There has already been a lot of news about RIM this week, and it's only Tuesday, but that's not the only thing that has been happening at RIM, on the International front RIM held a joint conference with Saudi Arabian Investment Authority (SAGIA) to announce the BlackBerry Entrepreneurship Academy over the weekend. The Kindgom recognises that there should be more support for "digital entrepreneurship" therefore the main aim of the project is to increase the growth of mobile app development as well as to "foster the growth of local software developers". In a statement, Fahd Hamidaddin, chief of marketing and competitives initiatives of SAGIA said, "We see an increasing demand in this region for localized applications and mobile content and this is creating an opportunity for enterprising software developers".

The academy allows RIM to implement training workshops, provide a support team and consultation that will help budding entrepreneurial developers in the Kingdom with commercial and technical perspective to develop mobile applications and content.

With BlackBerry smartphones and tablets continuing to grow popularity in the middle east, it is good to see RIM provide more support within the area to help current and upcoming developers to create apps and content for the BlackBerry devices we love to use.

Source: Arab News

It's always great to see app developers get recognized for their hard work, and the winners of the annual EMEA Innovation Awards were just announced for 2011. Based on various criteria, winners were chosen in 7 categories including Entertainment on BlackBerry, Going Social, and People's Choice. 

Category Winners: 

• Driving Innovation in Enterprise and the Public Sector: TechMobile Srl
• Accelerating innovation for entrepreneurs - Starting & Growing a Small Business: QUALTEH JR
• Optimising the BlackBerry Experience: SystAG Systemhaus GmbH
• Entertainment on BlackBerry: DevelopIQ Limited
• Going Social - Best BBM Connected App: Wikitude
• Most Innovative PlayBook Tablet Solution: HDS Digital SAS
• People’s Choice Award: Vanatur World Mobile Solutions

Congratulations to all the winners! Full press release and details after the break.

Continue reading article

Research In Motion Reports Third Quarter Results

WATERLOO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwire) -- 12/16/10 -- Research In Motion Limited (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM)(TSX: RIM), a world leader in the mobile communications market, today reported record third quarter results for the three months ended November 27, 2010 (all figures in U.S. dollars and U.S. GAAP).

Highlights:

• Record BlackBerry(R) smartphone shipments of 14.2 million grew 40% over the same quarter last year
• Revenue grew 40% over the same quarter last year to $5.5 billion
• Q3 Earnings per share of $1.74 were up 58% over the same quarter last year
• Cash increased by $446 million to $2.5 billion at the end of the quarter

Q3 Results:

Revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2011 was $5.49 billion, up 19% from $4.62 billion in the previous quarter and up 40% from $3.92 billion in the same quarter of last year. The revenue breakdown for the quarter was approximately 82% for devices, 15% for service, and 3% for software and other revenue. During the quarter, RIM shipped approximately 14.2 million devices.

Continue reading article

We've been following the BlackBerry 9670 for a long time now, so it's awesome to see the Sprint exclusive BlackBerry Style 9670 get announced today. The BlackBerry Style will be available from Sprint this Halloween for $99.99 (after mail-in rebate) on a 2 year contract. The Style will be styling in two colors at launch: Steel Gray and the pretty sweet looking Royal Purple (see BlackBerry Style Image gallery). 

The BlackBerry Style is the first CDMA BlackBerry to launch with BlackBerry 6 and also the first flip phone from Research In Motion to feature a full physical qwerty keyboard. We had the chance this past Friday to get briefed on the new phone by David Smith, VP Product Management at RIM and David Owens, VP Marketing at Sprint, who were both excited about the Style on Sprint. For more info you can check out the BlackBerry Style tech specs, visit sprint.com/bbstyle and keep reading for our notes from that call and for the  the full press release.

Continue reading article

Research in Motion announced their Q1 2011 results today, which you can read in the press release below. While the numbers are still pretty darn impressive, the stock did take a small hit in after-hours trading for missing the street's expectations slightly. Listening in to the investors call, it definitely seemed that at least part of the blame here was the timing of the BlackBerry Bold 9650 and Pearl 3G rollouts, which happened a little later than RIM was initially planning (nothing out of the norm by the sounds of it - just testing and approvals that took a little longer than planned).

Continue reading article

RIM announced their Year-End and Fourth Quarter results today, which you can read on the press release below the break. All in all it was a solid year for RIM when you look at the year over year growth in sales and subscribers, but the stock got beat up a bit in after hours trading as investors expectations were even higher. The two surprises here were the product mix being sold (higher % of lower end devices sold than expected) and that the carriers used this quarter to blow out more of their inventory from their channels.

