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DaffyDuck
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Amateur hour is over for RIM….
blackberry.playbook.at.cut.rate.price.for.staff
RIM clearing out BlackBerry PlayBook with $99 staff sale
BlackBerry PlayBook at cut-rate price for staff
Signs that RIM has been growing increasingly eager to clear out BlackBerry PlayBooks grew on Monday with an apparent leak detailing an employee sale. Already cut to $199, the 16GB tablet is understood by multiple The Verge contacts to be selling at just $99 for RIM staff. Price drops are believed even steeper on the 32GB and 64GB models, which should cost just $149 and $199.
The Waterloo company is also applying only a light restriction to prevent mass re-sales, letting each worker order as many as eight each. It's unknown how long the sale will last, and RIM hasn't publicly confirmed the deal.
Such prices are near certain to be well below cost and are low even for employee purchase programs. Combined with the public sale ending this week, enterprise bonuses, and the brief exit from Best Buy, questions have been raised as to whether the discounts have been just a short-term discount or whether it's part of a more determined clearance.
After shipping a lower-than-expected 500,000 PlayBooks in the device's launch quarter, RIM ended up shipping less than half as many in the summer, prompting a flurry of discounts. It had little success with a price drop from the original $500 to $300 and is now helped mostly by having a cost similar to the stripped-down Kindle Fire, where the sheer price gap between the PlayBook and the iPad has made a more convincing case for alternatives to Apple.
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Thai Girls : Meet Sexy Thai Girls
Posted on: 10:46 pm on Nov. 28, 2011
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DaffyDuck
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Seriously, these are the last spasms of a company that desperately tries to throw as much against a wall as they can, not just to see what sticks, but rather to desperately hope something, ANYTHING sticks!
These guys are hosed.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/29/us-rim-idUSTRE7AS0A720111129
RIM to offer security features on iPhone, Androids
By Alastair Sharp
TORONTO | Tue Nov 29, 2011 12:13am EST
(Reuters) - BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is seeking to cash in as companies switch to rival smartphones with a new tool that offers some of its important security features for sexier devices like the iPhone.
The company said on Tuesday that it will launch its new Mobile Fusion device management software in the first quarter, allowing corporate IT staff to set and monitor rules for passwords, apps and software on a range of devices, including Apple's iPad and iPhone, and smartphones using Google's Android operating system.
A company can remotely lock or wipe a lost or stolen device, a key selling point for security-conscious corporations who may have been wary of shifting away from the BlackBerry.
"What our enterprise customers are looking for, and the opportunity for us, is to become the de facto platform," RIM's vice-president for enterprise product management, Alan Panezic, told Reuters in an interview ahead of the announcement.
"We will take full advantage of whatever security capabilities are provided by the core operating system. We're not going to hold that back in any way, shape or form."
RIM's BlackBerry was for years the preferred device for businesses and government agencies, who treasured its encrypted data and distributed the device to millions of workers needing secure, round-the-clock email access.
But many workers now prefer using their own Apple and Android-powered devices to access corporate emails, raising security questions for corporations that RIM hopes to address with the new software.
Mobile Fusion will sit next to existing BlackBerry Enterprise Servers (BES) behind corporate firewalls.
Panezic said the software will manage RIM's PlayBook independently from a BlackBerry after the tablet - which has yet to gain traction with either business or consumer clients - receives a long-awaiting software upgrade, due in February.
He declined to give any pricing details for the Fusion service, but said it would be "competitive" with rivals.
"It will help stem the tide of those companies that may have considered eliminating their BES but it won't help sell more phones," said Gartner analyst Phillip Redman. "That's what they really need to do."
The new software follows on from RIM's May acquisition of device management company Ubitexx, which RIM announced in May.
Smaller companies such as Good Technology, MobileIron and BoxTone already offer device management as companies fret about leakage of sensitive commercial information.
"This will definitely rattle some cages" among smaller companies, filling a niche by securing and managing iPhones and other non-BlackBerry devices for corporations, Forrester analyst Christian Kane said.
Panezic said customers had requested a solution to handle Apple and Android devices, but RIM would consider adding support for other systems, such as Microsoft's Windows Phone, if there was enough demand.
RIM shares closed 3 percent higher at $16.48 on Nasdaq on Monday. They have fallen more than 70 percent this year.
(Reporting by Alastair Sharp; editing by Janet Guttsman)
BEIJING | Tue Nov 29, 2011 3:18am EST
(Reuters) - Microsoft Corp and U.S. mobile engineering firm AgreeYa Mobility on Tuesday signed an agreement to allow corporations and other users to connect to Microsoft services from a variety of computing platforms, including phones and tablets running Apple Inc's iOS and Google Inc's Android.
The protocol licensing agreement will allow AgreeYa Mobility to produce a software suite that interoperates with a range of Microsoft applications and services, connecting from Microsoft and other platforms, which also include Research in Motion Ltd's Blackberry and Hewlett-Packard Co's WebOS.
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft and Folsom, Calif.-based AgreeYa held the signing ceremony in Beijing to capture the attention of some of the world's largest handset manufacturers and tablet computer assemblers, which are in China, Taiwan and South Korea, said Sandy Gupta, marketing general manager for Microsoft's Open Solutions Group.
The partnership, which the companies plan to launch formally in March, is intended to expand Microsoft applications for enterprises, such as companies, universities and government agencies, across a wide range of mobile devices, primarily smartphones and tablet computers, Gupta said.
The two sides did not disclose the financial details of the agreement.
With about a billion mobile phones and tablet computers sold every year, corporate IT departments are shifting from issuing mobile devices to working with phones and tablets that employees have bought on their own, said Krish Kupathil, chief executive of AgreeYa Mobility.
