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BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is working with three other companies to launch a $150 million venture capital fund that will invest in companies developing new applications and services for mobile devices.

Electronic publisher Thomson Reuters and venture capital firms JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners have joined RIM to establish the fund. RIM said the fund won't be restricted to investing in BlackBerry-specific applications. It will also invest in start-ups as well as relatively mature software developers.

Specifically, investments will focus on services and applications such as mobile payments, advertising, retailing, and banking. It also will support companies developing applications for social networking, navigation and mapping, media and entertainment, lifestyle and personal productivity applications, and enterprise applications.

The fund will be co-managed by Canadian firm JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners.

The venture fund is part of RIM's bigger strategy. For one, the company wants to move more computer users from desktops to handheld devices. Earlier this month, it announced a partnership with enterprise software firm SAP to integrate all of the company's corporate software onto BlackBerrys.

The fund will also help the second prong in RIM's overall strategy, which is to expand its user base to the mass market. The company makes the bulk of its revenue from corporate customers, but over the past 18 months it has also targeted consumers with new devices and partnerships with companies like Facebook. The new venture fund should help spur more innovation among developers.

"The mobile world has evolved well beyond phone calls and simple messaging to become an empowering and liberating platform that connects people to everything that matters most to them," Jim Balsillie, co-chief executive officer at RIM, said in a statement. "And the BlackBerry Partners Fund is being formed to help fuel innovation and activity in the mobile ecosystem."

Thomson Reuters is one of the world's largest electronic news publishers, providing information to lawyers, doctors, and financial professionals. Many of its customers are already BlackBerry users. The company sees mobile devices and applications as a critical piece of its own strategy.

"Thomson Reuters is committed to supporting the development of next-generation mobile applications that will provide our professional and business customers with anywhere, anytime capabilities," Devin Wenig, CEO of the Markets Division of Thomson Reuters, said in a statement. "The ability to make business-critical decisions with intelligent information available on mobile devices will give our customers a clear competitive advantage."

Research in Motion is teaming up with SAP to integrate key enterprise software onto its Blackberry devices in a move that could mobilize business applications in the same way it did for corporate e-mail.

The two companies said Friday at a joint press conference in New York City that SAP's customer relationship management software will be natively integrated into BlackBerry devices. This means that sales professionals will be able to access their CRM application as readily as they get e-mail on their BlackBerrys.

RIM and SAP had already offered customers a browser-based solution for accessing CRM applications. But this new approach means that CRM information will be pushed to BlackBerry devices much the same way that corporate e-mail is pushed to BlackBerrys. The application will work over cellular networks and will work with all versions of BlackBerrys. The software will be available in the next few weeks, executives said.

The companies plan to expand the relationship over time. And over the next several months, they will integrate all of SAP's enterprise software applications with the BlackBerry.

RIM pioneered the mobile push e-mail model. And its BlackBerry phones lead the market in companies both large and small. Today it has over 150,000 BlackBerry servers installed in 135 countries.

But even though it's considered the leader in the corporate smartphone market, the company is facing stiff competition from companies, such as Microsoft and Apple. Apple's iPhone was originally targeted at consumers, but it's been gaining traction among business users. In March, Apple announced it was licensing software to work with Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers in an effort to provide corporate push e-mail to iPhone users. The company has also announced virtual private network capabilities and has added security features that should help corporate IT managers better manage iPhones on corporate networks. The new software upgrade will be available in June.

Meanwhile, RIM has also been addressing the consumer market with devices like the Pearl. It's also added multimedia features to its phones that allow people to store and listen to music and watch videos on their phones, features popular with some consumers. The company has also struck deals with social-networking Web sites like Facebook to bring those applications to Blackberry users. And most recently, RIM has been rumored to be working on a clamshell style phone that flips open. This handset would compete with basic-feature phones from companies such as Motorola.

Corporate customers still the core
But RIM's co-CEO James Balsillie emphasized that the company is still very much focused on its corporate customers, who make up the bulk of its base. And he said that many of the features and functionality developed for BlackBerrys are also very useful to corporate customers.

"In the media, the B to C (business to consumer) angle gets all the attention, because it's sexy," he said. "But actually the same core enablers are massively transformative to enterprise productivity. When people think of mobile video, they think of watching a music video on their phone. But they don't think about what it means for businesses to do things like training."

Balsillie said that the enterprise may actually find new multimedia features even more useful than consumers. But as RIM rapidly expands its customer base, the company has faced growing pains. And in the last year, it's encountered two major network outages that have annoyed many of its corporate customers.

