BlackBerry to perform well, given the power that Google and Apple now have over the market with their respective Android and iOS platforms. The two platforms account for 92 per cent of the smartphone market today, according to Strategy Analytics, and Apple has introduced a policy of testing operators’ LTE networks before allowing its iPhone devices to run on those networks.

At the beginning of the January BlackBerry launch event, Thorsten Heins made a point of thanking former co-CEO Jim Balsillie for the strong relationships that the handset maker has with operators. And according to Bates, the support the firm has received from operators has been key in getting devices in the market so soon after the launch event.

“From our discussions with the carriers, they want us to succeed. They’ve given us support for testing, particularly in the UK, to get BB10 out quickly,” said Bates.

“Quite a lot of the reason that the Z10 (the new flagship) has come out so quickly is because of the operators. We’ve got their support; they were working with us since very early on, on testing devices, and they’ve been working behind the scenes to ensure they can get enough shipments in on time. They’re training staff on the benefits on the platform, and fundamentally, without their support, we would not be launching the platform tomorrow. So it’s a good time for me to say thank you, the support from carriers has been brilliant for us to get out to the market early.”

The BlackBerry Z10

The Canadian handset manufacturer formerly known as Research In Motion unveiled its long-awaited BlackBerry 10 operating system on Wednesday. At an event in New York, CEO Thorsten Heins revealed two devices running on the OS and announced a change of name for the company to match its product brand.

Key features of the OS include BlackBerry Hub; a single place to manage all your conversations such as personal or work email, BBM messages, social media updates or notifications. The platform offers the ability to “peek” into the BlackBerry Hub from within any app, meaning users can view notifications by swiping the screen at any time.

The on screen keyboard and text entry also claims to be more advanced in understanding and adapting to the user, by learning and suggesting words while typing. It is also able to translate messages into variety of different languages, as BlackBerry’s research shows that the majority of the firm’s users type messages in two different languages; ten per cent of them type in three.

BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) also includes voice calling and video chat, and has the ability to screen share with other BlackBerry 10 contacts.

Naturally, the platform is particularly rich in enterprise functionality; BlackBerry Balance is a sandbox separates and secures work applications and data from personal content on BlackBerry devices. BlackBerry Safeguard technology helps users protect what is important to them and their business and BlackBerry Remember combines memos, tasks, photos, documents, and other files into a single hub. The BlackBerry World storefront includes 70,000 BlackBerry 10 apps.

“Every feature, every gesture, and every detail in BlackBerry 10 is designed to keep you moving,” Heins said at the launch of the platform.

Heins has previously spoken about BlackBerry’s ambition to make BB10 future-proof for the next ten years, and Stephen Bates, European MD for the firm, told Telecoms.com how this will be achieved.

“We’ve designed this micro-kernel, multi-core processing platform and the products we’ve launched are just the first manifestation of what the system can do. We’ve tried to articulate a vision around this mobile computing era that we see as the next big growth curve.”

“The world we’re trying to paint is a world where your interaction and activity transcends the mobile device and starts extending into your house, in terms of smart devices and components, and your car and in your business life according to the vertical you operate in, such as logistics.”

He added that in this mobile computing world, it will be important that platforms are able to identify who the user is through their various social profiles. The power of the software has been articulated with what the company has demonstrated at industry events in proof-of-concept cars such as Bentley and Porsche, he added.

Bates also admitted that having a platform that can compete with platforms such as iOS and Android is one thing, but being able to demonstrate its functionality to potential customers is the challenge that lies ahead.

“Historically, the way our devices became prevalent was through word-of-mouth, so that’s one channel that is very important to us – we’re looking to engage with the community. We’ll also be using above the line and below the line marketing channels. Ultimately though, we’re looking to show people, rather than tell them, how good this platform is.”

He claimed that BlackBerry does not have any sales forecasts for the first two BB10 devices, but for the moment it is keen to ensure that its 79 million-strong existing customer base remains with BlackBerry and that it can convince consumers who have previously used a BlackBerry to convert back to the platform.

The BlackBerry Z10 has a 4.2-inch display, 2GB RAM, 16GB hard drive and runs on a 1,5GHz dual core Qualcomm processor. It has an 8-megapixel camera and is capable of 1080m HD video recording.

