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.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

AT&T took a moment to toot its own horn this morning, announcing that it sold more than 10 million smartphones in the last quarter.

And while the company didn’t announce a product-level breakdown, thanks to Kantar Worldpanel data released last week we can guesstimate that this translates to 7.2 million iPhones, 2.2 million Android phones, and some small number of BlackBerry and Windows phones. Those numbers are interesting, as Apple’s Q1 2013 financials are coming in just a couple of weeks, with estimates as high as 55 million iPhones sold.

“During the quarter, we averaged more than 110,000 smartphone sales a day as customers flocked to our leading portfolio of the latest Android, Apple, and Windows devices,” AT&T President and CEO Ralph de la Vega said in a statement.

Significantly, de la Vega did not mention BlackBerry in his statement. Windows Phone has become the third contender in the U.S. mobile market — because, according to that same Kantar data, Microsoft surged into third place with 2.7 percent of the U.S market, while RIM free-fell from seven percent the previous quarter to just 1.4 percent in the Christmas quarter.

The numbers are big, there’s no question.

AT&T’s huge quarter undoubtedly helped Apple push above 50 percent market share for the first time ever in the U.S. market, as the massive mobile carrier was, of course, the first (and for years the only) iPhone-carrying telecom, giving it an advantage in high-end wireless customers that continues to this day. And, perhaps, something of a bias toward iPhone.

Humility is, of course, a key AT&T virtue, which explains the next part of de la Vega’s statement:

“Combine that with the nation’s largest 4G network and lightning-fast LTE network that now reaches more than 170 million people and you’ll understand why customers continue to choose AT&T in record numbers.”

AT&T’s full financial results for the quarter will be released the same day as Apple’s: January 24.

photo credit: GlennFleishman via photopin cc

We’ve seen the clash of titans in mobile as Apple, Google, and Microsoft have released new phones, tablets, and mobile operating systems. We’ve seen a single network connect over a billion people worldwide. We’ve seen the once-great mobile company of the far European north forced to hawk its headquarters to raise cash. And we’ve seen social media move from cutting-edge to mainstream as the Obama campaign celebrated four more years.

In every year, we see winners and losers: companies, devices, or operating systems. Here’s our look at some of the biggest successes and failures of 2012.

The winners

	Android What more can you say about Android? With 75 percent market share in the third quarter of 2012, the free mobile operating system from Google looks poised to take over the world.
	Samsung  Not many companies sell 55 million smartphones in a quarter. Samsung did, and it will probably do it again.
	Galaxy S III Samsung is hot in large part due to its top smartphone, the Galaxy S III. With over 18 million units shipped in the third quarter, and 30 million shipped in five months, it’s easy to see why.
	iPhone 5 Sure, it was Time’s gadget of the year. But more importantly, iPhone 5 catapulted Apple back into the smartphone leadership position, at least in the U.S.
	iPad Mini We called it immediately: light, portable, awesome, and expensive. And it even looked better up close and person in our review. But we had no clue it would become one of Apple’s best-selling iPads. And now that it’s probably going Retina in April/May, it’s just getting better.
	YouTube YouTube continues to be the online leader, by far, in online video with 800 million visitors and billion-view channels created by individuals and brands. Despite getting the boot from iOS6, YouTube just continues to grow, with 25 times the video streams of its nearest competitor.
	Twitter 2012 is the year that Twitter went mainstream, reaching 500 million users mid-summer and just recently announcing 200 million monthly active users. And despite major new API restrictions that soured its relationship with developers, a very public spat with Instagram, and an evolving shift from social utility to media company, the company continues to grow and solidify its space in fast-breaking news.
	Instagram With a sale initially priced at almost $1.3 billion and an exploding user count, not even a tone-deaf terms-of-service change that spurred a class action lawsuit and a possible exodus of some users can keep Instagram off our winner list.
	Google Android is hot — 75 percent market-share hot. Search is still a massive strength for the iconic company that runs an ad 30 billion times each and every day. And so Google makes over $100 million a day – and hits our list of hot companies in 2012.
	ARM With the vast majority of the chips in smartphones running ARM processors, ARM has people wondering whether the mobile juggernaut will challenge Intel for CPU dominance. That’s still a stretch, but not nearly what it was just a few years ago.
	Reddit With 3.8 billion page views and 46 million unique visitors in October — double the previous year’s numbers — Reddit is continuing its torrid growth. And it doesn’t hurt when the POTUS himself chooses your site to do an informal meet-the-people session — which required 60 dedicated servers.

