July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The conventional wisdom in the smartphone market is that Android is overtaking everything else. But in surprising news released this morning by Kantar, Apple’s iPhone and Microsoft’s Windows Phone are actually growing market share faster than Android.

Even more interesting is where that growth is coming from.

This quarter, Android still leads, with almost 52 percent market share. Android took the U.S. lead in 2012, lost it in the holiday quarter, and regained the title in January. And, of course, has not looked back.

But iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system, grew from 39.1 percent of smartphone sales in February, March, and April 2012 to 41.4 percent in the same period in 2013. And Windows Phone continued to see positive growth, jumping from 3.8 percent of the market to 5.6 percent. Both those growth rates are faster than Android’s, which was just 1.4 percent.

Windows Phone in particular was impressive. While it grew just 1.8 percentage points, that translates into a growth rate of 47 percent year-over-year. In comparison, Android’s 1.4 percent market share increase translates into just under three percent growth.

Who’s jumping on the Windows Phone bandwagon?

Increasingly, it’s former feature phone users — and Android users. In fact, 42 percent of those who bought a Windows Phone converted from a feature phone. Another 23 percent switched from Android.

And, interestingly, younger people.

“When looking at those changing now and in the last year, we’re seeing Windows now gaining share among those aged 25-34,” Kantar analyst Mary-Ann Parlato said.

In the previous quarter, it was clear that Windows Phone already had positive momentum, growing 1.4 percentage points and increasing market share by 52 percent. It was also clear that BlackBerry has fallen off a cliff, going down to .7 percent market share — exactly the same as its June numbers, released this morning. But while BlackBerry hasn’t recovered in spite of some hot new devices, Windows Phone has maintained positive momentum.

But iOS had dipped in April as well — down seven percent. And the newest Kantar numbers are a positive sign for Apple that the battle for smartphone marketshare is not lost yet — at least in the United States.

That’s good news for CEO Tim Cook, who reaffirmed in the company’s last earnings report that Apple does care about market share and did “want to grow faster,” even though the company does not view market share as the only indicator of a company’s health. Internationally, however, Apple has slid far behind Android in market share, with just under 20 percent global share last year. Some analysts, however, have said that Android market share is a “joke” and that profit share — which Apple has a majority of in the smartphone market, is all that matters.

Source: Kantar Worldpanel

U.S. smartphone sales by carrier

If Cook does care about market share, of course, Apple can’t ignore the international markets. Which is why China, the largest smartphone market on the planet, is increasingly important to the Cupertino company.

In the U.S. market, Verizon continues to own the largest share of smartphone sales, with 36.3 percent, followed by AT&T with 26.3 percent and Sprint with 13.1 percent.

Kantar runs the largest consumer research mobile phone survey in the world, conducting 240,000 interviews with consumers in the U.S. alone every year. By tracking phone sales, smartphone bills, and usage, the company’s Worldpanel ComTech builds a comprehensive picture of sales in three-month periods.

photo credit: fd via photopin cc

Source: John Koetsier

The actual, real, live fire pole.

Like a full regulation fire pole that people can actually use to drop down a floor. Or an officially certified slide to get down to the lobby after a long day. Perhaps a cushioned and enclosed chill room.

Or even, believe it or not, a cattle walkway.

On a recent trip through Ontario, I toured Google’s first office in Canada — and talked to the engineer who leads Google Canada, a former startup guy in Silicon Valley and native Canuck, Steve Woods. If you use mobile Gmail, a Chromebook, Google Maps, Google Calendar, or Google Fiber, there’s a good chance you’ve touched something built at Google’s offices in Waterloo, Ontario.

And if you ever get the opportunity, those offices are definitely something to touch as well.

“Startups are great, because you start from scratch,” Woods says. “Startups are awful, because you start from scratch. At Google, you can literally launch a project that affects a billion people.”

That’s one reason he decided to accept Google’s offer to leave the Valley, return home, and “figure out what we should do in Canada and do it.”

In 2008, when Google opened the office, Waterloo and London were the company’s two centers of mobile excellence — likely due to Waterloo’s proximity to then-leading smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry. So Waterloo and London pioneered the mobile version of virtually every service Google offers: Maps, Gmail, Calendar, mobile search, and more. Waterloo, which now boasts about 200 engineers, also hosts the team that built Google Fiber’s user interface and critical software for the Chrome Pixel, Google’s answer to Apple’s retina display, with full touch integration.

The office is located in a formerly industrial building that once housed a tannery, believe it or not (hence the cattle walkway). Google shares it with a number of accelerators, startups, and coworking spaces that together make up Communitech, a startup mecca with strong connections to Waterloo University, angel investors, and venture capitalists.

Source: John Koetsier

The Googlers who work here. After a year, their drawing gets colored in.

Woods, whose recruiting strategy is to get ex-patriate Canadians to move back as well as to draw new talent from the nearby Waterloo University, says that it’s an attractive place for Googlers for a variety of reasons — not just the fire pole or massage room.

“There’s fewer bosses here, or at least they can’t find you,” he jokes. “At least a third of the people here have moved back from California.”

Source: John Koetsier

The actual cattle walkway

Woods says that Google’s most internally unpopular and controversial product ever was built in Waterloo as well: Conversion Optimizer. That’s a piece of software for advertising buyers that Google calls the “just trust us and push the button button,” which essentially hands your advertising campaign over to Google to optimize for the cheapest and most effective ads.

“It was extremely unpopular in Google,” Woods told me. “People were wondering: How much money will we lose? They were worried that advertisers would optimize their ad spend early in the month, hit their caps, and stop buying.”

Google’s known for taking risks, however, and the company ultimately decided to go ahead despite the chance it might actually lose money. Now, the product is one of Google’s most popular for advertisers, and it manages “many, many billions of dollars.”

“It took a Nobel prize-winning economist to prove that was untrue,” Woods said. “It’s great for Google, great for advertisers, and great for surfers.”

And another product Waterloo build that Woods is particularly proud of is what he calls “the largest project Google has ever done.”

It’s the first mobile search transcoder, which was an infrastructure that rendered web pages on Google’s own internal servers, decided which bits were most important for mobile phone web users, and sent only those bits. It sounds like something for the presmartphone days of historical antiquity, but not so.

“It’s still a very fast-growing project,” Woods told me. “The volume is staggering … billions of pages per day in countries in the third world, and even in the U.S., it’s still growing.”

So … why in Waterloo, Ontario?

Source: John Koetsier

Communitech, the community in the building that includes Google.

“Something interesting is happening here,” Woods says. “The university produces an amazing kind of talent … and people that come into Google from the University of Waterloo do disproportionately well.”

Worldwide, he says, Waterloo has been one of Google’ top three or four recruiting centers for some years now. And, he adds, not everyone who wants to work for Google wants to live in California.

“This area has a very high proportion of startups to population,” he adds. “Google loves startups, and we love to hire entrepreneurial people.”

Oh, and the slide?

The office has a plastic red slide down from the second-floor Google reception area to the first-floor entrance. It has a prominent sign, “For Googlers Only,” which a PR rep told me was placed there because Ontario’s provincial slide inspector (yes, they have one, apparently) raised some concerns about safety.

I was bad, however, as I frequently am, and went down the slide anyways. The PR rep forgave me, as you can see in the video below:

Image credits: John Koetsier

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

TORONTO — Best known, perhaps, for being the headquarters of BlackBerry, Waterloo is a small suburb of Toronto with a population of 98,000 in which 500 startups were born in 2012.

I’m in Ontario, Canada, on a press junket put on by the government to highlight the startup scene in Canada’s most populous province.

40-50 percent of venture capital in Canada is put to work in Ontario, which is pushing past traditional industries and looking for investment and jobs in high-growth technology-focused companies. Those traditional industries include automotive — more cars are built in Ontario than anywhere in North America, including Michigan — and financial services, which employs more people in Ontario than anywhere else in the Americas besides New York.

But the most interesting stat is about the burgeoning startup scene, particularly in Waterloo, Ontario. Toronto is the big kahuna in southern Ontario, with a population of over 2.6 million. But Waterloo is where Google, Oracle, EA, and Intel have set up offices, where BlackBerry grew from nothing to leading the smartphone industry, and where startups are popping up incredibly fast.

BlackBerry, of course, is quickly returning to nothing, but as often happens in the tech industry, the cycle of creative destruction is resulting in a whole new cohort of hot young startups.

