Office 365 Subscription Slows Signficantly 

Microsoft said that consumer subscriptions to Office 365 topped 23 million, signaling that the segment’s once quite large year-over-year growth had slowed significantly.

IBM Partners With BOX

IBM and BOX have signed a global agreement to combine their strengths into a cloud powerhouse.

The star-crossed ones said in a joint statement: “The integration of IBM and Box technologies, combined with our global cloud capabilities and the ability to enrich content with analytics, will help unlock actionable insights for use across the enterprise.”

Box will bring its collaboration and productivity tools to the party, while IBM brings social, analytic, infrastructure and security services.

The move is described as a strategic alliance and will see the two companies jointly market products under a co-banner.

IBM will enable the use of Box APIs in enterprise apps and web services to make a whole new playground for developers.

The deal will see Box integrate IBM’s content management, including content capture, extraction, analytics, case management and governance. Also aboard will be Watson Analytics to study in depth the content being stored in Box.

Box will also be integrated into IBM Verse and IBM Connections to allow full integration for email and social.

IBM’s security and consulting services will be part of the deal, and the companies will work together to create mobile apps for industries under the IBM MobileFirst programme.

Finally, the APIs for Box will be enabled in Bluemix meaning that anyone working on rich apps in the cloud can make Box a part of their creation.

Box seems to be the Nick Clegg to IBM’s ham-faced posh-boy robot in this relationship, but is in fact bringing more than you’d think to the party with innovations delivered by its acquisition of 3D modelling company Verold.

What’s more, the results of these collaborations should allow another major player to join Microsoft and Google in the wars over productivity platforms.

It was announced today that Red Hat and Samsung are forming their own coalition to bring enterprise mobile out of the hands of the likes of IBM and Apple which already have a cool thing going on with MobileFirst.

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Blackberry Plans New Tablet

BlackBerry plans to roll out a larger tablet and two phone-tablet combos, or phablets, over the next year, according to a leaked road map presentation slide.

The three devices will run the BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system, which powers the Z10 smartphone and the upcoming Q10, which features a physical qwerty keyboard, according to the slide, which first appeared over the weekend on Twitter as @BB10Leaks.

BlackBerry officials didn’t comment on the road map. However, in comments to analysts last Thursday, CEO Thorstein Heins said repeatedly that the company will introduce more BlackBerry 10 devices this year, though he didn’t indicate what form factors the products would feature.

The three new devices shown in the slide include a BlackBerry 10 tablet with a widescreen aspect ratio, as well as a “U10″ phone-tablet, which some call a phablet, and an “R10″ phablet with a physical qwerty keyboard.

The slide indicates that the B10 tablet will ship in the third or fourth quarter, while the two phablets will be released later, with the U10 shipping at the end of the year and the R10 in spring of 2014.

There are no specifications on the slide, but the devices appear to be shown roughly in proportion to one another, with the phablets appearing to be wider than the existing Z10 and Q10 smartphones.

BlackBerry already has a 7-in. tablet called the PlayBook that is more square in shape than the widescreen look of the B10 in the slide. Some analysts and bloggers said it’s possible that BlackBerry is developing a competitor to the various 9-to-11-in. tablets already on the market, including many Android tablets, as well as the 9.7-in. iPad.

“BlackBerry wants to be a full-line competitor, particularly for business users, so they have to have a full line of products to compete head-on with Apple and Android, primarily Samsung,” said Jack Gold, an analyst at J.Gold Associates. “I would expect any viable competitor to establish a full line of products touching on all the various preferences of the marketplace, which includes smartphones, phablets and tablets.”

Gold couldn’t confirm whether any of the details in the leaked slide were accurate, but he noted that it doesn’t appear to include the mid-priced smartphones that Heins and other executives have hinted that BlackBerry may launch over the next few quarters.

The PlayBook tablet first went on sale in April 2011, running on what BlackBerry then called the BlackBerry Tablet OS, based on QNX. BlackBerry later said it would merge that tablet operating system into BlackBerry 10. The company also released a major update to the PlayBook tablet operating system in February 2012.

The first release of the PlayBook was criticized for not having native email.

