RIM could soon split the roles of CEO and chairman in a bid to reverse its fortunes. Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie are currently co-CEOs and co-chairmen at the embattled Canadian handset manufacturer, but that could change following an internal review of its board structure.
Beleaguered Blackberry maker RIM reported more bad news as the firm saw its net income plunge by almost three-quarters to just $265m in the third quarter of 2011. The figure is a 71 per cent drop from the $911m it recorded in 3Q10, and was impacted in large part by a $485m pre-tax charge related to unsold PlayBook tablets.
Canadian device vendor Research In Motion (RIM) has warned shareholders that it has a large inventory of Playbook tablets sitting in its channels at the moment, amounting to a provision for this quarter of around $360m.
As the global director for terminals marketing at the Vodafone Group, Peter Becker-Pennrich holds decision making powers over a procurement strategy that deals in serious volumes. Vodafone buys between 60 and 70 million handsets each year, spending $8bn across it’s footprint, including affiliates and partner markets. In this exclusive interview Becker-Pennrich offers frank assessments of the different strategies adopted by the vendor community, their chances for success and the nature of the relationship – ever evolving – between operators, vendors and platform developers.
Canadian handset vendor RIM has announced that it is rolling out its BBM Music service on a commercial basis following a successful beta trial.
Canadian devices firm RIM has announced its acquisition of digital content services provider NewBay, the BlackBerry maker’s fifth acquisition of 2011.
Research in Motion (RIM) has announced that it will delay the next version of its PlayBook operating system until February next year. The BlackBerry maker said it will not launch the PlayBook OS 2.0 until it is confident it has fully met the expectations of its developers, enterprise customers and end-users.
As a London cyclist, the Informer has been known to bellow profanities at car and van drivers breezily using their phones for voice and non-voice services as they barrel down the city’s roads. They are either oblivious to or unconcerned by the fates of their two-wheeled colleagues, and that text message they’re sending is just so important.
Research In Motion (RIM) has unveiled its new BlackBerry BBX mobile platform; a hybrid of the BlackBerry platform and the QNX operating system that the firm uses in its tablet offering, the PlayBook. The BBX platform has been designed from the ground up, said RIM, and the BBX operating system will support BlackBerry cloud services and development environments for both HTML5 and native developers.
Embattled Blackberry vendor RIM is confident that it can win back the trust of its customers following last week’s high profile outage. Stephen Bates, RIM’s UK MD told Telecoms.com on Tuesday that the firm will continue to innovate as it looks to make amends for the outage.
It looks like the BlackBerry service outage is now behind us. This incident couldn’t have come at a worse time for RIM, following some harsh criticism in recent months as a result of its recent financial performance, product delays, and the disappointment of its partners – chief among them the operators.
UAE mobile operators Etisalat and Du have both announced that they will compensate BlackBerry users for the recent disruption to their services. Both operators have said they will compensate BlackBerry users on both pre-pay and post pay accounts.
RIM Founder and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has apologised to BlackBerry users around the world for the outages that its service has experienced over the week in a YouTube video. The message comes in the fourth day of service disruption, which has affected millions of users around the world.
UAE operator Etisalat has teamed up with MasterCard Worldwide to launch cashless mobile payments programme in the country. The system uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to authorise everyday transactions via a smartphone.
RIM’s BlackBerry service is offline once again, just hours after the service was restored earlier on Tuesday. During the earlier outage, the reasons for which were not explained by BlackBerry, millions of customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were left without access to the internet or its BBM instant messaging tool. According to reports and commentary on Twitter, the same has happened again today.
RIM has announced that its BlackBerry services have been restored. The company had a service blackout yesterday, leaving millions of customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa without access to the internet or its BBM instant messaging.
RIM’s has seen its profits slide to less than half of what it generated in the previous quarter, and to little over 40 per cent of what it made in the same quarter last year. The company’s quarterly earnings for 2Q11 revealed that its net income for the quarter was $329 million. This marks a steep drop from the $695 million it recorded in 1Q11, an even steeper fall from the $797 million made in 2Q10.
Vodacom, the pan-African subsidiary of Vodafone, is reducing connection speeds for some of its BlackBerry users in South Africa “from 3G to 2G levels”. The company said that it studied the usage patterns of its customers to better understand the causes of congestion at peak times and found that more than 95 per cent of BlackBerry data usage was attributable to less than 5 per cent of users.
As device platform providers seek to build out their feature arsenals, Blackberry vendor RIM has come up with an innovative cloud-based music locker. Released on Thursday, BBM Music allows users to build and share music libraries with support from big name labels including Universal Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music and EMI.
Troubled Canadian BlackBerry vendor RIM is betting on the souped up BlackBerry 7 operating system to turn its fortunes around. On Wednesday the company unveiled three new models – updates to its Bold and Torch lines – all running the new flagship OS.
Consolidation, convergence and competitionCalls for consolidation in the European mobile market grow louder by the week and four-operator markets look increasingly challenged. Now, those mobile operators that have already built scale seem to be suggesting that there is no option but to expand yet further through diversification.
It is testament to Telstra’s aggressive approach to mobile broadband that an operator in a country of just over 23 million people should rank in the top ten operators worldwide in terms of LTE subscriber numbers. Mike Wright, Telstra’s executive director for networks and access technologies talks to Telecoms.com about the firm’s plans for further enhancing its LTE operation with fresh spectrum and LTE-Advanced capabilities.
Jonathan Bell, VP of Marketing at OpenCloud, discusses how policy and pricing are just two dimensions along which telecoms operators can differentiate their propositions. By adding a third dimension, the service behaviour itself, operators can define and bring true innovation to the market that surpasses the traditional approaches of the past, he says.
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With summer supposedly fast approaching, many look to trim some fat and get in shape for the sunny months. The Informer has never been a huge fan of gyms; in fact his favourite machine in the gym is the one that sells chocolate. Telefonica’s UK arm O2, is one business that is looking to get lean for the holidays, though, and this week it announced that it is to trim 3,500 UK employees.