“Waterloo and the culture of startups there is because of RIM,” John Marshall, the president and CEO of the Ontario Capital Growth Corporation says. “You’ve got kids coming up who saw their parents do it.”

While it’s a little early to call BlackBerry dead, the fact is that former Research in Motion is indeed in motion, downwards. Apple, Google, Android, and Samsung have taken over market leadership in mobile phones, and Microsoft looks to be passing BlackBerry with Windows Phone.

But the result has been a two-track acceleration of southern Ontario’s entrepreneurship engine. First, as Marshall says, new blood sees that global success is possible. And second, the high-tech workforce shed by a downsizing BlackBerry feeds the founding and growth of small startups.

That’s music to the ears of Ontario officials like Bill Mantel, the assistant deputy minister of the Ministry of Research and Development, which has invested $3.6 billion over the past decade in the startup ecosystem: R&D, seed funding, and ecosystem improvement.

“We want the world’s next biggest tech company to be built in Ontario,” Mantel says. “It’s about job growth … about half of all job growth is provided by the 3-4 percent of high-growth companies.”

That includes companies like Desire2Learn, located about 12 minutes away in Kitchener, Ontario. Desire2Learn has gone from 400 employees to 800 in a matter of months as it took the largest VC investment into a single company in Canada — $80 million — just last September, after bootstrapping for almost a decade.

The results are also visible elsewhere.

“In the StartUp Genome report from last year, Ontario had two cities in the top 20,” Mantel says. “Toronto was eighth, Waterloo was 16th, and we think Ottawa should have made the list too.”

There hasn’t really been the emergence of a BlackBerry mafia, in the sense that the PayPal mafia has kickstarted whole waves of startups in Silicon Valley. But perhaps, in a backwards sense, BlackBerry has had a similar effect in southern Ontario.

photo credit: miggslives via photopin cc

Disclosure: Ontario’s ministry of economic development paid VentureBeat’s costs to send me on this tour of Ontario companies and the venture capital scene. My coverage, however, is my own.

That’s an 11 percent increase in downloads from the end of 2012, according to Canalys’s latest App Interrogator Report, and a 9 percent jump in revenues. Which makes sense, given that we spend 80 percent of our time on mobile phones in apps. And while North America is seeing fairly healthy growth, with an 8 percent increase in downloads and an 6 percent increase in revenue, it’s not the most happening place for mobile.

“Some of the strongest growth was seen in emerging markets, such as South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia, helped not least by the growing base of smart device users in those countries,” the company said in a statement.

Asia, of course, is a mobile powerhouse, with China purchasing more new smartphones than the U.S., but Indonesia has a fast-growing population of 250 million and is seeing increasing smartphone penetration.

So what about non-Google and non-Apple apps markets?

‘The Apple-Google duopoly creates certain challenges for app publishers, carriers, investors, and device vendors, so there is intense interest in the possible emergence of a third ecosystem,’ said Adam Daum, Canalys’s chief analyst in a very tactfully worded statement.

BlackBerry has now hit 100,000 apps for its latest operating system, and Windows Phone has made good progress as well, Canalys says. But both are still challenged by a relative lack of market penetration that will drive the kind of developer interesting that has resulted in “there’s an app for that” being true on both Android and iOS.

“Apple’s App Store and Google Play remain the heavyweights in the app store world. In comparison, BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain distant challengers today, though they still should not be ignored,” said Tim Shepherd, Canalys Senior Analyst.

photo credit: Rick McCharles via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The mobile operating system market share numbers are in for Kantar Worldpanel’s last quarter, and the numbers are shocking.

Not the Android and iOS numbers: Steady but unspectacular growth for Android and gradual but not catastrophic drops for Apple are pretty much in line with expectations.

But the BlackBerry and Windows Phone numbers are dramatic changes from the same quarter a year ago. Windows Phone looks to be finally taking off, with 52 percent growth in December, January, and February of this year compared to the same three months in 2012. And BlackBerry is falling of a sales cliff, with an 81 percent plunge in sales.

Source: Kantar WorldPanel

Smartphone sales by operating system – U.S.

The big kahuna, of course, is Android.

Google’s Android now owns more than half of U.S. smartphone sales, with 51.2 percent market share. That’s up from 45.4 percent in the quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS is holding fairly steady at number two, with 43.5 percent, down slightly from last year’s 47 percent.

What’s interesting about the Windows numbers, even though they are on a much smaller installed base, is that Windows Phone is currently the fastest-growing mobile phone platform. At 4.1 percent of mobile operating system market share, Microsoft still has a very long ways to go, and growth rates could start to slow as it piles up share. But the numbers have to be encouraging for Redmond as it is finally gaining traction in a market that it once appeared to have completely lost.

And the international numbers contain pockets of even more good news, such as Italy, where Windows Phone now makes up 13.1 percent of new phone sales.

Apple’s mobile offerings are strongest with the two largest U.S. carriers, AT&T and Verizon. Both sell a majority of iOS smartphones, with AT&T selling 68.4 percent iOS versus 20.8 percent Android, and Verizon selling 55.1 percent iOS versus 43.4 percent Android.

Meanwhile, Samsung is continuing to expand its Android leadership, taking away market share from competitors LG and HTC:

“Of those who changed their phone over the last year to a Samsung smartphone, 19 percent had previously owned a Samsung feature phone, 15 percent owned a HTC smartphone, 14 percent owned an LG feature phone, 10 percent owned a Samsung smartphone, and 9 percent owned a BlackBerry,” said Kantar Worldpanel analyst Mary-Ann Parlato. “It’s apparent that Samsung is successful at capturing users from across the competitor set and not just gaining from their own loyalists.”

Kantar Worldpanel is the largest continuous consumer research mobile phone panel in the world, and conducts more than 240,000 interviews per year in the U.S. alone to determine what consumers are buying and using.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

James Bond and Uber share an appreciation for efficient and sleek transportation. At least, this is the angle Uber went for in an announcement on the company blog this morning.

The on-demand car service has released a new Android app with the same “new paint, chrome rims” as the iPhone app, which was updated in December to make the Uber app “as elegant and comfortable as the ride.” Features include integration with Foursquare’s location database, so users don’t need to know their exact address, and saved frequent pickup locations, as well as a fare estimate calculator.

Additionally, Blackberry and Windows phone users now have access to Uber for the first time.

These new apps complement Uber’s aggressive geographical and team expansion, which are geared towards turning the company into “everyone’s private driver.” Since launching its first luxury black car offering in 2009, Uber has added taxi, SUV, and UberX into its suite of products to make it more accessible and affordable.

Furthermore, CEO Travis Kalanick recently announced at SXSW plans to grow his staff to 800 members and propel global expansion. Uber is now available across Europe, as well as the U.S. and Canada, and recently began testing its service in Asia. The company has clearly not been deterred by frequent legal battles with transportation regulation agencies.

Kalanick is extremely vocal about his belief that the taxi cab industry is broken and his unflagging commitment to disrupting it. Uber’s passionate and active user base has been instrumental in keeping Uber afloat while city commissioners and regulators were trying to shut it down. Bringing the app to more users will only expand its community and keep Uber marching along in its battle to create a taxi system that is convenient, and even pleasant, for consumers. Even if your average night out “doesn’t include taking down super-villains.”

Photo credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The global app economy will reach $25 billion this year, according to new data from ABI Research. Thirty-five percent of that, or $8.8 billion, will be tablet apps, and 65 percent, or 16.4 billion, will be smartphone apps.

And Apple will have a combined 65 percent share.

The overall trend in the app economy is that tablet app monetization is outpacing smartphone apps, ABI said. By 2018, the company said, tablet apps should surpass smartphone apps in revenue. At that point, total global app revenue will reach $92 billion.

“The larger screen makes apps and content look and feel better, so there are more lucrative opportunities,” analyst Aapo Markkanen said in a statement. “One might think that the bigger installed base of smartphones would compensate for the disparity, but that notion fails to take into account the arrival of low-cost tablets, which hasn’t even started yet [in] earnest. The smartphones paved the way for them, but in the end we believe that it’s the tablets that will prove the more transformative device segment of the two.”

For 2013, ABI expects Apple to take 65 percent of global app revenues, followed by Google’s Android with 27 percent. The remaining eight percent will be fought over by the other mobile ecosystems, primarily Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

ABI didn’t comment on Apple versus Android share in later years, but you have to assume that the 65 percent share will not last. According to one measure, Android’s overall global market share hit almost 70 percent in 2012, and ABI has previously predicted that by December 2013, there will be 800 million Android smartphones to 300 million iPhones in active use.

