RIM Says Subscriber Base Grew

Research in Motion offered investors a glimmer of hope on Tuesday, announcing a surprise jump in subscriber numbers that sent its shares up 5 percent, even as the embattled BlackBerry maker worked hard to drum up enthusiasm for its new BB10 devices.

Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM, once a pioneer in the smartphone arena, has rapidly lost market share in North America to Apple’s snazzier iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy devices.

RIM is now attempting to reinvent itself through the launch of new line of totally revamped smartphones that will run on the new BlackBerry 10, or BB10, operating system. In an attempt to create a buzz around the new devices, RIM gave developers at a gathering Tuesday in San Jose, California, a sneak peek at the smartphone and its features.

At the event, the company also announced that its BlackBerry subscriber base has risen to 80 million from the 78 million it reported earlier this year, surprising many on Wall Street and sparking a jump in the company’s beleaguered share price.

In recent months, RIM has been completely focused on the launch its new line of revamped devices. In the meantime, its aging line-up of smartphones in the market have struggled to compete against the recently launched iPhone 5 and a slew of new Android devices. Most analysts had expected RIM to begin losing subscribers in the recently ended quarter, for the first time in its history.

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RIM, Microsoft Sign Patent Licensing Deal

Research In Motion’s shares jumped on Tuesday after it inked a patent licensing deal with Microsoft Corp to use one of the technology company’s file storage systems.

Microsoft said the patent being licensed by RIM greatly expands the size of files that flash memory devices can handle and increases the speed at which those files can be accessed. The technology also provides the ability to seamlessly transfer data between a variety of different devices.

“This is potentially money out of RIM’s coffers for the right to use the ex-FAT patent in its technology. But what it does for investors and others is provide a glimpse into what the BlackBerry 10 devices can do,” said Kevin Restivo, a mobile device analyst at global research firm IDC.

RIM has seen its once dominant position in the smartphone market slip away to Apple Inc, Samsung and other competitors, and the company’s fate may depend on the success of its new line of devices, the BlackBerry 10, which is set to hit the market early in 2013.

RIM hopes the BlackBerry 10 will help it regain market share that has been ceded to snazzier devices such as Apple’s iPhone and others that run on Google Inc’s Android operating system.

“I think there is some anticipation and speculation around the devices that RIM will launch as a result of the announcement today,” Restivo said.

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Windows 7 Most Used OS

Windows 7 is now the leading operating system (OS) for PCs, according to figures from web traffic analysis firm Statcounter.

The report claims that in June more than half of all internet connected PCs, or 50.2 per cent, ran Microsoft’s most recent Windows 7 OS.

Statcounter’s statistics show that Windows XP was the next most popular operating system, used by 29.9 per cent of users.

This might be the first time that Windows 7 has had more market share than the other operating systems put together, but with the launch of Windows 8 looming, it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft will begin pushing Windows 7 users to make the switch to its next operating system.

That’s already started happening with XP. Launched back in 2001, the OS was a massive hit for the software giant and for this reason it’s finding it hard to wean users away from Windows XP – especially considering how rubbish Windows Vista was. However, Microsoft has said that it’s time to move on, and it will end business support for Windows XP in the next two years.

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Is It “Game Over” For RIM?

Research In Motion’s share price on Monday fell to less than $10 on Nasdaq, a breach that technical analysts say could prompt even further declines, after an analyst warned that the BlackBerry maker’s sales were dismal last month.

The stock, which is trading at its lowest since 2003, has fallen nearly 15 percent in the past week alone.

After an announcement last week that RIM expects to post a quarterly operating loss, sentiment is extremely bearish on the stock, said Elvis Picardo, a strategist at Global Securities in Vancouver.

To make matters worse, Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette said in a note to clients on Sunday that RIM sales deteriorated further in May.

On Monday, RIM’s shares fell 5.8 percent to $9.66 on the Nasdaq, while its Toronto-listed shares closed on Monday 6.1 percent lower at C$10.03.

“You would have expected the C$10 level to have provided pretty strong support, but if it cracks through that it’s really hard to say where this decline will stop,” said Picardo.

RIM, which almost invented the concept of on-the-go email with its first BlackBerry device in 1999, has seen its once dominant position fade in the face of competition from Apple Inc’s iPhone and devices from the likes of Samsung Electronics Co using Google Inc’s Android software.

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Is B.Y.O.D Proving To Be A Headache?

IT managers trying to cope with the growing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend can expect to see an explosion in the number of smartphones and tablets used by employees in the next few years.

As a result, IT shops won’t be able to provide the security necessary to protect company data, says Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney.

“The number of devices coming in the next few years will outstrip IT’s ability to keep the enterprise secure,” he said, adding that IT workers are “going crazy” and “get into fights” over whether users should have upgrades.

To help IT cope, software vendors should create what Dulaney called “beneficial viruses” that could be embedded in corporate data carried on mobile devices. These software tools would require users to have licenses in order to access files, just as digital rights management technology does with music and video files.

Beneficial viruses would also “be smart enough” to delete the sensitive data if a device is lost or stolen, or if data winds up on an unauthorized device, Dulaney said, adding, “It’s time for the SAPs and Oracles to begin thinking about doing that, and it’s a lot harder than we think.”

Today, IT shops use mobile device management software to monitor which mobile users are authorized to access applications and whether they can access the data outside the corporate cloud.

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Cisco Hits 50 Million Milestone For Its IP Phones

Cisco Wednesday announced Wednesday that it has sold its 50 millionth IP phone, a significant increase in just two years when 30 million were sold.