The BlackBerry Q10 has a physical keyboard, a 3.1-inch touchscreen with a 720 x 720 pixel resolution, as well as a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM.

Both are LTE enabled and will launch first in the UK, where they are on sale this week.

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BlackBerry’s new platform has received a warm response from the analyst community

Despite having seen its market share drop considerably over the past two years and having delayed the launch of the platform several times, Canadian handset firm BlackBerry launched its BlackBerry 10 platform this week, still hoping to disrupt a smartphone market dominated by iOS and Android.

Those two platforms account for 92 per cent of the global smartphone market share, according to Strategy Analytics, but BlackBerry’s flagship offering has received a warm response from the analyst community, with many believing that BB 10 offers a serious alternative.

“The BlackBerry 10 platform offers a differentiated user experience in today’s crowded and homogenous smartphone market,” said Adam Leach, principal analyst at Ovum.

“The Blackberry Z10 and Q10 will stand out from the Android masses and look distinct from Apple’s iPhone. The user experience of Blackberry 10 introduces some nice new features but importantly builds on Blackberry’s UI heritage and therefore will certainly appeal to existing Blackberry users.”

However, he added that Ovum believes that despite a platform that will attract short-term interest from existing users, the company will struggle to appeal to a wider audience and in the long-term will remain a niche player in the smartphone market.

But Robert Rutherford, CEO of IT outsourcing services provider QuoStar Solutions believes BlackBerry may have taken a major step in making BYOD commercially viable.

“Traditionally BYOD has had two major drawbacks, it wasn’t secure and it wasn’t practical. The noises coming from the RIM camp today suggest that BlackBerry may be on the cusp of releasing a phone which has tackled these problems head on,” he said.

“The security risks for BYOD devices are more or less the same as company owned devices. It is however much harder to control devices the company doesn’t own. How do you dictate which applications and services can or can’t be installed, either intentionally or unintentionally? According to BlackBerry, the answer is, on the surface at least, remarkably simple: separate them. Instead of having a work phone and a personal phone, get a work/personal phone – the company might even buy it for you.

“Until the device is out in the market though, we won’t know for sure if it has the kind of potential that the pre-release rumours suggest, but if it lives up to the hype then there will be just one question from BYOD fans: when is the tablet coming?”

“I am excited about BB10,” added Jason Yeomans, MD at telecoms and IT managed services PMGC Technology Group. “Not because it is a BlackBerry, but because it is a great device that will add even more choice to an already competitive market place.”

Yeomans added that technology can drive growth back into the economy through mobile working, creating scalable and secure environments that can deliver services faster. He believes that BB10 does that but it also, for the first time, marries that with a social, user friendly interface.

“Some of the new developments are genuinely innovative – BlackBerry Balance for example or the UI on the touch screen keyboard. These are advancements that users will really love.”

Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media said that the new BlackBerry Z10 device delivers some of the most efficient, accurate and engaging ways to access messaging and social networking services to date.

“These services are always just one gesture away from the user regardless of the other tasks the phone is performing. The BlackBerry Z10’s comprehensive and yet intuitive typing experience, the architecture of the messaging hub, the speed of execution and multitasking capabilities make it stand out from the best smartphones currently available on the market,” he said. “Its LTE performance has also been first rate, at least in North America.”

He added that Blackberry Z10 needs to seduce business users and advanced consumers, as this audience is often more concerned about whether the device enables high productivity and gives scope for creativity and less concerned about price.

“However, in the consumer segment, the challenge BlackBerry faces is not so much related to the device’s performance or its appeal but is more about how consumers will react to its brand new approach to the user experience,” Saadi added. “Given that consumers are generally slow to adapt to new user experiences, they might find it hard to connect with Z10’s user interface from the first touch. The minimalistic design of the phone means it does not feature the traditional physical ‘buttons’ users are accustomed to – the home button, the back button and the search button. Instead the phone relies predominantly on soft touch and gesture for navigation.”

He added that it will be challenging for BlackBerry to push the new device to consumers in retail stores, as sales representatives often prefer to sell as many phones as quickly as possible, preferably the ones that don’t require too much effort in educating the consumer.

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The BBz10

Sales above three million units of BlackBerry Z10 in the first three months on sale will send BlackBerry shares sky high, but anything below one million will not be well received by investors.