But Apple’s market share will stay very strong for many years to come, Markkanen believes.

“Apple’s share is obviously declining as Android grows,” Markkanen told me on the phone. “By 2018 in terms of tablets it will still be 57 percent, and in terms of tablets plus smartphones, it will still be above 50 percent … around 52 percent.”

That 52 percent of the 2018 app market will be worth about $48 billion, a third of which is almost pure profit.

photo credit: waferbaby via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

It’s going to be a good month for U.S. BlackBerry fans.

AT&T finally announced its official launch details for the BlackBerry Z10 this morning: It will be available on March 22 for $200 with a two-year contract. Pre-orders for the phone kick off tomorrow on AT&T’s website.

BlackBerry’s latest flagship phone, which I called a boring beta in my review, has been available in other parts of the world for weeks now. T-Mobile will also offer the Z10 to its business customers today for $249.99.

The BlackBerry Z10 reportedly sold out in certain markets when it launched, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of welcome it gets in the U.S. Given just how quickly the U.S. smartphone market has jumped to the iPhone and Android though, I don’t expect any major success stories from the Z10′s launch.

What about native-only solutions?

Only 15 percent of developers would go native-only when building an app for multiple platforms, a stat that might be a little shocking to those witnessed Facebook famously and loudly abandoning HTML5 development last year in favor of a faster, smoother, better native app experience.

See the infographic: What developers do with HTML5

“Most developers were not impacted by that Facebook decision,” Kendo UI EVP Todd Anglin told me yesterday. “One thing that gets overlooked often in the Facebook news is that Facebook hasn’t abandoned HTML5 at all … just changed their use of it.”

In fact, the new Facebook app includes a lot of HTML5, Anglin said, adding that Facebook has said that HTML5 makes it faster to develop and maintain multiple apps.

Source: KendoUI

Developers who are actively using HTML5

HTML5 on the desktop

HTML5 on mobile is nothing new. But what about HTML5 on the desktop?

It turns out that HTML5 could be huge on the desktop, with 66 percent of developers interested in developing HTML5 apps for Windows 8, almost half interesting in building apps for Google’s Chrome OS, and another third thinking about developing apps for the emerging Firefox OS.

“It’s the final frontier for where HTML5 should go,” Anglin said. “And it begs the question … why don’t we think of this as an equal option for a PC?”

On a desktop PC, HTML5 would not be limited by a relatively puny mobile processor, either, meaning that developers could do even more with HTML5 video and interactivity. What that means, Anglin said, is that you could have a complete unified strategy for all mobile operating systems and desktop systems at one time … that uses the same codebase and the same developer skill set.

That’s fairly mind-blowing, considering where we’ve come from.

Source: KendoUI

HTML5 for the desktop

The ‘one + HTML5′ strategy

A growing strategic solution to the challenge of multiple platforms seems to be the “one + HTML5″ plan, in which developers build one app for a key target platform in native code — although it may also contain some HTML5 — and one app for all the other desired-but-not-core platforms in HTML5.

Typically, the “one” is iOS, although it could also be Android, and the HTML5 solution is for BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and any other desired platforms.

Still, given a choice, most developers would either do a pure HTML5 app for all platforms, or a hybrid app: HTML5 core, with native wrapping on each targeted platform.

Source: Kendo UI

Native vs HTML5 vs Hybrid apps

The hype cycle — HTML5 isn’t overhyped anymore

Only a quarter of developers now believe that HTML5 is overhyped, while almost half strongly believe it is not.

“Developers are now beyond the hype curve,” Anglin said. “Even though some developers think that  HTML5 is overhyped, that doesn’t mean they don’t think it’s a platform that is both usable and important.”

78 percent of developers now say HTML5 is appropriate for building mobile apps, and 68 percent say it’s appropriate for all developers building any kind of app.

iOS and BlackBerry: both hard to develop for

While iOS is a top platform, developers say it’s difficult to develop for. In fact, iOS ranked just under the notoriously challenging BlackBerry for development difficulty. Sixty-four percent of developers said that BlackBerry was challenging — and having developed two apps for the platform myself, I agree — while 69 percent said that iOS was difficult.

Objective-C is not the newest or widest-known language in the world, of course, and Apple does put a few hurdles in developers’ paths as well.

In contrast, half of developers thought that Windows 8 was easy to develop for, and Windows Phone 8 was not far behind. Android, meanwhile, was split: 26 percent said it was very easy, while 29 percent said it was very hard.

“What’s surprising to us is not that it’s difficult, but that’s it almost twice as difficult to work with as Android,” Anglin said. “We would have thought developers would rank Android equal to iOS or even harder, since there are so many more devices in the Android ecosystem.”

Source: Kendo UI

Mobile platforms: how difficult?

photo credit: brucelawson via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

BlackBerry has lost the battle for the consumer heart of America.

The Mall of America announced today that its employees are ditching their BlackBerry phones in favor of the Nokia Lumia 920 because of the Lumia’s “tight integration with Microsoft services.”

With 11,000 year-round employees (and 13,000 during the holidays), Mall of America’s headcount is a drop in the bucket in the big scheme of things. But its move to Nokia holds the kind of symbolic weight that should horrify BlackBerry, which is quickly losing its status as the go-to device for businesses.

The news comes a week after Home Depot decided that BlackBerry wasn’t good enough for it either. The company is replacing 10,000 employee BlackBerrys with iPhones. Something tells me that a lot more companies will soon follow suit.

The trend is especially troubling for BlackBerry because it clearly shows the company is having a hard time hanging onto its business customers, which are essentially all it has left. With nonexistent consumer interest, BlackBerry is trying as hard as it can to hold onto the businessman.

The problem is, the businessman is eyeing the iPhone, not the BlackBerry Z10.

Photo: Flickr/Mark Gstohl

Even better, your apps share about 90 percent of their code, making cross-platform development simpler and quicker.

Today Xamarin is launching Xamarin 2.o, a bundle of products including Xamarin Studio, a new IDE, Xamarin.iOS for Visual Studio, a plugin for Visual Studio that enables cross-platform mobile development, and the Xamarin Component Store, an “app store for code,” where you buy and sell components of apps to speed your development and make some cash.

“Xamarin enables us to deliver high performance, native apps that, until Xamarin, were only possible with Objective-C and Java,” says Matt Crocker, director of client engineering at Rdio, which has been using the new software. “Sharing over 50,000 lines of code across platforms gives us more time to spend on great user experiences. Xamarin 2.0 will help us build even better apps, faster.”

With the massive rise in mobile devices and apps, cross platform development tools are enjoying a golden age. PhoneGap allows developers to build for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Corona created its own simple language, Lua, to enable cross-platform development in a single language. Appcelerator’s Titanium developer platform — which the company claims is the widest-used in the world — also uses Javascript as the foundation programming language.

Xamarin’s approach?

There are eight million C# developers in the world, the company says. So why not let them build mobile apps in a language they know? The Xamarin studio, which also allows developers to build Mac apps, lets C# developers leverage their existing skills, “essentially transforming existing teams into mobile developers virtually overnight.”

Launched two years ago, Xamarin says it already has 230,000 mobile developers using its software development tools, growing its developer community 300 percent in the last year alone, and adding 12,000 new customers — companies like Clear Channel, Rdio, and the Portland Trailblazers.

“In the very near future, every business process and customer transaction will happen on a mobile device,” Nat Friedman, Xamarin’s CEO and cofounder said in a statement. “Xamarin’s unique approach … has already helped thousands of businesses to successfully deliver on their mobile strategy.”

photo credit: kk+ via photopin cc

Former Research in Motion CEO and cofounder Jim Balsillie has sold every single share of RIM — now BBRY — stock he owns, according to an SEC filing posted this morning.

Balsillie’s 26.8 million shares of common stock amounted to a 5.1 percent stake in the company. At one point — literally in the days right after the first iPhone launched — that much stock was worth around $6 billion.

But, oh, how the mighty have fallen. In 2012, when share prices for the company formerly known as RIM dropped into the single digits, a 26 million share stake amounted to less than five percent of what it was worth a few years before.

Check out this chart we made for the visual learners among you:

For comparison, here’s how other smartphone OS makers have done, stock-price-wise, between 2007 and today:

GOOG data by YCharts

As the fella said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And the wind for BlackBerry seems to be blowing in a decidedly southerly direction.