Next page: The losers

Pages: 1 2 3

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SAN DIEGO, Calif. — BlackBerry 10, the hyped mobile operating system that could resurrect the Research in Motion brand, is still months away from reaching consumers. Thousands of developers, however, were given early access to the platform to build BlackBerry 10-ready applications.

Wednesday, October 10 (10/10), BlackBerry opened App World to developers for BlackBerry 10 app submissions, product marketing manager Jeff Gadway said onstage at CTIA’s MobileCON. Gadway added that the company handed out 6,000 developer prototypes prior to today’s announcement.

The reveal is an important one. RIM is bleeding developers to Android and iOS, and any comeback story will be hinged on the company’s ability to attract the best developers to its platform. Native versions of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn, as previously announced, simply aren’t going to cut it.

Robin Bienfait, CIO, Research In Motion

Wednesday, Gadway and RIM CIO Robin Bienfait also pitched the BlackBerry 10 platform to enterprise and IT professionals looking for a bring-your-own-device ready platform.

Gadway demoed how a consumer could use BlackBerry 10 to run App World for personal and business needs simultaneously. BlackBerry 10 is a seamless, easy, and fast solution for end users to be more productive, he said. “It’s fast and easy to deploy as a BYOD,” he added.

With an uncertain release date still months away, it remains to be seen whether RIM’s efforts around making BlackBerry 10 both consumer- and enterprise-friendly are enough to recapture the market share it has lost in recent years. By comScore’s account, RIM holds just 8.3 percent of the U.S. smartphone subscriber market. Google and Apple have 52.6 percent and 34.3 shares respectively.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

ComScore just released its June 2012 U.S. mobile report, and the results were mostly predictable.

The unholy trinity of Google, Samsung, and Apple captured 50 percent of the mobile phone market, and 84 percent of all smartphones run either Android or iOS. But Apple is growing slightly faster in both categories.

Samsung manufactured 25.6 percent of all phones in use in the U.S. as of June 2012, ComScore says, while Apple had a 15.4 percent share of the entire mobile market, which includes both smartphones and feature phones. Motorola, which is owned by Google, came in at 11.7 percent, while LG has almost 19 percent market share.

Source: ComScore

Top mobile manufacturers

When it comes to smartphone platforms, Google is in the undisputed lead, with a 51.6 percent share. Apple has a 32.4 percent share but grew 1.7 percent over March 2012 numbers — faster than any other platform vendor. In fact, the only other mobile operating system to grow was Android, with an uncharacteristically anemic .6 percent growth rate.

Source: ComScore

Top smartphone operating systems

Predictably, RIM was down 1.6 percent, and Symbian (Nokia) also dropped.

Windows Phone, supposedly a platform of the future, also dropped a small amount. Most likely that drop was due to turmoil around Windows phones and upgradeability: If devices on the shelf right now can’t be upgraded to Windows Phone 8, what’s the point of purchasing a Windows Phone today?

ComScore also asked the 30,000 survey respondents a few usage questions. The highlights include:

• 75 percent of mobile subscribers send texts
• 50 percent use downloaded apps
• 36.9 percent access social networking sites via their mobile device
• 33 percent play games on their phones
• 27.6 percent listen to music on their phones

Image credit: David Hammonds/ShutterStock

But that’s just part of the story.

Poor hiring decisions, clueless management moves, scandals, and crazy acquisitions are all reasons HP, RIM, Yahoo, and BofA are in the running for worst corporate governance of the year.

See all the details in this infographic from the Chamber of Commerce. After reviewing … answer our poll for which one you think is worst!

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Add jet-setting executives to the list of things hard-hit Research in Motion can’t get off the ground.

The mobile company, beset by problems, — including a stock that’s dived 95 percent in the past four years — is now looking to sell one of its two corporate jets in a cost-saving plan insiders say could net up to $7 million. The move is part of the Ontario company’s goal to save $1 billion this fiscal year.

