"From today on, we are BlackBerry everywhere in the world," Heins said.

Heins said that Research In Motion is BlackBerry. All employees are working on BlackBerry and the brand is indentifiable only with BlackBerry. Hence, RIM, a company that has been in existence since the early 1980s, is no more. 

The company will now trade publicly as BBRY.

Stay tuned for more information from the BlackBerry 10 launch event in New York City. 

The big question, not likely to be answered at the launch event, unfortunately, is whether or not BlackBerry 10 will be RIM’s saving grace.

Yes, we will finally see the full features of BlackBerry 10. We (the assembled Technorati) will give our immediate reactions and decide whether or not either of the two new devices presented is worth your hard earned money and attention. These opinions will go a long way in creating the short-term consumer and business opinion of the viability of BlackBerry 10.

But RIM’s ultimate success (or lack thereof) with BlackBerry 10 rests not on the initial opinions of overwrought tech journalist. There are four key factors that will determine whether RIM has a chance to rebuild its company and market share:

1. Reacquiring The Enterprise Base

RIM made its money off the enterprise, starting in the C-suite and working its way to regular employees. Only later did it it fully address the consumer market. Every foundation needs have a bedrock to build upon and for RIM, that still has to be the enterprise and government. 

As such, RIM has seeded BlackBerry 10 to 120 select enterprise and government customers - including 64 of the Fortune 500 companies - with its Technical Preview Program for Enterprise. RIM also refreshed the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and has “Workplace Apps” ready for BB 10. Its BlackBerry Balance feature will be able to cordon off personal data and workplace data from each other on the device. BlackBerry 10 (and BES 10) also have received FIPS 140-2 security certification ahead of launch.

2. Robust App Ecosystem

Like it or not, apps sell smartphones. RIM has been working very hard through the last year to create a dynamic app ecosystem. It had a BlackBerry Jam World Tour designed to drum up developer interest and has incentivized developers by offering $10,000 in guaranteed revenue if an app can make at least $1,000. 

“One key driver for this is the ability to build up an ecosystem of compelling applications available for download (something they were not able to do with the Playbook launch),” said Scott Snyder, president and co-founder of app-maker Mobiquity. “Because RIM architected the BB 10 operating system to be open, there are APIs and Java-based toolsets that will make porting Android apps to BB 10 fairly easy, which could be a major help given they are unlikely to ever match the 500,000+ apps in Google Play.”

On Monday, RIM announced that its app store, BlackBerry World, will have an “extensive catalogue of songs, latest movies and TV shows” upon launch of BlackBerry 10. RIM has said that 70,000 apps will be available to BB 10 when it is released. 

The key here is not app quantity, though, it's app quality. When people buy new smartphones, they download their go-to apps for music, video, social networking, productivity, etc. RIM needs to make sure that popular, highly desired apps like Spotify, a good Facebook app (preferably built by Facebook, not RIM), Twitter, Netflix, Hulu Plus and the like are readily available at launch. Otherwise, users may find the BlackBerry 10 experience lacking no matter how good the operating system itself may be. 

Companies like ooVoo and BitTorrent have announced apps that will be available for BlackBerry 10. That is a good start, but RIM needs to make sure that most of the heavy hitters get involved. 

3. Effective Distribution

A litany of quality smartphones have died on the market because they were exclusively available via one carrier or another. The HTC One X and Nokia Lumia 900/920 are the poster children of the dangers of limited distribution. 

RIM needs to take a page out of the Samsung playbook and make BlackBerry 10 devices on every carrier it possibly can. So far the company has shown every indication that it will do just that. RIM has been testing BB 10 with hundreds of worldwide carriers since the fall of 2012 and does not have exclusivity agreements with any of them. The ability for RIM to have multiple smartphones on multiple carriers at multiple price points is key to creating product momentum in both the United States and globally. 