Clearly, the company is hoping to slow this momentum (we doubt anyone seriously thinks a fortune so colossally and complete lost can ever be totally recovered) by the launch of BlackBerry 10. While our own reviewer said the units aren’t half bad, he also noted it might be way, way too late to turn the ship around.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Samsung now leads in consumer loyalty in most of the consumer electronics categories it competes in … including arch-rival Apple’s former territory: laptops and smartphones.

For laptops, Samsung and Apple were tied, according to the Brand Keys’ 2013 Consumer Loyalty Engagement Index, released today. But Samsung led in flat screen TVs, and, in perhaps the biggest shocker, beat out Apple for consumer loyalty in smartphones.

“This is the first year that Samsung beat out Apple in smartphones,” Brand Keys president Robert Passikoff told me this afternoon. “When Apple was number one, everyone said, ‘Well sure, it’s Apple.’ But the fact is that Samsung always had a larger share of the marketplace.”

Source: Brand Keys

Customer loyalty – smartphones

If you’re wondering whether this is just some dinky little no-name survey, think again. The Brand Keys customer loyalty index surveys 39,000 people, making it generalizable to the entire United States population with 95 percent confidence. And if you’re also wondering how big the delta between number one and number two actually is, Passikoff says there’s a “significant difference.”

“It’s not terrible to be number two,” Passikof said. “But in both cases I think consumers are looking for higher degrees of innovation. It was only after Samsung and other companies came out with smaller tablets that Apple brought out the iPad mini. It was only in reaction.”

Asus followed Samsung and Apple as the laptop vendor with the third-most-loyal customers, with Toshiba and Sony right on its heels. In smartphones, LG took third place after Samsung and Apple, followed by Nokia and Sony, who were tied for fourth. Motorola, HTC, and BlackBerry rounded out the top eight.

Amazon handed Apple some more bad news in the e-reader category, leading the field with its Kindle tablet. Barnes & Noble’s Nook took second, with Apple, Kobo, and Sony following. One big caveat here: it’s likely consumers don’t think of the iPad as an e-reader first and foremost, but rather as a general-purpose tablet, which may have affected these rankings.

I asked Passikoff about exactly that:

Source: Brand Keys

Customer loyalty – laptops

“That’s absolutely so. When we initially added the category, iPad never showed up. And then later it did … its primary product value is not as an e-reader. But we don’t define what products go in which categories: consumers do.”

But, adding injury to insult, Amazon beat out Apple in the dedicated tablets category as well. Apple and Samsung tied for second in that category, followed by Barnes & Noble in a tie for third, and Acer, Lenovo, and Toshiba in a tie for fourth. Google showed up in the tablets category, also in a tie, in fifth place with Sony.

Clearly, consumers are a little confused about what is a tablet and what is an e-reader — a rapidly disappearing difference — and that confusion played a role in Apple’s rankings. But just as clearly, Samsung’s products, innovation, and advertising are helping that company shape an extremely positive reputation.

Image credit: Dean Takahashi

Making games for the BlackBerry makes a little sense, but it’s more of a diversion, not a long-term occupation. If you’re doing it, you have to ask why. Do you have nothing better to do with your time?

That is not a disrespectful question, but a practical one. Opportunity cost is a hurdle for BlackBerry. It has to convince developers that making games for its platform will pay off, when they can make more money developing for other platforms. It’s a hard sell, but BlackBerry, formerly known as Research in Motion, is doing what it can.

Yesterday, the company debuted its new BlackBerry 10 phones and apps in an attempt to save the business. For the most part, observers say that the new stuff doesn’t suck, which is a prerequisite for game developers to pay attention. BlackBerry’s curse has been the status quo of loyal users who don’t mind using a BlackBerry, even though more interesting smartphones and tablets are available. BlackBerry’s business has seemed doomed ever since Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007 and consumers began to favor touchscreens over BlackBerry keyboards. But BlackBerry fans didn’t see to notice, and 18 million of them are still out there.

BlackBerry has come out swinging with its own touchscreen mobile devices now (the Z10) and a faster operating system. But it seems terribly late. After all, Microsoft has been trying for months to steal away the developers and consumers who aren’t already in the Android or Apple camps.

The new devices are compatible with past BlackBerry apps, so 70,000 are already apps available. That sounds like a lot, but Apple has 10 times more apps. To bolster its app store, the Canadian company has turned to game companies in an attempt to bring in new audiences beyond the core demographic of executives who check their emails. That makes sense. If you look at Google Play, about 95 percent of revenues generated by apps in South Korea come from games. In the U.S., the percentage is 76 percent, according to market analyst firm App Annie.

Gameloft and Electronic Arts’ mobile division have said they will support the platform with games. EA is putting eight games on the BlackBerry 10, including Plants vs. Zombies and The Sims FreePlay, while Gameloft is publishing 11 games, including Six Guns and Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour.

Sam Shperling, a senior account manager for BlackBerry at Gameloft, told me in an interview that his teams have worked with BlackBerry for years making Java games.

“They still have a huge and loyal customer base who could migrate to the BlackBerry 10,” he said. “We think this is a great opportunity to show those users there is a new frontier for BlackBerry.”

But the Gameloft guys never met a game platform they didn’t like. It has a huge mobile game businesses already and teams that are able to quickly adapt games to run on any platform. Doing the extra work to port to BlackBerry 10 isn’t that difficult for it. Gameloft is also more experimental in nature. Because it benefits from the spread of new platforms, it’s more willing to expand to the new platforms. So it’s doing games for Microsoft’s platforms at the same time it’s doing games for BlackBerry.

If you think about how the big game publishers are willing to take risks while the little ones aren’t, it makes sense. If your games are on 10 platforms, adding No. 11 isn’t so hard. But if you are a small indie game developer only has the staff and money to adapt to maybe three platforms, BlackBerry isn’t on your list. Sure, it has 18 million users, but that is actually a small number in the overall mobile market.

Other game supporters include Disney, Sega, Rovio (the publisher of Angry Birds), Fishlabs, Funkoi, Halfbrick, JoyBits, Square One Games, and ZeptoLab. But if you really wanted to play games from these companies, wouldn’t you really want to do it on the 10 platforms that are already out there? The presence of these companies and their me-too games will not help BlackBerry sell any new devices. What BlackBerry needs is some content that nobody else has.

BlackBerry is also enticing indie developers by offering them $100 per approved application. Cash bribes could actually work with developers who are starting out and currently don’t have any apps out. For these developers, making money on the BlackBerry could finance efforts on bigger platforms. The problem here is that BlackBerry has no idea if it is getting shovelware or quality stuff from these developers.

The new BlackBerry models, the Z10 and the Q10, don’t suck, according to VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar. The Z10 has a 4.2-inch touchscreen with 720p resolution. The Q10 has a 3.1-inch screen with a keyboard. The technology isn’t bad, with a dual-core 1.5 GHz processor, 2GB of main memory, and 16GB of storage.

But the devices seem terribly late. Will they devices go the way of the ill-fated BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, which debuted in the spring 2011 and sold maybe 2 million units by the end of last year. That’s a horrible record compared to the sales of competitors. Against the iPad and Android tablets, this device had no chance. Gameloft’s Shperling said that the PlayBook was a first step where the company got its feet wet making and recruiting apps.

“I think what matters here is that there is another alternative platform out there that developers can go to,” Shperling said.

BlackBerry is late again, compared to the launch of another challenge, Microsoft’s Windows 8, which got started in the market last fall. Game developers and publishers aren’t lacking for yet another mobile contender. They didn’t make unique content for the PlayBook, and it isn’t clear to me why many game developers would make unique content for the BlackBerry now.

BlackBerry has a chance for survival if consumers decide they don’t need these extra choices the other guys offer. Perhaps the only way that it could survive is if it provides enough of the basics to cover the field. If consumers only want about 70,000 apps and BlackBerry delivers the right ones, then it could survive. And BlackBerry can always hope to strike gold, seeding enough money to hungry developers who might come up with some exclusive content that could give people a reason to buy a BlackBerry.

But that’s going to be so hard to do. Lots of platforms are spreading money around, and they may very well have more users than BlackBerry does. Developers who make games for a small platform face that opportunity cost. BlackBerry, at least, has made it easy to adapt game. Shperling said there is still some risk to what it’s doing. For a company with Gameloft’s resources, making games for the BlackBerry is an acceptable risk. But if you’re betting the company on making games for the BlackBerry, don’t do it.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The British are such beautiful bastards. Especially their journalists.