The BlackBerry maker will reportedly place its nine-passenger Dassault Aviation SA (DSY) F50EX on the market for $6 million to $7 million, an unnamed sources told Bloomberg News Tuesday. Chief Executive Thorsten Heins is attempting to find $1 billion in savings via “significant efficiences and operating cost reductions.” Already, the Waterloo, Ontario company has slashed 5,000 jobs and several manufacturing plants. News of the aircraft going up for sale comes on the day Heins is to face shareholders at RIM’s annual stockholders meeting.

The F50EX costs around $2.1 million per year to operate, one jet expert told Bloomberg. If the 9-passenger jet is sold, it will still leave RIM with a longer-range aircraft able to seat 14 passengers. The longer-distance aircraft will come in handy, given that RIM executives are being forced to travel as far as Indonesia and South Africa to find customers no longer available closer to home. The company’s 2011 U.S. sales fell 47 percent as Apple and Google’s Android phones grab the bulk of mobile phone marketshare.

Another hiccup came in June, when Heins announced the much-awaited BlackBerry 10 phone would be postponed until early 2013. The new BlackBerry was seen as RIM’s best hope to dig itself out of a sales ditch and regain some consumer interest.

Jet plane photo via Tayhutch/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Research in Motion is cutting its supply chain up, starting with smartphone manufacturer Celestica, which will stop RIM production completely within the next 3-6 months.

The manufacturer expects to spend around $35 million on restructuring after RIM’s departure.

RIM has been reevaluating its supply chain as sales dwindle in the competition against iOS and Android. The company, whose devices were extremely popular in corporate environments, is failing to keep up with the consumer smartphone demands that Google and Apple have both readily met. In an effort to hold on, RIM is slimming down, including this supply chain restructure and an expected operating loss for its first quarter 2012 earnings.

“The on-going competitive environment is impacting our business in the form of lower volumes and highly competitive pricing dynamics in the marketplace, and we expect our Q1 results to reflect this and likely result in an operating loss for the quarter,” said RIM CEO Thorsten Heins in a recent company update that forced the company to halt trading on its stock.

Celestica reassured customers in its announcement today that it still anticipates a revenue increase from $1.65 billion to $1.75 billion, as well as a six cents increase on its earnings per share, at $0.26. The company is now being forced out into the wild to find new customers.

Early in June, RIM’s stock fell into the single digits at $9.57 a share for the first time in nearly a decade. The company is also planning to shut down production on its 16GB PlayBook, the company’s star-crossed attempt at entering the tablet market. But there is hope on the horizon for RIM. The company is planning to launch its Blackberry 10 operating system soon, which it hopes will refresh its line of smartphones.

Blackberry image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Research in Motion, the mobile device company in desperate need of a hit, apparently shunned the summer acquisition advances of e-commerce and hardware behemoth Amazon.

Amazon, a lovely suitor if ever there was one, went so far as to hire an investment bank to advise on a potential deal, but it did not make a formal offer, Reuters is reporting. The reason? RIM just wasn’t that into them.

RIM, said people familiar with the matter, would prefer to have co-captains Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie continue to man the helm and right the course of what appears to be a ship with a broken compass. The BlackBerry-maker is said to have also rejected advances from companies other than Amazon, and is not open to a sale or break-up of the company. AllThingsD is reporting that Microsoft and Nokia have toyed with the idea of a joint RIM take over.

“They have had approaches from folks who have wanted to have discussions,” a Wall Street banker told Reuters. “The issue is it is hard to find a value that makes sense with a falling knife.”

So RIM is in it to win it. Okay, that’s noble, and it’s a rally-time strategy we could get behind if the company would stop fumbling the ball. The PlayBook tablet has performed atrociously, for instance, and we learned last week that the release of BlackBerry 10 devices, RIM’s only real hail-mary opportunity, was pushed back. Now the new phones won’t see the light of day until late 2012 — an entire year away. Chances are we’ll see a new iPhone before then.

Things could get a lot worse before they get better. RIM reported profits of $265 million on $5.2 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2011. For some perspective, that’s down $911 million from a year ago. And the co-CEO even admitted, “It may take some time to realize the benefits of these efforts and the platform transition that we are undertaking.”