It is clear that the new BlackBerry Z10 device delivers some of the most efficient, accurate and engaging ways to access messaging and social networking services to date. These services are always just one gesture away from the user regardless of the other tasks the phone is performing. The BlackBerry Z10’s comprehensive and yet intuitive typing experience, the architecture of the messaging hub, the speed of execution and multitasking capabilities make it stand out from the best smartphones currently available on the market. Its LTE performance has also been first rate, at least in North America.

The BlackBerry Z10 also allows business users to separate their professional and personal profiles thanks to Balance, a newly released feature of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. This feature, together with the newly rebranded BlackBerry World store, plus the music and video hubs and 70,000 available applications, will enable the BlackBerry Z10 to make a good start in developed markets and could potentially challenge devices such as Samsung Galaxy S III and Apple’s iPhone.

With the superior messaging experience that the BlackBerry Z10 offers, and its highly integrated enterprise features, BlackBerry could well win back the hearts of business users, particularly in Europe and North America. In emerging markets, the situation is different as the majority of BlackBerry users tend to opt for affordable devices with an average selling price around US$200. Given the high-end specifications of BlackBerry Z10, it is highly unlikely that the typical Blackberry users in these regions will be able to afford it. Instead, RIM will attempt to win new premium subscribers in these regions, a market segment currently dominated by Apple and Samsung.

Without a doubt, the Blackberry Z10 needs to seduce business users and advanced consumers, as this audience is often more concerned about whether the device enables high productivity and gives scope for creativity and less concerned about price.

However, in the consumer segment, the challenge BlackBerry faces is not so much related to the device’s performance or its appeal but is more about how consumers will react to its brand new approach to the user experience. With a significant majority of consumers now using smartphones on a daily basis, expectations have become a direct product of their experience with their current device. Given that consumers are generally slow to adapt to new user experiences, they might find it hard to connect with Z10’s user interface from the first touch. The minimalistic design of the phone means it does not feature the traditional physical ‘buttons’ users are accustomed to – the home button, the back button and the search button. Instead the phone relies predominantly on soft touch and gesture for navigation.

No doubt it will be challenging for BlackBerry to push the new device to consumers in retail stores. Sales representatives often prefer to sell as many phones as quickly as possible, preferably the ones that don’t require too much effort in educating the consumer. This happens each time a new platform is introduced to the market. For example, the shipments of iPhone, Android and Windows Phone devices did not exceed 1.1 million, 0.8 million and 0.9 million, respectively, in the first three months after they were launched.

So, given the very fast growing smartphone market, BlackBerry should aim to sell at least one million units of the new device in its first quarter. Anything below this would call into question the company’s ability to execute its marketing strategy while anything above three million units would be a spectacular performance, which will undoubtedly resurrect both the consumers’ and the investors’ confidence in the BlackBerry brand.

Canadian BlackBerry maker RIM has a lot to prove wtih the launch of its Blackberry 10 (BB10) operating system later today. The handset vendor’s struggles have been much publicised—after posting disappointing financial results throughout last year it watched its share of the global smartphone market drop to just 4.1 per cent in 2012, according to data from Informa’s Intelligence Centre. In 2010 it had been more than 17 per cent.

Here Telecoms.com investigates what the company will be bringing to the table as it attempts to reverse its decline.

Since his appointment as CEO of the firm in January 2012, Thorsten Heins has spoken often about the impact that BB10 will have on RIM’s performance. He has said that the platform will be future proof for the next ten years—and there will need to be evidence of this at the unveiling if it is to generate any sort of enthusiasm from industry observers.

As Colin Cieszynski, market analyst at financial derivatives dealer CMC Markets Canada puts it: “Having become a fallen star in the eyes of the street, RIM needs a big hit to turn this tale from one of woe to one of redemption.”

The landscape has changed drastically since RIM established dominance in the enterprise device market. Today smartphones are consumer rather than enterprise purchases, and those consumers are overwhelmingly opting for Android and iOS handsets—more than 92 per cent of smarpthone sales in 4Q12 were accounted for by these two operating systems, according to Strategy Analytics.

Jan Dawson, chief telecoms analyst  at Ovum, says this could represent a pitfall for RIM as it is still very much focused on the needs of the enterprise.