It’s one thing to be a company man. Or to toe the company line, parrot the company’s talking points, and be a staunch defender of your team. It’s another to be a bloody idiot and refuse even to acknowledge the rest of the world exists.

Like BlackBerry exec Stephen Bates in a chat with the BBC today.

But the BBC interviewer pursues him doggedly, magnificently, patiently, and wonderfully — at least for us. It’s embarrassing, to say the least, for BlackBerry corporately, and for Bates personally. Here’s the interview (transcript below):

BBC interviewer: What have you learned from Apple?

So BlackBerry is a unique proposition. We’ve got round about 17-18 million customers who love the BlackBerry experience, so we’re taking the essence of that BlackBerry experience and moving it forward.”

BBC interviewer: Have you learned anything from the iPhone?

And … this … market is a great market. There’s a, there’s a change …

BBC interviewer: I’m just wondering, technologically, it’s a pretty straight question, have you?

So, so, so, we … BlackBerry was one of the inventors of the smartphone market. You know, we’ve helped shape what the smartphone market is today, and we’re at the bridge of a new transformation where we see it going from mobile communications to this mobile computing world. And we saw that with our existing BlackBerrys that that would not give us the power to drive this new market.

BBC interviewer: OK, but obviously the iPhone is your main competitor. You all learn from each other. What have you learned from the iPhone?

So, so, the key focus around BlackBerry 10 that we’ve really driven to is to deliver a new unique user experience.

BBC interviewer: So you haven’t learned anything from the iPhone, you’re saying?

So, fun-fundamentally…

BBC interviewer: The new user experience? Sounds a little like you’re reading from a press release. I’m just wondering, you all learn from each other, you say ‘Oh, that’s a good idea.’ And one of the things about the iPhone, which has its faults — they all have their faults — is that it’s very incredibly user-friendly and you can bounce around it and it’s, it’s … so what have you learned from it?

So, so, so, we’ve spent the last few months with BlackBerry 10 engaging our customers, our consumer customers, our business customers, the developers, our partners, and we’ve been interacting about what the new BlackBerry 10 will deliver …

BBC interviewer: OK, you’re clearly not answering that question …

. . .

At this point the Beeb journalist basically gives up trying to get Bates to answer that question and goes on to other topics. You have to love the British, who seem to know how to do mean better, and more politely, than anyone else. Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan come to mind.

It’s a massive fail for BlackBerry, as this has made the news on multiple sites on the same day of BlackBerry’s big new launch. I don’t blame the exec — he was almost certainly coached by PR reps to not mention competitors and keep the focus on BlackBerry — but memo to PR agencies: People do better when they speak naturally.

Let the man have a conversation.

His points — and BlackBerry’s — are much stronger when he acknowledges that maybe, just maybe, there are good mobile products in the universe that did not originate with a company formerly known as Research in Motion.

photo credit: Peter Werkman (www.peterwerkman.nl) via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

In addition to today’s BlackBerry World event, BlackBerry users are finally getting a chance to buy digital media like those that swear their allegiance to other mobile devices.

The BlackBerry maker formerly known as RIM has added a bunch of music, movies, and television shows to the BlackBerry web store today. The selection pales in comparison to what’s available on iTunes and Amazon Cloud Music stores in terms of music, but that should change over time. The company does have support from all the major entertainment studios, which means you’ll have a decent selection of popular TV shows and movies.

The addition of digital media is a long time coming, and it’s something that BlackBerry needs to catch up with other mobile platforms.

It’s worth noting that the sharing of integrated digital media from the BlackBerry web store is only available for BlackBerry 10 at launch and only in the U.S., U.K., and Canada for now.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

As far as press events go, RIM seems to be sparing no expense with its massive BlackBerry 10 launch event in Manhattan. It’s taking place among Manhattan’s southern piers, filled with RIM’s trademark colors, and it’s jam-packed with press, analysts, and plenty of RIM employees. Heck, even the Wi-Fi works properly.

Strutting out on stage, with the most confidence I’ve seen in a RIM executive in some time, chief executive Thorsten Heins kicked off the event. “We have definitely been on a journey of transformation … not only to transform a company brand … but also a journey to transfer mobile communications into true mobile computing,” he said.

Heins noted that the company was forced to make a tough choice a few years ago, between adopting someone elses mobile platform, or building something new from the ground up. “We made the call to go it alone,” Heins said. He thanked the people who made BlackBerry 10 possible, including the people who developed the QNX operating system, and former co-CEO Jim Balsillie for nabbing plenty of carrier partnerships.

Out of nowhere, Heins dropped a bombshell: RIM will now simply be known as BlackBerry. “It is one brand, one promise,” he said. “Our customers use BlackBerry, our employees work at BlackBerry, our shareholders are owners of BlackBerry … from today on we are BlackBerry everywhere  in the world.”

With the audience’s excitement on high, Heins introduced the first BlackBerry 10 phones: the fully touchscreen BlackBerry Z10, and the keyboard-toating BlackBerry Q10. The Z10 sports a 4.2-inch display with a 720p resolution, while the Q10 features a 3.1-inch display along with a full keyboard. (Images of the Z10 have been floating around the web for months, so its reveal didn’t come as much of a surprise.)

Vivek Bhardwaj, BlackBerry’s head of software portfolio, joined Heins on stage to show off some of BlackBerry 10′s capabilities. He demonstrated how easy it is to move between multiple apps, a method the company calls “Flow,” as well as how the BlackBerry Hub is always just a few flicks away.

BlackBerry Messenger fans will have a lot to look forward to in the new OS. Bhardwaj showed off a new video calling feature, which looks like it may give Apple’s FaceTime some decent competition. He also demonstrated a feature that’s completely unique to BB10: Screensharing. Bhardwaj was able to view a colleague’s phone screen with just the touch of a button.

When it comes to media, BB10 has more support from partners than any of BlackBerry’s past efforts. Heins said that BlackBerry World will feature music from all the major labels, and movies from eight major studios.

RIM’s vice president of global alliances and business development, Martyn Mallick, boasted that BlackBerry 10 has 70,000 apps — more than any platform at launch. He confirmed that the company has app commitments from Skype, Amazon Kindle, and Whatsapp.

Unfortunately, BlackBerry didn’t have any specific release dates or pricing for the BB10 phones in the U.S. Heins said that the Z10 is expected to be available on the four big U.S. carriers in March, with pricing around $150 on a three year contract. The Z10 will be available in the United Kingdom tomorrow, in Canada on February 5, and in the United Arab Emirates on February 10.

Heins pulled out another bombshell towards the tail-end of the press conference: BlackBerry has brought on singer Alicia Keys as its first Global Creative Director.  “We wanted someone at the top of her field, well respected, immensely creative — someone who incorporates technology and creativity into her day to day work,” Heins said.

On stage today, Keys recounted “breaking up” with BlackBerry after being tempted away by other platforms (she wouldn’t say which). But now that there are new phones and an entirely new platform, she’s exclusive to BlackBerry once again. Keys will also take part in the BlackBerry “Keep moving project,” alongside well-known artists like direct Robert Rodriguez and author Neil Gaiman who will use BlackBerry 10 devices in their work.

After cutting off the livestream to other launch events around the world, Heins revealed that everyone at the NYC launch today will be getting a BlackBerry Z10. Check back later for some hands-on thoughts on the BlackBerry Z10 and Q10.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

BlackBerry 10 is late. And I’m not just talking about missing a few release dates. It could very well be too late for Research in Motion to make an impact in today’s smartphone market with the iPhone and Android reigning supreme — where even Microsoft has a several-year head start.

But that’s not stopping RIM from holding a massive launch event for BlackBerry 10 in New York City tomorrow. There the company will finally unveil its new smartphones, discuss how popular apps like BlackBerry Messenger will live on, and explain how BlackBerry 10 is different from the competition. Ultimately, RIM will try to prove it’s still relevant.

From my brief hands-on time with BlackBerry 10, RIM is genuinely trying to bring something new to the smartphone world by focusing on productivity, multitasking, and security capabilities that IT departments will surely love. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s enough to bring the company into the modern smartphone era.

Tomorrow we’ll finally get to see if BlackBerry 10 is more than “good enough” and if RIM’s new devices can keep BlackBerry fans loyal (and maybe even convince a few other smartphone owners to jump ship). The company also has to put on a good show to impress developers (it’s already helped coax 15,000 apps onto BlackBerry 10 with promises of cash).