Balsillie acknowledged the network issues of the past. And he said the company is constantly working to ensure that outages don't occur in the future.

"We are not perfect," he said. "And I can't stand here before you and say we've been perfect. But we aspire to perfection. And we take our responsibility to provide 100 percent uptime to our customers with the utmost seriousness. And when something happens we make sure that service is restored and no packets are lost."

Research in Motion is merging social networking with music on its Blackberry smartphones in the hopes of attracting more consumers.

This week the company announced that it is partnering with pop artist Will.i.am by making his Dipdive online community and content available to Blackberry users. Will.i.am is a founding member of the group Black Eyed Peas and his "Yes We Can" Barack Obama video has been a huge hit on YouTube.

Research in Motion dominates the business smartphone market. And business users make up roughly two-thirds of its 12 million Blackberry customers. But the company is looking to expand its reach into the consumer market. The company's most recent move to attract casual mobile users has been to combine music and social networking with its push email and Web services.

RIM's co-CEO Jim Balsillie told the wire service Reuters in an interview that he sees music and social networking as the two hottest trends of the moment. And he sees the two things merging into a single multimedia experience. He said that Dipdive is an example of this "where politics-heavy blogging meets music video content."

RIM initiated its push into the consumer market with the Blackberry Pearl device. And the company has also been offering "lifestyle applications" for its devices. Last year, it announced partnership with Facebook to make it easier for users of the social networking site to access their profile and information from Blackberries.

As RIM adds more of these features and functionality, the company is likely to bump up against other competitors, such as Apple's iPhone. But RIM has said repeatedly that it doesn't see Apple as a threat.

That could soon change, since Apple announced on Thursday that it has licensed the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol, which will make it much easier to do push e-mail and contacts with Exchange servers.

BARCELONA--Research In Motion's co-chief executive officer, Jim Balsillie, doesn't seem too worried that the second major outage of the company's BlackBerry service in 10 months could hurt its reputation with corporate customers.

RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie

(Credit: Research In Motion)

"It was an intermittent delay, a couple of hours," he said. "It's old news. It happened days ago."

Balsillie's comments were in response to a question about Monday's outage and how it might impact the company's relationship with corporate customers. Balsillie had just given a keynote speech and participated in a panel discussion at the Mobile World Congress here Wednesday morning. He declined to answer further questions about the situation.

The BlackBerry outage, the service's second major interruption since April 2007, began at about 3:30 p.m. New York time Monday. Service was restored roughly three hours later, the company said in a statement. No messages were lost. Calling and text-messaging services weren't affected.

Research In Motion said in a statement issued late Tuesday afternoon that the outage was caused by "a problem with an internal data routing system within the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had been recently upgraded." The company has been upgrading capacity throughout its server farms to accommodate growing demand for its BlackBerry services.

This recent snafu and the company's previous major outage in April highlight a key weakness of the company's system, which is that it has a single point of failure.

RIM's service is centralized and works by routing all BlackBerry e-mails through one of two main network operations centers, which are essentially large data centers. One center is located in Canada and primarily serves the Western Hemisphere as well as parts of Asia. The other data center, located in the U.K., handles e-mail traffic in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Of course, the world didn't stop on Monday when people were unable to get their BlackBerry e-mail for a few hours. After all, e-mail was still available the old-fashioned way, on desktop PCs. But the outage was an inconvenience. And as mobile phones become a bigger part of people's personal and business lives, frequent outages of any kind could drive these customers to consider other solutions.

It's safe to say that RIM has built a strong reputation as a reliable service provider that has attracted bankers, lawyers and lawmakers as subscribers. But if the outages persist or even become more frequent, the company risks losing some of these very valuable customers to competitors such as Apple and Microsoft, which also offer smartphones with e-mail capabilities.

Microsoft, in particular, presents a threat since most corporate e-mail already runs on Microsoft software. What's more, corporate users are familiar with Microsoft. Its software is also available on a wide variety of handsets offered from almost every major cell phone maker, including Sony Ericsson, which just announced its first Windows Mobile phone this week at MWC.

There's no question the stakes are high for RIM as competition grows. The smartphone market is the fastest-growing segment of the cell phone market. It grew about 72 percent last quarter for a total of 35.5 million phones sold worldwide. This compares to about 13 percent growth for the total mobile phone market.

Research In Motion

(Credit: RIM)

This week, Research In Motion announced that it will roll out a series of updates to its BlackBerry platform (both to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry device software), with some big ups on the e-mail and productivity fronts.