Analysts are not sure that BlackBerry can keep up with production demand for so many new devices that depend on a relatively constrained supply chain for displays and other components. But to boost its global smartphone market share, currently at less than 10%, BlackBerry will need a product lineup with a variety of options.

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LinkedIn Beefs Up

LinkedIn has re-tooled its search engine with changes designed to make it easier for members to find information on the business networking site, whose volume of content has increased and grown more diverse in recent years.

Launched in 2003, LinkedIn initially focused on giving professionals a place to feature their resumes and career bios, as well as connect with peers and colleagues, but the site has progressively become more interactive and houses a much larger repository of data beyond individual profiles.

For example, almost 3 million companies have set up corporate pages, more than 1.5 million groups have been created, the site features a jobs section, and individuals and publishers are able to post and share comments and links to articles.

So it’s not surprising for LinkedIn to focus on improving its search engine, which fielded 5.7 billion queries last year.

LinkedIn members have until now had to run separate queries for groups, companies, jobs and other professionals, but that’s changing with the upgraded search engine.

“Now, all you need to do is type what you’re looking for into the search box and you’ll see a comprehensive page of results that pulls content from all across LinkedIn including people, jobs, groups and companies,” Johnathan Podemsky, a LinkedIn product manager, wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Users can still segment results, so as to see only job results, for example.

The LinkedIn search engine is also gaining auto-complete and suggested-searches functionalities to help people fine-tune query terms. In addition, the search engine will log members’ search queries and “learn” from them in order to deliver more relevant results.

It will also be possible for users to save search queries and be alerted about new or changed search results. The advanced search option has also gained more search filters, including location, company and school.

However, the search engine still doesn’t include content from the company’s SlideShare site, which about 60 million monthly visitors use to upload, share, rate and comment on primarily slide presentations, but also documents, videos and webinars.

Also, the search improvements are being applied to the main site, not to the mobile apps, although doing so is something the company is looking into, according to a spokeswoman.

LinkedIn started to roll out the new search features on Monday, and expects to finish delivering them to every member worldwide in the coming weeks.

As of the end of 2012, LinkedIn had topped 200 million registered members located in more than 200 countries.

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IBM Goes Social

Responding to increased use of tablets within business settings, IBM will launch on Wednesday several mobile applications designed to let employees use IBM enterprise social collaboration software with iPads and other mobile devices.

The new applications, free to customers with active licenses of the IBM software, have been built specifically for tablet interfaces and have security, IT management and compliance features.

“The apps are very lightweight and talk directly back in a secure manner to the enterprise systems that people who don’t have these devices are using inside the company,” said Rob Ingram, senior manager of IBM’s Mobile Collaboration Strategy.

One of the applications lets employees use IBM Connections via iPads, while another one is for LotusLive Meeting users to participate in online meetings using iPhones or Android, BlackBerry or iPad tablets.

For IBM Sametime, another application lets employees engage in one-on-one or group instant messaging sessions on iPad and Android tablets. There is also one application for Lotus Symphony Viewer that lets users view ODF-based files, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations, on iPads, iPhones or Android devices.

There are also applications for managing telephony tasks within IBM Sametime from tablets and for Android device users to add widgets to home screens as shortcuts to their Lotus Notes mail and calendar.

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Nokia Expects Windows Phone Before EOY

Nokia has “increased confidence” that the first of its smartphone devices to run on the Windows Phone platform will ship by the fourth quarter, the company said on Tuesday.

Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop is putting his full weight behind getting a Windows Phone-based product out for the important end-of-year holiday shopping season, in order to help turn around the company’s smartphone fortunes. The company’s teams are aligned around that goal, he said in a statement.

The company won’t reveal ship dates until closer to when the first phones arrive, but the pressure is on to deliver the devices this year, Elop said when the company announced its first quarter results.

Nokia will have several more opportunities to divulge more information shortly. On June 21, Elop will give a presentation at the Connection 2011 Conference, which is organized in conjunction with CommunicAsia 2011 in Singapore. He will give an update on the company’s partnership with Microsoft, and set the stage for a number of product and service launches, according to the program.

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