Image via johncatral/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google’s Android operating system is kicking ass and taking names in the mobile software market, and Apple’s iPhone is on the rise in the hardware category, according to newly released data from comScore.

One in ten mobile subscribers are iPhone owners (10.8 percent), according to comScore which surveyed 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers. The iPhone nabbed more than a percent share of the phone manufacturers market form July to October, but still trails Samsung (25.5 percent), LG (20.6 percent) and Motorola (23.6 percent) when it comes to mobile handsets.

Google has no skin in the hardware game, but no matter. Android once again ranked number one in the smartphone platform market share category, and now commands almost half — 46.3 percent to be exact — of the entire market. Apple’s iOS is a distant second with 28.1 percent share, up 1 percent from July. RIM, meanwhile, continues to slide backward; it dropped from 21.7 to 17.2 percent share between July and October. And Windows Phone, which fell from 5.7 to 5.4 percent of the OS market, is not exactly a hit just yet.

Also, according to comScore, a larger percentage of mobile subscribers are texting (71.8 percent), using the browser (44 percent), downloading apps (43.6 percent) and accessing social networking sites (32.3 percent) on their devices.

[Image via svet/Flickr]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Best Buy sold out of Research in Motion’s PlayBook tablets this Black Friday, leading to speculation that the company was canning the tablet altogether.

Best Buy confirmed to VentureBeat that it is not canceling the PlayBook; it’s just temporarily sold out.

After purchasing PlayBooks for the sale price of $199 on Best Buy’s website, customers reported having credit cards charged, with e-mails following soon after stating Best Buy was not going to deliver the tablet. Some said inventory issues were blamed, but others were given no explanation. While this looked like another bump on RIM’s road to recovery, it could be a positive for the company. After all, having its Best Buy inventory wiped out online and in-store is a sign that people actually want to buy RIM’s tablet.

The mobile company has been losing steam for some time now, amplified by recent outages to its Blackberry service, a push back of updates to its PlayBook operating system and now the steep PlayBook holiday sale price, $300 off the regular price of $499. The company’s second quarter revenue was down ten percent year over year. PlayBook sales topped out at 200,000 shipped units, half of the 400,000 units expected. The price drop seems to have helped the tablet, however, making it more competitive with eReaders on the market, instead of the iPad and its Android competitors.

One customer detailed his experience on Best Buy’s customer forum. The person ordered a PlayBook to be picked up at a local Best Buy. The next day, he received an e-mail saying the store did not have any PlayBooks in stock, but he could call the general Best Buy number to check availability in other stores and receive free shipping on the tablet. He decided to wait for the PlayBook to come back in stock online and when it did that day, he placed a second order. The next day Best Buy sent him a second e-mail saying there was “a change to the status of your order,” and his credit card would be credited.

To figure out what was going on, he called customer service, who said it was a fraud issue and sent him to the fraud department. The fraud department didn’t know why his order had been rescinded and stated that this was not a fraud issue. The customer service representative, which he returned to, said it was a stock availability issue.

Electronista reported calling a Best Buy which confirmed canceling all shipments.

It’s wouldn’t be surprising if Best Buy did want to strip its shelves of the PlayBook, however. Others such as Sprint have already done so when it decided not to order RIM’s 4G version of the tablet in August.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion said Monday evening that it will cooperate after police said BlackBerry Messenger played an instrumental part in coordinating the violent rioting and looting in London during the past few days.

In a statement to VentureBeat, RIM said:

“As in all markets around the world where BlackBerry is available, we cooperate with local telecommunications operators, law enforcement and regulatory officials. Similar to other technology providers in the UK we comply with The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and co-operate fully with the Home Office and UK police forces.”

The company declined to elaborate further, but the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act does allow police to make companies hand over information, so RIM could have to give up information it has on specific users.

BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, is a free, private messaging service that only works on BlackBerry devices. What makes the network special—and easy to abuse—is that BBM messages are encrypted and untraceable to authorities. RIM has said in the past that it can’t unscramble messages sent via BBM, but the scope of the company’s capabilities in this area remain unclear.

Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have also been blamed for amplifying users’ messages. Steve Kavanagh, the deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police, said that “inflammatory” and “inaccurate” messages on Twitter were also to blame for the riots, according to the Guardian. “Social media and other methods have been used to organize these levels of greed and criminality,” Kavanagh said, according to the paper.

The riots in London have been raging since Saturday, and it was reported today that a 26-year-old man who was shot during the riots has died, becoming the first death attributed to the mass disorder. Police are expecting more disturbances this evening.

The negative press toward BBM certainly doesn’t help RIM, which has struggled lately to keep consumers interested in its devices. The company just launched five new models of BlackBerry 7 devices, but many smartphone buyers in the U.S. and around the world have shown a preference for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android devices.

I’d like to point out that although smartphone technology and social networks helped in coordinating the riots in London, these tools shouldn’t be blamed for actually causing the disorder. In the absence of BBM or Twitter, users could have used text messages or phone calls to coordinate.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion made several announcements that showed the company isn’t ready to give up its smartphone dominance in the US just yet.

RIM announced a new WebKit-based web browser that would compete directly with iPhone’s mobile Safari and Android’s web browser (both also use WebKit). Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis emphasized network efficiency in his keynote, and said that the new BlackBerry browser would make efficiency a priority as well. So we can expect the browser to be fast. Lazaridis also demonstrated that the new browser scored 100 percent on the Acid 3 test — which shows that it’s compliant with known web standards. He went on to say that the browser will hit BlackBerrys sometime this year.

As a traditionally e-mail-focused device, RIM has waited too long to improve the BlackBerry’s web browsing experience. A better browser would be key for the next iteration of its Storm smartphone — a direct competitor to other touchscreen smartphones — and will bring the rest of the BlackBerry line to the modern age of mobile web browsing.

Lazaridis also pushed “SuperApps” — which appears to be RIM’s spin on making its existing BlackBerry applications more functional via extensions and other applications. He showed off an extension that allowed BlackBerry users to tweet from their inbox, as well as an eBay app that syncs with your calendar and sends alerts to the inbox. We can expect further extensions for the inbox in the future, along with similar integration with other applications.

Finally, Lazaridis announced a free version of BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express — a simplified version of the BES server that many large businesses and institutions run to support BlackBerry e-mail. The BES Express server will run on existing mail servers and will come with free server and client licenses. A higher-end version will offer social network and video features.

In short, RIM didn’t announce anything truly revolutionary, but the unveiling of its WebKit browser is a sign that the company is keenly aware of the progress its mobile competitors are making.

[Photo via CrackBerry]

Here’s a sampling of their responses:

“I know what’s out there. I’ve been running free events in the Bay Area for more than five years now to try to bolster the mobile community when nothing else would. I’ve been working in the industry for about three times as long. I’ve developed for just about every platform, and I know the ecosystem extremely well. It’s not that I’m blind to everything else. I know everything else that’s out there, and because of that I’ve chosen to develop for iPhone. . . . Is the Nokia store supposed to challenge Apple? Or Microsoft supposed to? Or RIM? You know what folks, you had your chances. If you want to impress me, if you want me to start developing for your platforms again, get your houses in order. Once things change, once you get your stores developed, released, and proven as a good commercial channels to end users — then we can talk again. Until then we’re all just going to keep laughing at you and developing for iPhone.”
– Mike Rowehl on his blog This Is Mobility.

“The developer support on the iPhone side is years ahead of the other platforms both in terms of code objects, documentation, and quick constant positive feedback from friends and partners who all own the device. A national marketing campaign that emphasizes applications as the primary device feature doesn’t hurt either. Speaking as a developer and for fellow developers, iPhone development is fun and enjoyable development again. No one is going to do S60 or WindowsMobile dev for fun and those companies haven’t proven anyone will make money either. Big houses like Google, Facebook, Myspace,will all support all platforms. They can afford to. Smaller houses, not so much. Higher development costs + higher marketing risks. . . . Many of the iPhone apps are created by 1-3 person shops. Many part-time. They are supported an amazingly large number of books, blogs, screencasts, code samples, community gatherings, and apple developer resources covering the iPhone supported by a first-rate development environment with a toolkit that supports creating good looking apps easily (cheaply). Type “blackberry programming book” or “blackberry development”. Scant scant resources. Symbian/s60 too. . . . Nokia and Blackberry’s hardware and carrier focus has thus far led to lack of investment/interest/capability in software SDK design & developer support.”
– “Diesel McFadden” in response to my story.