4. Quality Experience, Hardware, Industrial Design

The BlackBerry 10 devices cannot look and feel like bricks, the way the Nokia Lumia 920 does. Nor can they be hard to use or have software lags. They need to feel good in your hand (the way a One X or iPhone 5 do). This is Smartphone Manufacturing 101 and RIM cannot afford to fail the course.  

Can Research In Motion pull it all off? RIM is still theoretically run by smart people, and so far indications are that it just might be able to make everything work.  

Does that mean BlackBerry 10 will ultimately succeed? There are no guarantees even if RIM reaches all the milestones on this roadmap. As Nokia, Motorola, HTC and other manufacturers have already learned, the smartphone market is a hard industry in which to succeed.

The BlackBerry Enterprise Server is the spine that RIM built its robust enterprise business on over the last decade. When times were bleakest, BES was likely the savior of RIM in the enterprise and government spaces. The BES 10 upgrade integrates many specific features related to BlackBerry 10. 

• BlackBerry Balance – The ability to keep work data and personal data separate on employees BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook devices
• “Behind the firewall” - Secure access to corporate email and connectivity to applications and data
• BlackBerry World For Work – Corporate application front for BlackBerry apps in the enterprise
• New management controls
• Support for iOS and Android

Breaking Down BES 10

When you break it down to its constituent parts, BES 10 is not fundamentally different from RIM’s Mobile Fusion product announced at the end of 2011. Mobile Fusion, which was officially released in Spring 2012, brought the capability to manage iOS and Android devices from the BES environment.

“BES 10 is all about solving the needs of the mobile enterprise,” Jeff Holleran, senior director of enterprise product management at RIM said in a video accompanying the BES 10 announcement. “As we’ve looked at the trends in the industry today, we’ve got end users bringing their own devices into an organization. As an end user bring a different device in, that organization wants to be able to support that device no matter what the manufacturer is.”

BES 10 software is available for upgrade (along with a 60-day free trial) through RIM’s website. BES 10 has already received FIPS 140-2 certification, which once again shows that RIM is working behind the curve for the launch of its products. FIPS certification often takes between four and six months through the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Most products seeking FIPS certification are released to the enterprise and consumer market first, then given to NIST for review. The timing shows that RIM was ready with most of the technology stack that will encompass the full BlackBerry 10 launch in the middle of 2012. 

RIM's core BES product has come under fire from competition over recent years as the “bring your own device” trend of employees bringing their own smartphones to work has given birth to a robust mobile device and application management (MDM/MAM) industry. Samsung, Google (through Motorola’s 3LM), IBM, SAP and a host of startups have all come calling to take a piece of the BES market share. Samsung in particular would love to close in on RIM’s enterprise space and has partnered with a long list of top companies in the enterprise security space such as BoxTone, Good Technology, Fiberlink Communications, Symantec, VMWare and others.  

Is your organization still using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server? Do you plan to upgrade to BES 10? Let us know in the comments. 

At the Consumer Electronics Show this week, three executives from top cellular providers in the United States said they would carry RIM’s new BlackBerry 10 devices. That includes the big two, Verizon and AT&T, as well as fourth place T-Mobile. No word on if Sprint will carry the new BlackBerry 10 devices, but it would be surprising if the third biggest carrier in the U.S. was shut out on one of the biggest device releases of 2013. 

We have known for a while that RIM has been testing BB10 with a variety of carriers worldwide. RIM’s CMO Frank Boulben told Fierce Wireless this week that 150 carriers worldwide are testing BB10 devices and that the company is not tied into exclusivity agreements with any carrier. Boulben also said that RIM would release at least six BB10 devices this year across the globe at a variety of price points. 

On the other side of the supply chain, RIM has also worked hard with developer partners to make sure that a vibrant app ecosystem will exist for BB10 when it is officially announced on Jan. 30. Nearly 70,000 BB10 apps will reportedly be in the BlackBerry World app store when the device hits store shelves. 

Aiming For The Target

The Technorati taunted and ridiculed RIM for the delays in releasing BB10 to the world. The release has been pushed back multiple times and RIM lost out on the 2012 holiday shopping season, which happened to be the most lucrative for smartphone manufacturers in history. That hurts, no doubt about it. But, we are starting to see the benefits of waiting. RIM has loaded its shotgun and plans to take its shot at a time when it should see its fullest effect.

