Shortly after RIM's Co-Founder and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis gave his general assembly keynote at Mobile World Congress yesterday (view that video), he jumped over to App Planet to talk to the developers in attendance at BlackBerry Developer day.
In addition to rallying the BlackBerry developer troops with some BlackBerry facts and figures, Mike gave some advice to developers about remembering to look for opportunities in enterprise in addition to embracing the growing demand for consumer apps. Makes sense. Whereas consumers are looking for apps to be cheap (and preferably free) businesses are willing to pay for apps that add value to their organizations. In fact, just a little while ago at MWC here I ran into an individual from the IMGA (International Mobile Gaming Awards) team who gave me the stat that apparently only 9% of iPhone App developers are actually making money right now. The vast majority are still looking at iPhone apps as an investment vs. as a money maker, which adds some validation to this notion.
One other stat that Lazaridis made note of that REALLY caught my attention is that RIM makes 2 BlackBerry Smartphones every second. Multiply that out. That's 2 x 60 x 60 x 24 = 172,800 phones manufactured each day. That would equal 15.5 million phones in a quarter. RIM's official stat was that they shipped over 10 million phones in their last quarter. My guess is that Mike Lazaridis rounded up slightly to the two figure (or maybe RIM doesn't manufacturer quite 24/7), but either way, RIM is pumping out phones like crazy. In comparison, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt yesterday during an MWC address made note that 60,000 android-based phones are being sold each day and that number is growing. All in all, it really goes to show that the adoption of smartphones in the marketplace is ramping up as is the competition. It's going to be an interesting couple of years ahead!