“. . . Some people seem to write off the real enthusiasm that Apple has been able to stir up in the consumer and developer communities as some sort of cultish devotion that has no basis in reality. You know what? . . . It’s time to foster your own counter-cult or get out of the way.”
–“Jon Bell” in response to Rowehl’s post.

“As of now, Ovi is not a very developer-friendly place. Developers should get the VERY expensive ‘Java certified’ status for each app (a certificate that cost a decent list of devices could easily run up to $60k+). Nokia won’t do the app-verification process. Without doing anything to verify the app, Nokia takes a 30 percent cut on apps sold. Nokia is like the most tip-demanding waiter in a self service restaurant.”
– “Rapidmortal” in response to my story.

“. . . Developing for Symbian is extremely painful. The tool chain is cr*p on Windows platforms and even worse on Mac.”
–“Jim” in response to my story.

“RIM does not get it either. I tried to read their instructions on building html pages for the Blackberry, and I had to download a pdf file instead of reading it on an html page. To a developer that spells clueless.”
–“Dan Cornish” in response to my story.

“I would add Palm to the list as well. They had a great ecosystem before but flushed all of that down the toilet.”
–“Zen” in response to Rowehl’s post.

“I don’t blame developers for being leery of Palm. Palm screwed its Palm OS developers royally, beginning with its adoption of WinMo, and any serious businessperson would be foolish to forget that. Palm has suffered from bad management for an astonishingly long time – and WebOS doesn’t fundamentally change that fact.”
– “thegeniusfiles” in response to GigaOm’s coverage of the Skyhook Wireless study.

“I love how Apple sent a wake-up call to the mobile phone industry, and now they’re all scrambling to catch up! Reminds me of how Microsoft has for decades treated developers to garbage products because they didn’t have incentive to produce quality. I hope the desperate attempts at copying Apple fail for all these wanna-be players. And I hope the iPhone puts them out of business, with no hope for a bailout.”
–“Jim Bob” in response to Rowehl’s post.

Other respondents were a bit more hopeful:

“Whilst I don’t believe that you’re blinded by iPhone-lurve, it’s not the only game in town. There are profitable businesses running across other devices, and have been for years. iPhone has *absolutely* shown a better way and shaken up an industry for the better. I can’t wait to see what happens to the industry when the market leaders in mobile devices are as helpful as Apple have been. Whether that comes from Apple becoming the market leader, or the incumbents emulating them, I neither know nor care. It’s going to happen, and that’s a good thing for all of us.”
–“Tom Hume” in response to Rowehl’s post.

And Symbian offered up a response of its own:

“The frustration is well understood. I can wax poetic about the trials and tribulations you highlight and fill up many pints of beer with stories about the reasons why the barriers, control points, and technologies are set up this way in a Symbian and a Nokia marketplace. Rest assured, there have been many individuals involved that have been paying attention and have been acting on these needs well before the iPhone came around. It’s a big industry, and there are many strategies and initiatives to align and evolve. The Foundation we have formed and the asset distribution model we proactively endorse enables us to overcome many of those same barriers. You now get the addressable market, and many, not one object of desire. It took us a while to get here and now we have not only listened, but will continue to learn.”
– Lee M. Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, in response to Rowehl’s post.

By the way, a recent study of location-based app developers by Skyhook Wireless (and covered here by GigaOm) shows that Google’s Android platform may actually be drawing more developer interest than the iPhone — although the numbers are a bit hard to interpret: 58 percent of developers surveyed expressed interest in developing for Android versus 40 percent “of non-iPhone developers” who said they were interested in porting their apps to the iPhone. Still, the survey bears out the lack of interest in Nokia’s Symbian. Only nine percent considered porting apps to that platform. RIM, Windows Mobile, and Palm registered 26 percent, 20 percent, and 8 percent interest respectively. But again, remember, the survey was limited to location-based app developers.