The shotgun metaphor is apt. RIM has certainly studied the behaviors of its top competitors and realized what works and what does not. As such, the RIM distribution strategy looks a lot more like Apple and Samsung’s than that of Nokia or HTC.

In particular, Samsung has gained massive global dominance in part through its “spray and pray” approach to smartphone distribution. Samsung releases every one of its major smartphones to all four major U.S. carriers and similar carriers around the world. That practice started with the original Samsung Galaxy S and has worked well for successive iterations of its flagship smartphones, including the “phablet” Galaxy Note. The shotgun approach has been very successful for Samsung and, to a certain extent, Apple as well. 

On the other hand, exclusivity agreements have been the bane of Nokia and HTC. Two very good phones, the Lumia 920 and the HTC One X, have been caught up in exclusivity agreements with AT&T in the U.S. and have suffered because of it. To get similar versions of those devices on other carriers, the manufacturers have had to come out completely new devices. For instance, the equivalent of the HTC One X on Sprint is the EVO 4G LTE. The One X never made it to Verizon, which went without a flagship HTC device for most of 2012 until the Droid DNA was released last November. Unique devices are by no means a bad thing, but exclusivity has slowed HTC and Nokia down and caused the manufacturers to lose ground to the faster moving, better distributed iPhones and Galaxies of the world. 

A sure death for the BlackBerry 10 would have been to come out with one or two devices and tie them directly to one carrier, like Nokia did with the Lumia 900 and 920 on AT&T. With the future of Research In Motion resting on the success of BB10, that is not a game that RIM can afford to play.

In The Hands Of The Consumer

Only one factor really threatens to derail BlackBerry 10 at this point. Research In Motion has all its ducks lined up ready to knock them down one by one. The goals have been met. But, there is no accounting for the taste of the consumer.

"We're hopeful it's going to be a good device,"  said Lowell McAdam, CEO Verizon Communications, according to Reuters. 

That is the trick. RIM can do all it wants with carrier testing, robust and diverse distribution and application ecosystems that it wants. But, if BlackBerry 10 is not any good, or if consumers perceive it to not be any good, then all of the company’s carefully laid plans will go for naught. 

Patent trolls are also deliberately provocative to produce the most amount of disruption possible. The end goal for patent trolls, however, is to line their wallets. They may think of themselves as purveyors of fine intellectual property, but they are not actually creating anything or delivering useful items to the innovation economy. Patent trolls, by definition, are Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs) – they do not practice what they preach (or litigate over). 

InterDigital: A Fine Line In The Sand

A very fine line has been drawn in the sand on what constitutes a patent troll and what does not. A company called InterDigital, an “innovator” of 3G/4G wireless solutions, straddles that line. On one hand, InterDigital has a large engineering team that works to create patentable material on wireless technology. On the other hand, InterDigital does not create anything with those patents. It doesn't build the networks, the hardware, the base stations, servers or processors. It takes its patents and attempts to license them to mobile manufacturers and when those manufacturers refuse, InterDigital sues them. 

Nokia, Samsung, RIM, ZTE and Huawei have all run afoul InterDigital in the last year. In particular, the Nokia vs. InterDigital battle has been going on for a long time and has grown contentious over the last months. Today, InterDigital brought new patent suits regarding wireless technology against Samsung, Huawei, ZTE and Nokia, alleging that products from the companies using 3G/4G technology violate InterDigital’s patents.

From the complaint:

"The wireless devices at issue operate as, for example, cellular mobile telephones (including “smart phones”), cellular PC cards, cellular USB dongles or sticks, personal computers such as laptops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets and other mobile internet devise with cellular capabilities, cellular access points or “hotspots”, and cellular modems."

Basically, this covers anything you could possibly think of that might connect to the Internet in any way using cellular connections. InterDigital proposes an import ban for the four companies for any products that allegedly violate its patents. 