“The points of differentiation RIM has focused on in teasers for the new platform confirm this – better multitasking, productivity, email, contacts and calendar applications and so on, rather than a better gaming, content consumption or social networking experience,” he says.

It is Ovum’s view, he says, that RIM’s intention for BlackBerry 10 is that it be “the best BlackBerry for BlackBerry users” rather than something that will necessarily win converts from other platforms.

Not everyone agrees though. Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, has had a look at prototypes of the BlackBerry Z10, which will launched today and targeted squarely at the high end smartphone market, and is impressed by what he sees. “Certainly, RIM should not be shy in comparing this device to Apple’s iPhone or Samsung’s S3,” he says.

He adds that the previous OS, BlackBerry 7, lacked music and video hubs, which effectively disqualified it as a contender in the consumer smartphone market, but such hubs have now been integrated into BB10.

Nonetheless, Saadi is not expecting fireworks any time soon. He cautioned that even the iPhone sold in modest quantities when it was first launched in 2007, as did the HTC Dream (or T-Mobile G1) – the first ever Android handset.

“This is a completely new platform, with a unique user experience, which requires customers to accept and adapt to it,” he says. “For RIM to sell between one or two million units of the Z10 in the first quarter of its launch would be acceptable; three to four million would be very good; anything higher would be exceptional. But anything less than one million would be deemed as totally unacceptable by shareholders.”

Ovum’s Dawson notes that at its peak, RIM shipped between 12 and 15 million BlackBerry devices per quarter, but believes there is no way it can hit this number on a sustainable basis once the BB10 launch filters through.

“Though the new platform should have significant appeal to existing users, we don’t expect it to win significant numbers of converts from other platforms,” he says. “There is little in the new platform that suggests it will have the compelling apps, content stores, or the broader ecosystem that consumers have come to expect in a competitive smartphone platform.”

Reinstating itself as a serious contender in the premium smartphone market is not the only challenge facing RIM. The company’s form in emerging markets has been comparatively strong and, with so much time and effort invested into the BB10 platform, RIM will need to be careful that it does not jeopardise the stronghold that it has in markets such as Southeast Asia and Central Africa.

“In emerging markets, BlackBerry devices have become a middle-class status symbol as they once were in mature markets,” says Dawson. “But these devices are low-priced and based on BB10’s predecessor BB7, which is destined for the scrap heap in the medium term. As developers shift their focus to BB10, it will be harder and harder for RIM to maintain the appeal of the older platform in these markets, especially since it is unlikely to release new hardware running BB7.”

Saadi agrees and warned that unless RIM continues to develop low-end BlackBerry 7 devices for emerging markets, it could lose the little clout it still has.

“BB10 does not address emerging markets, and it is likely to be 2014 before RIM can scale down the platform enough to launch low end devices running on it. The company needs to address this issue quickly, otherwise it could lose out to the likes of Nokia, ZTE and Huawei.”

Nokia is attempting to enforce a similar arbitration order to that which was handed down by the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce

Embattled handset manufacturers Nokia and RIM are now locked in a dispute with each other over patents in the US, Canada and UK. The two firms are fighting over intellectual property they have licensed to each other since 2003, which enables phones to connect to wifi networks.

Nokia is attempting to enforce a similar arbitration order to that which was handed down by the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce as part of the same dispute. The Swedish arbitrator ruled that RIM is “not entitled to manufacture or sell products compatible with the WLAN standard” until it agrees on royalties with Nokia.

“RIM is liable to pay royalties and damages to Nokia for its … sales of any subscriber terminals (handsets or tablets) … compatible with the WLAN standard,” the arbitrator said in the ruling. “RIM has not contested that it manufactures and sells products using WLAN in accordance with Nokia’s WLAN patents.”

According to Nokia, a cross-license agreement was reached with RIM for standards-essential cellular patents in 2003 and was amended in 2008.

“In 2011, RIM sought arbitration, arguing that the license extended beyond cellular essentials,” Nokia said in a statement. “In November 2012, the arbitration tribunal ruled against RIM. It found that RIM was in breach of contract.”

“RIM and its US subsidiary nevertheless continue to violate the award and breach the underlying agreement. In order to enforce the Tribunal’s ruling, we have now filed actions in the US, UK and Canada with the aim of ending RIM’s breach of contract.”