The switching technology giant today also said it will make software for presence, instant messaging and Cisco Jabber IM clients available for free to its Unified Communications Manager customers.

The latter move means organizations with UCM can roll out presence and IM to employees simply and cheaply to smartphones and tablets running various operating systems, Barry O’Sullivan, senior vice president of Cisco’s voice technology group, said in a blog post.

The supported OSs include Windows, Mac, iPad, Cisco Cius, iPhone, BlackBerry and, later in 2012, Android, O’Sullivan said.

The move helps companies “deploy a unified communications client that is BYOD-ready,” he added. BYOD refers to Bring Your Own Device, a trend where companies allow workers to use devices of their choosing to connect to company data wirelessly.

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RIM Goes Non-BlackBerry

Research In Motion on Tuesday launched software that will allow its large “enterprise” customers to manage Apple and other rival devices through the same servers as they use for the BlackBerry smartphone and Playbook tablet.

The new Mobile Fusion software, first announced in November, is an acknowledgement of sorts by RIM of a growing preference by many users inside big corporations and government to access professional communications over their personal devices, often the Apple iPhone or iPad, or devices running Google’s Android.

RIM, which long dominated the so-called enterprise market, has watched the BlackBerry’s market share steadily erode in recent years. Unable to arrest the trend, the company now aims to generate a fresh revenue stream from it. Mobile Fusion will cost $99 per user to license and $4 per user a month, with discounts available for bulk orders.

In a second announcement on Tuesday that highlights RIM’s eroding market position, it said its PlayBook tablet now boasts 15,000 applications – still just a tiny fraction of the number available on the iPad. One of the biggest complaints about RIM’s products is the dearth of content and applications.

A recent survey from Appcelerator and IDC showed less than 16 percent of developers were “very interested” in creating programs for RIM, compared with 90 percent for Apple and 80 percent for Android.

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Corporate America Prefers iPads

Corporate customers who are planning tablet purchases next quarter overwhelmingly picked Apple’s iPad, a research firm said Tuesday.

Of the 1,000 business IT buyers surveyed last month by ChangeWave Research who said they would purchase tablets for their firms in the coming quarter, 84% named the iPad as an intended selection.

That number was more than ten times the nearest competitor and was a record for Apple.

“The percentage reporting they’ll buy Apple iPads has jumped to the highest level of corporate iPad demand ever seen in a ChangeWave survey,” the company said in a blog post.

Apple’s share of future business purchases has never been lower than 77% in any ChangeWave survey, which go back to November 2010.

Just over a fifth of all IT buyers — 22% — confirmed that they would be purchasing tablets for employees in the April-June quarter, ChangeWave said.

While Apple’s stock among corporate buyers rose by seven percentage points from the 77% that tapped the iPad as their preferred device last November, all other tablet makers’ numbers dropped in the most recent survey.
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Remote Access Tools Threatens Smartphones

Malware tools that allow attackers to gain complete remote control of smartphones have become a major threat to owners around the world, security researchers say.

In a demonstration at the RSA Conference 2012 here Wednesday, former McAfee executives George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, who recently founded security firm CrowdStrike, installed a remote access tool on an Android 2.2-powered smartphone by taking advantage of an unpatched flaw in WebKit, the default browser in the OS.

The researchers showed an overflow audience how the malware can be delivered on a smartphone via an innocuous looking SMS message and then be used to intercept and record phone conversations, capture video, steal text messages, track dialed numbers and pinpoint a user’s physical location.

The tools used in the attack were obtained from easily available underground sources, Kurtz said. The WebKit bug, for instance, was one of 20 tools purchased from hackers for a collective $1,400.

The remote access Trojan used in the attack was a modified version of Nickispy a well-known Chinese malware tool.

Learning how to exploit the WebKit vulnerability and to modify the Trojan for the attack, was harder than expected, said Kurtz. He estimated that CrowdStrike spent about $14,000 in all to develop the attack.

But the key issue is that similar attacks are possible against any smartphone, not just those running Android, he said.

WebKit for instance, is widely used as a default browser in other mobile operating systems including Apple’s iOS and the BlackBerry Tablet OS. WebKit is also is used in Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers.

Several mobile remote access Trojans are already openly available from companies pitching them as tools that can be used to surreptitiously keep tabs on others.

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Big Boys Sign Consumer Privacy Pact

Six of the world’s top consumer technology companies have agreed to provide greater privacy disclosures before customers download applications in order to protect the personal data of millions of consumers, California’s attorney general said on Wednesday.

The agreement binds Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Hewlett-Packard — and developers on their platforms — to disclose how they use private data before an app may be downloaded, Attorney General Kamala D. Harris said.

“Your personal privacy should not be the cost of using mobile apps, but all too often it is,” said Harris.

Currently 22 of the 30 most downloaded apps do not have privacy notices, said Harris. Some downloaded apps also download a consumer’s contact book.

Google said in a statement that under the California agreement, Android users will have “even more ways to make informed decisions when it comes to their privacy.”

Apple confirmed the agreement but did not elaborate.

Harris was also among U.S. state lawmakers who on Wednesday signed a letter to Google CEO Larry Page to express “serious concerns” over the web giant’s recent decision to consolidate its privacy policy.

The policy change would give Google access to user information across its products, such as GMail and Google Plus, without the proper ability for consumers to opt out, said the 36 U.S. attorneys general in their letter.

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