This is where the line between a company looking to protect its own intellectual property and status in a marketplace and a patent troll exists. Though many patent lawsuits from the likes of Apple, Samsung, Nokia, RIM, Motorola or others in the mobile manufacturer ecosystem are looking to hurt their rivals by keeping smartphones and other devices off retail shelves, InterDigital has no such marketable product to protect. 

In other words, this looks like a shakedown. 

InterDigital threatens import bans from these manufacturers with the hopes that the companies will back down and eventually license the patents in question. RIM has already succumbed to InterDigital and extended an agreement it had with the company to cover 4G technology like LTE and LTE-Advanced. 

“[InterDigital] is a patent licensing organization, not a technology licensing operation,” said James Bessen, a lecturer at the Boston University School Of Law and an expert on NPEs. “I do know people that study trolls who do consider it a patent troll … [InterDigital] is definitely considered a non-practicing entity.”

Lawyers like Bessen are not technically supposed to use the word “troll” when defining companies that act like patent trolls. The preferred technical term is “patent assertion entity.” A variety of companies fit into this category, notably the RockStar Consortium backed by the likes of Apple and Microsoft that deals with the leftover patents from the Nortel auction. InterDigital has the fifth largest holding of patents among companies considered to be NPEs in the United States with 3,138 patents, according to PatentFreedom. Intellectual Ventures is considered the biggest troll of them all, with 15,000 – 20,000 patents held. 

Manufacturers' Drag Fishing

InterDigital and its NPE cohorts are, of course, not the only companies that make news in patent litigation these days. The biggest tech story of 2012 was the patent fight between Samsung and Apple in which a jury awarded the Cupertino-based iPhone maker $1.05 billion in damages. Another top story of the year was the Google and Oracle smack down over the use of Java in Android. Apple and HTC got into a patent dispute and we learned that Apple and Microsoft have a patent settlement in place that required no litigation from either party. Ericsson has just filed a patent claim against Samsung in the U.S. with the International Trade Commission. Nokia and Research In Motion have had their patent battles. Such a complicated web patents weave.

Would you call Apple a patent troll? Google? Some people have and will continue to do so while the lawsuits continue to fly around courts. Technically, of course, they are not considered patent trolls under the definition of NPEs. These are definitely practicing entities, putting patented technology to work in products that people can actually buy. 

Yesterday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ruled on its 19-month investigation of Google’s antitrust case. While Google escaped mostly unscathed from the unfair search practices, the FTC did come down on Google-owned subsidiary Motorola for its patent-wielding practices. Motorola (even before the Google acquisition became final) had been suing rivals using patents that were considered SEP – Standard Essential Patents. SEPs are the type of patents commonly used by many companies because the ecosystem could not function without that particular technology. Think of Wi-Fi or cellular patents and you get the idea. 

SEP patents are supposed to be licensed on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND), meaning that companies like Motorola are not supposed to use these patents to sue other companies or seek injunctions and import bans. To a certain extent, that is what Motorola was doing and the FTC put a kibosh on the practice, hoping to create a template for future patent licensing between manufacturers. 

Where Does That Leave InterDigital?

InterDigital has seven specific patents pertaining to 3G/4G technology in its most recent suit against the four major manufacturers. InterDigital could be hurt by the FTC’s ruling on Motorola’s patent practices because of the SEP nature of InterDigital’s patents. In its complaint, InterDigital says that the FRAND defense would not apply to its patents. It also says that barring devices from the four listed manufacturers would not harm competition in the U.S. because InterDigital's other licensees (which now includes RIM), "would easily meet market demand with non-infringing devices." 

Seems like a convenient argument, no? InterDigital claims it is neither subject to FRAND nor would it provide a negative impact on competition. The latter might be true if Samsung was not listed in the complaint, but the Korean mobile manufacturer is largest smartphone supplier by volume in the U.S. 