This "bring your own device" approach means that companies need to make disparate devices running on different operating systems able to access necessary applications, he said.
"Imagine an enterprise with 40,000-50,000 employees spread across the globe," Kupathil said. "Currently the IT team just manages the laptops. With mobile devices coming on, I think that number is going to at least triple. So manageability of these devices is a very important part of this."
(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones; Editing by Matt Driskill)
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Bangkok Women : Meet Sensual Bangkok Women
Posted on: 3:32 am on Nov. 29, 2011
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DaffyDuck
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Anybody still holding on to RIM stock should really consider dumping it by now, or shorting it.
http://www.splatf.com/2011/12/playbook-inventory/
RIM’s unsold PlayBook inventory: Probably 1+ million units
Among other bad news, BlackBerry maker RIM announced today that it would take a $485 million write-down for its November quarter because it has too many unsold PlayBook tablets in inventory.
How many? Probably about 1.4 million, Morgan Stanley analyst Ehud Gelblum estimates in a report today.
So stay tuned for the PlayBook fire sale. RIM says its early promotions are causing a “significant increase in demand for the PlayBook,” with more than 150,000 sales to end users last quarter. Still, that’s a lot of PlayBooks left to get rid of. (And, really, why would you buy one at any price?)
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Thai Girls : Meet Sexy Thai Girls
Posted on: 11:31 pm on Dec. 3, 2011
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DaffyDuck
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Even worse for RIM - selling Playbook at a loss, and still can't compete?
rim.said.losing.50.75.on.each.blackberry.playbook
RIM 'blindsided' by Kindle Fire, may lose $75 per PlayBook
RIM said losing 50-75 on each BlackBerry PlayBook
RIM's prolonged BlackBerry PlayBook discounting came after it was "blindsided" by the Amazon Kindle Fire, according to a research note from Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu. Citing "checks" in the supply chain, he understood RIM hadn't expected Amazon's loss-leading $199 price and had decided to take even more of a loss to follow suit. RIM was estimated to be losing $50 to $75 on every PlayBook it shipped.
The company was also being squeezed in smartphones, Wu said. The pricing of the $99 iPhone 4 and (in most countries) free-on-contract iPhone 3GS was squeezing RIM's lower-end BlackBerry line.
Wu still saw value in the company, but he was mostly basing it on its value as a takeover target. Its 70 million users, the BlackBerry platform, its BIS push data servers, and its patent collection could all be valuable. RIM's contribution to the Nortel patent buy led the analyst to estimate RIM's full patent catalog by itself was worth $2.5 billion to $4 billion.
The $485 million pre-tax ($360 million after) hit from unsold inventory is likely to see RIM fall short of guidance yet again and should make 2011 the company's worst year to date, having bled share through most of the year. Its tablet effort has been so low-key that it doesn't register in the top ranks of non-iPad makers, who themselves sell just a fraction of the tablets Apple manages.
By Electronista Staff
Sent from my iPad
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Bangkok Girls : Meet Sexy Bangkok Girls
Posted on: 12:11 pm on Dec. 5, 2011
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DaffyDuck
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Painful endgame.
It's almost painful to see them flailing about as they do, completely incompetent in stopping their own demise.
Game over.
http://m.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/rims-outlook-darkens-with-delay-of-new-smartphone/article2272750
Iain Morrow, reporting for The Globe and Mail:
Research In Motion Ltd.’s top executives cut their salaries to $1 as they delivered yet more dismal news to investors, telling the world the product that was supposed to save the company will come out almost a year later than promised.
The news that a new line of BlackBerrys with an upgraded operating system won’t be released until late 2012, combined with a weak outlook for the company’s fourth quarter, pounded RIM shares in after-hours trading. The stock fell more than 7 per cent to about $14 (U.S.).
Sent from my iPad
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Thai Women : Meet Matured Thai Women
Posted on: 9:20 pm on Dec. 15, 2011
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DaffyDuck
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Worse and worse...
Next-Gen BlackBerry Products Don't Work, Source Says
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/22/next-gen-blackberry-products-dont-work-source-says/
Bad products, horrible software and no cohesive vision have seemingly turned Research In Motion into a company without motion at this point.
Throw in a huge delay before BlackBerry 10 smartphones start shipping, and it’s clear why people are losing, or have lost, faith in a company that played a tremendous role in making the smartphone industry what it is today. Thanks to one of our most trusted sources, BGR now has new information on what’s going on inside Research In Motion, and the picture isn’t pretty.
Our source has communicated to us in no uncertain terms that PlayBook 2.0 -- the next-gen tablet operating system RIM is developing -- is a crystal clear window into the state of BlackBerry 10 on the upcoming smartphones RIM is building.
And the view is none too good.
“Email and PIM [is better] on an 8700 than it is on BlackBerry 10,” our contact said while talking to us about RIM’s failure to make the company’s upcoming smartphone OS work with the network infrastructure RIM is known for.
We also have more background on why RIM’s BlackBerry 10 smartphones are delayed, and it has nothing to do with a new chipset that RIM is waiting on. Our source told us that CEO Mike Lazaridis was lying when he said the company’s new lineup was delayed for that reason.
"RIM is simply pushing this out as long as they can for one reason, they don’t have a working product yet,” we were told.
At the end of our conversation, our source communicated something shocking for a high-level RIM employee to say. He told us that RIM is betting its business on a platform and ecosystem that isn’t even as good as iPhone OS 1.0 or Android 2.0. “There’s no room for a fourth ecosystem,” he stated.
This content was originally published on BGR.com
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Bangkok Women : Meet Beautiful Thai Girls
Posted on: 12:57 pm on Dec. 22, 2011
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