While I don’t think RIM is going to outright disappoint with BlackBerry 10, the company’s bigger problem is that it simply isn’t exciting anymore. The BlackBerry brand has lost most of its luster — and for good reason. RIM practically ignored the advances made by the iPhone and Android. And when it finally decided to respond with a touchscreen smartphone, we got the disastrous BlackBerry Storm.

It seems like no matter what RIM does, it can’t escape the narrative of being a struggling old dinosaur. But with 80 million users and better-than-expected revenues last quarter, it’s a dinosaur that won’t exactly go extinct overnight. In the worst case, RIM could give up on hardware altogether and license the BlackBerry platform (something that still seems to be on the table). In the best case, RIM will slowly regain market share to solidify it’s third-place position.

But the most likely scenario is that RIM will continue trucking as usual by appealing to its current users for as long as possible.

“We can’t fault RIM for wanting to hold onto its 80 million existing subscribers,” notes Ovum chief telecoms analyst Jan Dawson in a commentary piece today. “While exact figures aren’t available, our analysis suggests that RIM has always sold about half its devices to new customers and half to existing customers upgrading to a better phone. For much of the last two years, the portion bought by upgrading customers has significantly outweighed the portion bought by converts, and this makes it all the more important for RIM to retain existing subscribers.”

Dawson predicts that RIM will see a slight sales and market share bump after the launch of BlackBerry 10, as the BlackBerry faithful finally get the new platform and hardware they’ve been waiting for. But afterwards it will likely decline once again.

“All in all, BlackBerry does need to appeal to end users,” said Jack Gold, chief analyst at J. Gold Associates, in an email to VentureBeat. “If it can’t get grass roots user support, it will have a tough time. That said, it doesn’t have to get a 50 percent market share to be successful. Even if it got 20 percent to 25 percent of the smartphone market worldwide, that would be a huge number for them.”

VentureBeat will be on the ground at RIM’s NYC launch event tomorrow, so check back for more.

Photo: Closari/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apple may be winning the smartphone battle Stateside, but Android is winning the global smartphone war being fought everywhere else.

Smartphone sales grew 38 percent last quarter to reach 217 million units worldwide, and over 700 million units for the entire year, according to a new report from Strategy Analytics. Of those 700 million-plus smartphones, 68.4% smartphones ran Android as the operating system, while only 19.4 percent ran iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system.

“Almost half-a-billion Android smartphones were shipped in total worldwide during 2012,” the firm’s executive director Neil Mawston said in a statement. “Android is clearly the undisputed volume leader of the smartphone industry at the present time.”

In terms of manufacturing, the global smartphone industry is basically two companies: Apple and Samsung. Apple shipped 135.8 phones last year, all smartphones, of course, while Samsung shipped 396.5 million phones, most of them smartphones. Phone shipments in general reached 1.6 billion in 2012, meaning that smartphones still made up slightly less than half of all phones sold. Nokia still ships a lot of units — 335.6 million in 2012 – but most of them are not modern smartphones.

“Apple grew 29 percent annually and shipped 47.8 million smartphones worldwide for 22 percent marketshare in Q4 2012, dipping slightly from 24 percent a year earlier,” Scott Bicheno, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, added. “Combined together, Apple and Android accounted for a record 92 percent share of all smartphones shipped globally in the fourth quarter of 2012.”

The massive numbers obscure that growth, while still torrid, is slowing. While 2011 saw 64 percent in smartphone shipments, 2012′s growth rate was a slightly more moderate 43 percent.

But it’s clear that the market has become a tale of two mobile operating systems: Android and iOS.

The challenge in 2013 for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and even smaller upstart phone operating systems is simple to grow enough to matter.

photo credit: CanPatsFan via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

When Lenovo bought IBM’s ThinkPad business in 2005, it inherited one of the most recognizable laptop brands of all time. Now, the Chinese electronics giant could do the same with the BlackBerry.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Lenovo chief financial officer Wong Wai Ming said that his company was exploring a variety of acquisition targets, including RIM.

“We’ll have no hesitation if the right opportunity comes along that could benefit us and shareholders,” he said, as reported by Bloomberg.

The news comes days after RIM CEO Thorsten Heins reiterated that his company was looking at a number of “strategic options,” including selling its BlackBerry hardware unit.

A Lenovo-RIM deal would be an interesting, if slightly uncomfortable, marriage between two companies that have so far had middling success in the post-iPhone world: RIM’s struggles are well documented, and Lenovo has tried is hands at smartphones multiple times, just not in North America.

Where the deal could work well is in the enterprise, where both the ThinkPad and BlackBerry brands have been successful. But the enterprise factor also breeds its own share of problems. Considering how U.S. lawmakers have greeted the rise of Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei, it’s not a stretch to assume that a Lenovo acquisition of the security-focused RIM wouldn’t be received well — even if RIM is Canadian.

The better strategy for both RIM and Lenovo is a bit more simple: Rather than buy RIM outright, Lenovo could simply licence BlackBerry 10 with its own hardware (which RIM has also said is an option). Not only will this keep lawmakers (relatively) quiet, but it could also be the key to Lenovo getting a foothold in the North American market. Oh, and it could also save RIM’s butt, too.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Jack Gold is the founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, based in Northborough, Mass. He covers the many aspects of business and consumer computing and emerging technologies.

Innovation. It’s what makes new markets. It’s what creates new opportunities for companies to grow dramatically. And it’s what creates demand when consumers don’t even know they want something.

We’ve seen innovation in the computer industry many times. And we recently saw it again when Apple created a market for its smartphones and tablets and took a commanding lead from the previous kings of the hill (e.g., RIM, Nokia, Microsoft).

Microsoft has been particularly hard hit as tablets have eaten into its core PC market. And its smartphone efforts have faltered for several years. Now Microsoft is fighting back with its latest innovation, Windows 8.

But Windows 8 has a legacy curve “trap” to deal with that, as a brand new platform, iOS didn’t. However, I believe iOS now is moving down the same legacy curve that is hampering Microsoft (and RIM, for that matter) and falling into the same trap. How radically can you change things without turning off your existing customer base? Your ecosystem? Your app selection and developers?

The fact is, the farther you move down the innovation curve, the more likely you are to have challenges. When you start from a green field position (as iPad/iPhone/iOS did), the innovation curve is just at it’s beginning, both because you have no base to work from and because there are no predetermined expectations.

But when you have an existing product, its much harder to innovate – both because you are primarily making fine tuning adjustments on next generation products, and because you don’t want to alienate your base by changing too radically from what they already know and like so they will continue to buy new products and/or upgrade.

So, getting back to Apple and Microsoft — it’s the best of times and the worst of times, in a Tale of Two OSes (OK, three if you add Android, and perhaps 4 if you add BlackBerry).

Which brings us to the recently launched iPad Mini and Microsoft Surface tablets. Both now have to satisfy the legacy needs of their partners. Arguably, Microsoft’s legacy baggage is more severe than Apple’s. But when many people asked recently why the Mini was relatively non-innovative, the innovation curve is the answer.

Unless Apple wants to completely reinvent the iPad and iOS, they have some real world restrictions (e.g., app compatibility, user interface, form factor). For its part, Microsoft knows it needs to maintain Windows compatibility to keep its ecosystem happy while at the same time appealing to new users. That’s why some describe Windows 8 as Windows 7 with a touch interface wrapper.

But the legacy effect in the mobile market doesn’t apply only to Apple and Microsoft. Now that Android is beginning to mature, it too will fall into the legacy trap. Google will continue to make enhancements/improvements, but new versions of Android can no longer be a radical departure from the previous ones, without requiring a restart of the ecosystem that has been built to date.

Further, this is exactly what RIM faces with BlackBerry 10. On the one hand, it needs to totally reinvent the experience to modernize its image. On the other hand, it has an existing ecosystem, albeit shrinking, that it doesn’t want to alienate. It will do its best to make both happy, but in the end, it has to go much higher on the innovation curve than a typical legacy calculation would allow simply to regain its shrinking market share. This is a much bigger gamble for RIM but it really has no choice.

So what does this mean for the market? All of the major vendors are now bound by a Legacy Trap that limits their overall ability to innovate (including Apple). This means you should expect refinements, rather than revolution. This is typical of mature markets, and although the tablet and smartphone markets are still fairly young, the maturity curve for new tech is now months or a few years at best, rather than the decades it used to take for older tech like PCs.

It also means that buyer characteristics will change. It’s not as much the mass crowds seeking the newest, latest gadget going forward. It’s more likely customers that will upgrade more slowly than before (more traditionally like other tech products). The amount of innovation will directly effect how soon/quickly the upgrades take place.