In addition, the Dataviz Documents to Go suite will be integrated into future devices for viewing and editing Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, and users will also be able to look up the availability of their colleagues with a calendar lookup function. IT managers will also get some love with new software and Web-based components that help with monitoring and troubleshooting, enhanced security, and the ability to send over-the-air software upgrades.

Unfortunately, we don't have any more specifics on specific release dates or which devices/carriers will receive the update, but we'll certainly keep you posted as we get more information.

(More resources: RIM press release)

Though Research in Motion continues to keep the BlackBerry a frustratingly closed platform (with precious few applications--my biggest complaint about an otherwise great device/service), it is upgrading its software to add some interesting new features, the Wall Street Journal reports:

With the aim of making mobile e-mailing more like e-mailing from a desktop computer, RIM said BlackBerry users will soon be able to edit documents directly from the handheld device and to view messages in their original formatting...[RIM] also said the changes will enable users to retrieve e-mail messages that aren't stored on the device and to check the availability of a colleague before sending a meeting request.

To wait so long...for so little. At this pace, Apple's iPhone will leapfrog the BlackBerry. Already, I've noticed scads of new iPhones being used in corporate settings. But for the lack of a keyboard, I'd be on an iPhone, too.

RIM makes great hardware and decent software. It needs to recognize, however, that it's not the center of all original thinking. Once it came up with its idea and implemented it, it hasn't done much in the way of innovation.

SAN FRANCISCO--BlackBerry's users, often referred to as "CrackBerry" addicts, will now have easy access to the popular social-networking site Facebook.

The two companies, which have been working in secret for the past six months, announced Wednesday that they have integrated the Facebook Web application with Research In Motion's Blackerry smartphones.

Mike Lazaridis, founder of RIM, joined Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, to formally unveil and demonstrate Facebook for BlackBerry Smartphones at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment show here.

T-Mobile USA will be the first mobile operator to provide the software application to subscribers, the companies said. The application, which will come preloaded onto all T-Mobile BlackBerry smartphones, will be free.

"By integrating Blackberry's push technology with Facebook's networking technology provides a real-time social-networking experience away from the desktop," Lazaridis said.

Lazaridis demonstrated how easily pictures could be sent to a Facebook page from a BlackBerry Curve. Without even opening the application, a BlackBerry user can take a picture and instead of e-mailing or sending the photo by MMS to a friend, he can go directly to his Facebook mobile page, add captions and even tag the photo. Then with the click of a single button, the picture is uploaded to the Facebook page where anyone can see it.

Friends who are also using the integrated BlackBerry/Facebook application can be notified immediately that a new picture has been added. These alerts can even be customized with unique tones so that BlackBerry users know who has just messaged them. The application is also integrated into BlackBerry's address book, so that BlackBerry users can invite contacts to become Facebook "friends."

It makes sense for Facebook to work with device makers to integrate its application into more phones. As a new smartphone user, I've noticed that it can be a real pain in the neck to access Web applications I access all the time on my desktop.

It's also very telling that the young Facebook, which was started by a couple of college kids, is partnering with a company that got its start catering to the stodgy world of Wall Street bankers, government middle managers, and corporate lawyers. Even seeing the founders of the company on stage together was a symbolic look at where the future of the Internet and mobile industry are going. Moskovitz, who quipped when he came on stage that he was drinking Red Bull and eating Hot Pockets four years ago in a dorm room at Harvard, looked like he could easily be Lazaridis' son or dare I say even grandson.

Indeed, Facebook is not just for students anymore. A year after the company started letting anyone join the network, Moskovitz said that more than half of the nearly 50 million registered users of Facebook are not in college or high school. When he asked the packed hall in San Francisco's Moscone Center how many people had a Facebook profile, nearly every hand in the room went up.

"It's really exciting to see the business community using this communications platform," he said. "Opening the application to more users and developers is really the cornerstone of our growth."

But RIM is also trying to expand its market with new products geared toward more casual users. The BlackBerry Pearl has been dubbed a perfect phone for "soccer moms" who need to check e-mail on the go. And the BlackBerry Curve, which is loaded with multimedia functionality to rival Motorola's Q, the Samsung Blackjack, and other "lifestyle" smartphones, is also geared more to the mass market than the hardcore business user. While the Curve is no Apple iPhone, it certainly shows where the market is headed. The Facebook application is another indication that BlackBerry is trying to hit professionals who want to meld their work lives with their professional lives.