In the end, InterDigital may find the Motorola ruling from the FTC will harm its ability to litigate going forward. We will also see in 2013 how courts end up treating other NPEs, like Intellectual Ventures. 

InterDigital is clever, though. It rides that fine line between patent troll and innovator with a large research and development department. But, as Bessen put it, InterDigital still looks like a troll by any other name. 

Top image courtesy Shutterstock

The overall velocity of smartphone adoption may be starting to slow in the United States and other first world markets like Western Europe, but the rest of the world is starting to see extraordinary mobile adoption rates. For instance, according to analytics firm Flurry, China’s growth rate of iPhone and Android devices was 291% between October 2011 and October 2012. Countries like India and other populous Asian states are starting dip into the smartphone pool in force as well and the sheer magnitude of those populations will be the primary driving force in smartphone adoption over the next several years. 

The U.S. is very close to its saturation point for smartphone adoption. Nearly 181 million people in the U.S. have an iPhone or an Android and total smartphone adoption is likely near 208 million or so. If you consider that the population of the U.S. is about 315 million and a good third or so of the populous are either too young, too old or too poor to buy a smartphone, there is not much more room for smartphone adoption in the states. But, for people that do own smartphones, their use of apps and the mobile Web is increasing year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter. For instance, Flurry notes that people spend 127 minutes a day on mobile apps, an increase from 94 minutes a day in December 2011. 

2012 saw the first billion smartphones in consumers hands. The next billion is not far behind. 

In many ways, the U.S. will be a blueprint for how mobile adoption evolves in the rest of the world. More smartphones by more consumers mean more app usage and more money everywhere in the ecosystem. It is a classic case of network effects, only on a global scale. 

App Stores Boom

The biggest visual impact of the velocity of smartphone adoption across the world has been the parallel rise of app economy. 

Both Apple’s iOS App Store and Android’s Google Play have more than 700,000 apps. Amazon’s Appstore for Android recently announced 50,000 apps for its Kindle Fire devices. Windows Phone has about 100,000 apps and the recently renamed BlackBerry World has 80,000 or so, with RIM making a big push to get developers to build apps for BlackBerry 10. 

And downloads are booming. Apple has more than doubled the amount of iOS app downloads in the last year. Apple users downloaded nearly as many apps from October 2011 to September 2012 (about 17 billion) than had been downloaded from the App Store before October 2011 (about 18 billion). Google Play hit 25 billion downloads in September 2012, averaging nearly 46 million downloads a day for more a little less than a year. As Android increasingly dominates the smartphone global smartphone industry, look for Google Play to increase download volume by orders of magnitude. 

For mobile developers, this means two things: great opportunity and extreme competition. It is easier to build a mobile app than ever but it is also harder to get people to pay attention considering the sheer volume of the ecosystem. That is a problem that is not going to change any time soon.

For mobile consumers, you can find almost any type of app that you could dream of. Think of a category (food, sports, utility, dating, social … anything) and there is a plethora of apps to choose from. Discovering the app that is right for you may prove more difficult as Google Play and Apple’s App Store are a glut of apps without well defined discoverability engines. 

Tablet Wars Come To Full Scale


In 2010, we dubbed it “The Year Of The iPad.” At the time, we thought that the tablet wars would mature and 2011 would not be dominated quite so much by Apple’s signature slate. Well, we were wrong. 2011 was indeed “Year Of The iPad, But Even More So.” The iPad competitors that emerged last year turned out to be anything but, mostly because Android was perhaps not ready for prime time tablet computing. The only product that made a dent in iPad sales in 2011 was the Kindle Fire, but close inspection of that particular device shows it was more flawed than Amazon wanted you to believe. Samsung, Motorola and a variety of others released tablets last year that also failed to gain market traction.

That has all changed in 2012. In many ways, 2012 was to tablets what 2010 was to smartphones. In a two words: more and better. In 2012 we saw second (and third in some cases) iterations of tablets from manufacturers like Samsung, and Amazon make real gains against the iPad. Two major players also jumped into the tablet mainstream in 2012 with Google releasing its Nexus series of tablets (the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10) that have seen decent adoption rates. Microsoft has finally jumped into tablet wars in full force with Windows 8 and Windows RT. The market now has more quality tablet options for consumers than any time before. 