New product categories have a huge surge, while upgrade categories generally don’t. This may be one of the reasons for the relatively slow sales of the iPad Mini at launch (although it still had decent sales overall). It also means that the pace of new product introduction may actually slow somewhat as fewer feature upgrades make it less attractive for customers to buy every 9-12 months. And customers often will skip a generation (or two) before upgrading. Again, this may have had an effect on the Mini, as many “gotta have one” customers bought the iPad 3 earlier (and how many consumers really need/will buy one of each?).

This has been a factor with Windows PCs for several years, and it’s why Microsoft is still in the process of converting Windows XP users who skipped a generation (now potentially 2 generations). RIM had a similar problem getting users onto BlackBerry 7. And Palm’s demise came about partially from requiring the loyal PalmOS user base to move up to WebOS (although Palm had several other problems that condemned it). You could probably include Symbian and some others in this discussion as well.

So, what’s the bottom line? The innovation curve is real and affects all products. But the hyper-inflation of new products categories seems to make people forget this. We will see a slowing in the amount of innovation of products over time as they fall into the legacy trap. And this will include the most popular products that seem to have unlimited potential.

Of course, this will only hold until the next new innovation cycle begins, and no one really knows what, or when, that might be.

iPad Mini, Surface photos: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Images of RIM’s upcoming keyboard-equipped BlackBerry 10 N-Series have appeared online … and they look a bit familiar.

The images, leaked in a post on cnBeta, show a device that’s almost identical to devices like the Bold 9900 — which is either a welcome relief or a big disappointment, depending on how you feel about RIM’s older phones.

This should all be expected, however. RIM has made quite a mint on its keyboard-equipped devices (people really like those keyboards!), and the brand is instantly recognizable. There’s no point in messing with it if it works.

Today’s leak comes two weeks after RIM’s touchscreen-equipped BlackBerry Z10 also appeared online. That all of these phones are leaking a month ahead of their planned unveiling is no big surprise. As RIM revealed during its third quarter earnings call last week, the company has already started testing its BlackBerry 10 devices at a bunch of large companies. This gives people a lot of opportunities to photograph the phones — regardless of whether RIM would like them to.

Via: The Verge

The Federal Communications Commission knows that smartphone owners don’t actually know how much power is in their pockets. The agency released the “Smartphone Security Checker” today, a web app aimed at helping consumers get wise about mobile security.

The FCC launched the web tool in tandem with a number of well-known names in the mobile industry such as RIM, security company Lookout Mobile, McAfee, and others. The tool is simple. You tell it what type of smartphone you have — either BlackBerry, iOS, Android, or Windows Phone — and it gives you security instructions based on that operating system. These instructions include best security apps, safety tips, and how to set up passwords on that particular phone type, as well as ways to backup or wipe your phone.

It’s a simple website, but seeing the government reach out to smartphone users and specifically try to protect them is encouraging — especially in the midst of the holiday season, when millions of smartphones will be gifted. Mobile security is now recognized as a need instead of a “nice to have.” Consumers have their bank accounts, work accounts, health apps, email, and more on their phones — apps that reach much deeper into the person than just text messages and photos.

It also marks a new partnership between the government and security companies like Lookout Mobile, McAfee, and Symantec. For Lookout, this is the latest of a few big partnerships the company has been making over the last year. This includes a partnership with T-Mobile and it’s most recent deal with French mobile carrier Orange, which included an undisclosed amount of funding.

Solidifying the need, Lookout found a new Android scam yesterday called SpamSoldier that parades as a popular free app, such as Angry Birds Space, and instead turns your phone into a bot for its spam campaign. Once installed, the “app” erases its icon from the launch screen and sends out text messages promoting the scam or fake websites to your contact lists.

The More You Know image via Zeusandhera/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Some new leaked screenshots might show the new face of BlackBerry. Or they might be an Internet hype machine hoax leading up to the official, RIM-sanctioned launch of BlackBerry 10 this month.

But whoever created ‘em, be he Internet hoaxster or RIM employee, is to be congratulated for packing that much ugly into a smartphone screen.

The screenshots were published this morning on Boy Genius Report, so we’re taking them with a shaker of salt. What they show is a series of homebrewed applications, including BlackBerry Hub and speech-to-text, as well as shots of the homescreen.

We also see purported screenshots of a few social apps such as Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare.

Here, take a look for yourself:

The social apps aren’t so very bad; they use the design language we’re all accustomed to by now. But the BlackBerry-specific apps are less than inspiring. When comparing these (again, purported) screenshots to images from BlackBerry’s more commercially successful OS counterparts, it’s clear which designs are missing out on the attention to detail that consumers rarely see but always perceive.

So far, the only official image we’ve seen on BlackBerry 10 is the super vague shot of the back of the hardware (pictured at top). And as far as the OS itself goes, while the design is still an unknown entity, we do know that the browser it will carry kicks technical butt — kind of a must when mobile web apps are a big part of how BlackBerry users will be accessing their favorite apps due to waning developer interest.

BlackBerry 10 is set to make its debut on January 30, 2013. The launch will finally give us all the gory details and availability information we’ve been waiting for. The event will take place in multiple cities around the world on that date.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

After several delays, Research in Motion announced this morning that it will officially launch BlackBerry 10, its next-generation phone platform, on January 30, 2013.

RIM says the launch event will happen simultaneously in several countries, and you can bet that it’ll be livestreamed on the Web as well. In addition to more details on the BlackBerry 10 OS, RIM says that it will also divulge more information on BB10 hardware and availability.

The former smartphone giant certainly has its work cut out for it, now that it has even strong competition to contend with. Around this time last year, RIM said that it was planning to launch new BB10 phones in late 2012, a delay from an expected mid-2012 launch.

It would have been tough for RIM to make a comeback in the middle of this year,  but with a 2013 launch (and who knows when the phones will actually be available) RIM’s recovery seems almost impossible. Not only have the iPhone and Android cemented themselves more with consumers, Windows Phone 8 also now has Windows 8 buoying its presence. All the while, I can’t imagine too many smartphone buyers were drooling at the thought of a new BlackBerry.

Photo: Robin Bienfait, CIO, Research In Motion; by Jennifer Van Grove

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The latest IDC numbers are out, and Android is by far the undisputed heavyweight champion of the smartphone world. If Android was Mike Tyson, iOS would be Peewee Herman, and everything else is dust on the floor.

That is, if shipping numbers are all that matter.

Manufacturers — mostly Samsung — shipped 136 million Android-based phones in the third quarter of 2012, capturing 75 percent market share. The only other growing phone ecosystem, iOS, shipped 27 million units, taking 15 percent market share.

After that, it gets really nasty.

BlackBerry captured 4.3 percent, which is, let us remember, more than double the percentage of Windows Phone — not bad for the embattled RIM, but both down and going downer. Symbian desperately clung to 2.3 percent of the market, and Windows Phone had two percent. Expect to see that number grow as Windows Phone 8 — and some positive Windows 8 and Surface tablet momentum — finally engage Microsoft’s mobile engines.

IDC’s numbers in all their glory

But the real story is Android and iOS, Google and Apple. And haven’t we seen this movie before?

I know that shipping numbers aren’t everything. And I know that the Apple ecosystem is still the strongest mobile/media/apps ecosystem in the world (well, I think I know that … some may disagree). And I know that iOS punches way above its weight in terms of actual use and usability — it’s only in the past month that the overwhelming majority of Android phones finally surpassed iPhone’s mobile web traffic share. And I know that Apple still accounts for a staggering proportion, almost certainly still the majority, of profits in the mobile device market.

But do you really think all that can continue to be true if iOS starts accounting for 10 percent of all mobile devices sold? What if it’s five percent?

I should add a caveat here: iPhone sales were probably a little depressed in the past quarter — July, August, and September — since the iPhone 5 was not released until late September. So we’ll probably see a bump in iOS market share in the next couple of quarters, which are traditionally strong for Apple in any case.

Source: John Koetsier

iPhone 5

But Android is a train that has left the station, and it is stopping for no one. (No, not even for Google — ask Amazon.) The number of Android phones sold in this quarter alone is greater than the total number of smartphones of all kinds sold in the entire year of 2007.

And, not to do the monkey dance here, developers follow users. Sometimes the other way around, too, but developers will develop for platforms that have users. Ecosystem partners, like media companies, tend to aggregate around platforms with scale.