On the investors conference call, RIM remained very optimistic about where they're at and where they're going. International markets are showing great growth and subscriber numbers in North America, where the competition is heating up, are still solid. Obviously RIM can't talk about unannounced or unreleased products, but on more than one occassion RIM's Co-CEO Jim Balsillie told the analysts on the other end of the line that they'll just have to sit tight to see what's coming and that he was happy with the outlook. Balsillie did mention that WES is coming up at the end of April and there will be quite of bit a news surrounding all parts of the BlackBerry experience (so hopefully we'll see device announcements, software announcements, enterprise announcements, etc.). At one point Balsillie said "if you saw the roadmap you'd be blown away" which leads me to hope we'll be seeing a lot of cool stuff from RIM before this new fiscal year is through.

On a funny note, at one point during the call when talking about some of the recent announcements at Mobile World Congress, Balsillie mentioned the the word "concierge app" along with items that had been announced/released. A little blunder perhaps, as of course we have not seen the personal concierge app get released yet or even acknowledge it as an app that will get released. We have seen screen captures of it pop up however though in RIM developer presenations (with some mistaking it as OS 6.0). But let's hope this means we will in fact see the concierge app get released by RIM. It looks pretty cool! Read on for the release.

Continue reading article

We've been hearing for the past week now that Research In Motion was cooking up something good for Mobile World Congress. Alot of information floating around about a BIS and BES "alternative" or something that mixes the both as a free option to users that are already on BIS but still want a BES infrastructure of sorts. Seems, Boy Genius has been hearing the same stuff as well.

Anyone remember BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express? Well, going by some of the info we've been hearing and putting that along with what Boy Genius has heard. It seems as though it may be re-launched as a free and unlimited BlackBerry Enterprise Server for BIS users. Which would of course offer OTA synching, back ups and more while no longer requiring a dedicated BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Research In Motion has long been thought to not want to offer this sort of thing to its users. Simply based on the fact it could eat into Enterprise sales but I think they simply need to look beyond that and come up with an in between solution now. And maybe, this will be it. Remember nothing about this is 100% confirmed and information surrounding it has been slightly fragmented but, I guess we'll find out soon enough. Good move by RIM? Let us know in the comments what ya think.

Some of you may remember when Research In Motion announced their acquistion of Chalk Media. Chalk Media develops applications which allows businesses to deliver training and video messages via BlackBerry smartphones using the Chalk back end servers. You can read more about the acquisition and uses in the previous write up we did here on CrackBerry. Now while we have not heard much about Chalk on the consumer side of things, Research In Motion has been making good use of their Fredericton, New Brunswick based company.

Research In Motion has once again set their sights on Fredericton, New Brunswick with the promise of hiring new employees in the area according to an article by the DailyGleaner. With Fredericton being the homebase of Chalk Media the Government has agreed to offer up $800,000 worth of funding and RIM has agreed that the 50 new hires will be for their operations, rather then a whole new setup.

If all goes according to plan, you could see a lot more jobs open up under the RIM banner in New Brunswick as well. You students at University of New Brunswick may wanna get your paperwork in order. You could quite possibly have an employer knocking on your door soon, literally.

[ BBCool ]

NICE. CES 2010 hasn't even kicked off yet and already RIM is throwing a little suprise at us with the announcement of their latest accessory for BlackBerry Smartphones, the BlackBerry Presenter! The BlackBerry Presenter connects to your BlackBerry Smartphone wirelessly via Bluetooth and from there the BlackBerry Presenter can be connected to a monitor or projector via VGA or S-Video connections. Once connected, you can present your Microsoft Powerpoint presentation to the monitor/projector straight from your BlackBerry - no more need for a laptop!

An accessory like this to me seems pretty useful and pretty logical. The concept is obviously very similar to the BlackBerry Music Gateway, which allows you to stream music from your device to your stereo. While not as mass market as something like the Music Gateway, I'm sure there are a lot of road warriors and mobile professionals out there who will find great value in this and pick one up. You can let us know what you think about in the poll below. You can learn more at blackberry.com/presenter.

Contest: Win a Free BlackBerry Presenter! - We don't have the BlackBerry Presenter available for purchase just yet, but when it hits ShopCrackBerry.com inventory we'll send one out to the winner of this contest. Just leave a comment to this blog post letting us know how you'd make use of the BlackBerry Presenter in your life if you were to buy / own one. Contest ends this Sunday at Midnight PST. Good luck!

Continue reading article