Another caveat, for which Apple can get down on its knees and thank Google: Android is fragmented and fractured, and likely to get more so over time.

In spite of all Google is doing to try to connect and unite and consolidate the versions of Android that users have on their phones, powerful ecosystem frenemies, like the carriers, and just plain old-fashioned enemies — or at least freeloaders — like Amazon, have opposing strategic imperatives. As do Chinese carriers, who might love what Android can do for them but have little incentive to keep Google in the mix.

Because of that, and because Apple earns vastly disproportionate amounts of income from its slice of the mobile market, I’m not saying that things are going to be the way they were when “beleaguered” was the adjective du jour for every article about Apple.

But there’s no doubt that there are clear parallels. And while I love Apple’s extreme devotion to not building crap as much as anyone, there’s a very valid question here: Was it truly impossible for Apple to build a mid-market or even low-end phone two or three years ago, and possibly be in a very different position today — possibly not as wealthy, but perhaps with a larger market share?

Some will say market share is irrelevant. To them I say, go get a job at RIM. Or Nokia. Market share does matter. And there will also be some who will say that profits matter most, and Apple’s got the mostest of those. To them I say, revenue and profit are trailing indicators that reveal a lot about what you have done, not so much about what you will accomplish.

I guess, in a sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just not in quite the same way.

photo credit: Insomnia PHT via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Scratch Instagram from the list of brand-name applications making their way over to RIM’s next-generation, potentially company-saving BlackBerry 10 platform.

Facebook may be a building a native version of the social network for the new mobile operating system, but the company has zero plans to build or release an Instagram application for BlackBerry 10, a person familiar with the matter told VentureBeat.

The snub may sound like a minor setback for RIM, which previously promised native versions of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn applications for BlackBerry 10. Multiple reports also hint that BlackBerry 10 will have its own photo editor with filters.

But for RIM, getting application makers to build for the platform is arguably the single most important factor to determining whether consumers go back to (or discover) BlackBerry, especially if task management flow is all the platform has to set it apart from iOS and Android. The need for great apps is so important that RIM is offering payouts to app makers, and it even seeded 6,000 BlackBerry 10 prototypes with developers to get the app creation process going.

And when you consider that Facebook’s photo-sharing prodigy has more than 100 million registered users, many of whom wouldn’t dream of giving up their favorite app, the app’s absence from BB10 seems more than a little disconcerting.

Then again, should BlackBerry 10 be a surprise hit, Facebook may reconsider its decision. BlackBerry fans can only hope.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

SAN DIEGO, Calif. — BlackBerry 10 is late. Late for its originally scheduled release date, and even later to a mobile revolution that some say has already been won by Google and Apple. But the word “late” doesn’t seem to be in RIM’s lexicon.

“I don’t think we’re coming late, per se,” Jeff Gadway, senior manager of brand and marketing communications at Research In Motion, told me today in an interview at CTIA MobileCON. “The smartphone category as a whole is really just in its infancy. There’s still a tremendous amount of smartphone growth both in the United States and around the world.”

“Growth” is an interesting word, especially when you consider that the inverse is happening to RIM’s mobile subscriber base. By comScore’s calculations, RIM lost 3.1 percent of its mobile U.S. subscriber share between May and August. The company, still number three in the platform race, now holds just 8.3 percent share of the smartphone subscriber market.

Perhaps, for RIM, things just have to get worse before they can get better. The company is the unenviable position of bringing to market a mobile operating system and platform that must resuscitate a dying brand and return profits. Everything rests on BlackBerry 10, the operating system and the six new devices promised for 2013.

So, what’s so special about BB10? This sure sounds like one big hustle, but Gadway said that BB10 is all about the flow.

“We’re hearing that there’s a lot of fatigue in terms of user experience in the market. The paradigm that people are used to today, going in and out of applications using the home button, applications operating in silos … I mean, this is five, six years old now. People are looking for a better way to be able to move through all the tasks, and all the things that they’re being met with over the course of the day. Today, what you have to do is go into multiple applications to complete a simple task,” he said.

BB10 is the answer to the headache, giving people a new mobile flow that allows them to move quickly through all of their tasks.

“What we’re trying to do is streamline [the multitasking] process, break down the silos that exist between a lot of those applications … and introduce a new flow to the whole user experience paradigm,” Gadway added. “That’s something we’re confident is going to set us apart.”

Swipe down from the inbox to see what’s coming next or toggle between accounts within the BlackBerry Hub. These are the time-saving (world-changing?) mobile features that Gadway speaks of.

“It’s all about trying to put information that you’re going to need at your fingertips so you don’t have to go looking for it,” he said.

Sounds lovely and all, but successfully marketing that message to customers who’ve long moved on to Android or iPhone devices seems like stretch. That’s why RIM is starting early on the messaging front, Gadway told me.

Gadway also pointed me to some of BlackBerry 10′s finer details, as seen in the video below. The photo experience, for instance, includes a rather nifty time-shifting element for adjusting the shot and changing the final product.

Say you snap a photo of a friend and her eyes are closed. With time-shift enabled, you can scroll through different frames of her face, all captured while you were shooting the original photo, to pick the frame that portrays your bestie’s face in the best light. Best of all, the feature works for each person in the shot.

“I can create a moment that never existed,” Gadway said.

Little will these features matter if BlackBerry 10 doesn’t land the most desired applications. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are guaranteed, but others such as Instagram are not.

Gadway did say, however, that of the developers who RIM has seeded with prototypes, 99 percent have indicated that they’ve started work building for BlackBerry 10. The company handed out 6,000 developer prototypes before opening App World to developers today. So, that’s something.

But, for now, all we’ve got to go on is a whole lot of hustle and just the promise of flow.

Apple’s iPhone 5 fared a little better than Samsung’s S3, but all phones have eco-issues, according to a study by the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Ecology Center. In fact, mobile phones contain up to 40 elements, many of which are heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants. The results were released today at HealthyStuff.

“Even the best phones from our study are still loaded with chemical hazards,” Ecology Center research director Jeff Gearhart said in a statement.

The iPhone 5 ranked fifth best, appropriately enough, while the S3 was ninth. Apple’s most recent model, the 4S, ranked second, but top honors went to the Motorola Citrus — probably due to the fact that it is both small and cheap (hence containing fewer expensive elements).

Samsung, however, had the best average rating for all of its phones.

The most toxic phones are, thankfully, not huge sellers. The Palm Treo 750, released a digital eon ago in 2007, ranked worst of all, followed by a BlackBerry Storm released in 2008. So the trend seems to be toward greener, cleaner mobile devices.

The biggest offenders are chlorine, bromium, cadmium, mercury, and lead, which can cause birth defects, impaired learning and other serious health problems, according to Gearhart. And while using the phone may not expose consumers to the chemicals, the Ecology Center highlighted the fact that these toxicity levels at e-waste recycling plants — often in China — can be 10 times to 100 times higher than normal background levels.

Here’s a visual view of the best and worst phones. Where’s yours?

photo credit: ‘PixelPlacebo’ via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Research in Motion beat Wall Street expectations with the results of its fiscal second quarter of 2013 today, and investors have responded in kind by shooting the company’s stock up 17 percent in after-hours trading.

RIM has had much trouble in the past few years as its BlackBerry brand continues to look antiquated next to what Apple, Google, and Microsoft have been cooking up. The company will release devices running its upcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system in early 2013. It released a strange music video this week trying to keep app developers interested in the BB platform.

With all the negative vibes and heavy competition, this quarter at least looked decent. Revenue was $2.9 billion, down 31 percent from the same quarter a year ago, but up 2 percent from $2.8 billion last quarter. Net loss was $235 million, or $.45 per share diluted.

Thomson Reuters said analysts expected RIM would report revenue of $2.48 billion and a loss of $0.46 per share.

RIM shipped about 7.4 million BlackBerry smartphones and 130,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets in this quarter.

“Despite the significant changes we are implementing across the organization, our second quarter results demonstrate that RIM is progressing on its financial and operational commitments during this major transition,” RIM CEO Thorsten Heins said in a statement. “Subscribers grew to approximately 80 million global users. Revenue grew sequentially from the first quarter, cash, cash equivalents, short-term and long-term investments increased by approximately $100 million to $2.3 billion. And carriers and developers are responding well to previews of our upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform.”

Investors seem to be happy with this quarter’s results. RIM is trading up more than 17 percent to above $8 a share in after-hours trading. The stock had closed the day at $7.14 a share.