Apple has not stood still either. It released two versions of its original 9.7-inch iPad in 2012 as well as the iPad Mini in October. 

The increased competition plus Apple’s double down on the iPad led research firm IDC to increase its projection of tablet shipments for years to come. IDC increased its tablet shipment projection for 2012 by nearly five million units for the rest of the year and nearly 20 million for 2016. The market will still be led by Apple and its iPad variations but Apple's slice will decrease year after year as Android and Windows make inroads on the business and consumer side of tablet computing.

Android's Increased Dominance

The rise of Android led us to believe that 2011 was really, “The Year Of Android” in the smartphone arena. Like many trends that started in 2011, 2012 was a year where that trend became magnified. That is especially true for Android.

According to third quarter data reported by research firm IDC, Android had a 75% stranglehold on worldwide smartphone shipments. That was up from 68% in the second quarter and the 50-odd percent through most of 2011. 

Android’s strength is built from its wide base of manufacturers making many different smartphones at many different price points for many different worldwide cellular carriers. The variety has turned into Android’s biggest strength and given rise to companies like Huawei that have thrived by selling cheaper Android devices overseas. HTC, Samsung, Motorola and LG make up many of the top-market Android devices and seed versions of their smartphones to most major carriers. For instance, HTC has the Droid DNA on Verizon, the One X on AT&T and the Evo 4G LTE on Sprint. The Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II from Samsung can be found on every major U.S. carrier. It is becoming increasingly hard for competitors like Microsoft’s Windows Phone and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry to compete against the depth and breadth of Android’s offerings. 

The story is a little bit different in the United States. Among sales from the top three carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint), the iPhone is the top-selling smartphone variant, taking upwards of 60% of sales. Overall, the iPhone carries about a 50% share (when taking prepaid plans and smaller carriers into account) of the entire U.S. smartphone market. 

Looking For The Third Platform (Or Not)

Speaking of Android’s dominance (and its duopoly with Apple), the hunt to make a dent in to two behemoths' profits is on. And 2012 was a bad year for the competitors. 

Research In Motion delayed the release of its new BlackBerry 10 operating system several times in 2012. It also was forced to change the name from BBX to BlackBerry 10 (in Dec. 2011) after trademark questions. Overall, 2012 was very much a lost year for RIM in terms of sales as it spent the year liquidating much of its old BlackBerry stock to foreign markets and not releasing any new meaningful products. Since its first BlackBerry Jam developer conference in May, RIM has taken to the road to give developers a preview of BB 10 in cities across the world and develop an application base for its new platform once it is announced on January 30th, 2013. RIM may have one last gasp with BlackBerry 10. If its new operating system turns out to be a flop on the consumer market, RIM may not survive as a major player in the mobile ecosystem through the year.

2012 was supposed to be a big year for Windows Phone and Microsoft’s primary manufacturing partner Nokia. It did not materialize that way. Nokia has fallen further than RIM, especially considering it was still battling for the top of the smartphone scrap heap as recently as the beginning of 2011. According to Boston-based research firm Strategy Analytics, the third quarter saw Nokia fall out of the top three in smartphone shipments for the first time ever, all the way down to 9th place behind basically every other major smartphone maker. 

Nokia’s inability to crack the top of the smartphone consumer market did not bode well for overall Windows Phone sales. Nokia released the Lumia 900 in the U.S. in April to mixed (though mostly positive) reviews. The Lumia 920 was not viewed quite as favorably, running Windows Phone 8, though it does have interesting technology such as wireless charging and innovative Near Field Communications abilities. Consumers are simply not flocking to Windows Phone as Microsoft, Nokia and (to a certain extent, HTC) might have hoped. 

Like RIM, Windows Phone will have another shot to right the ship in 2013. But, the chances that these platforms will have to take market share from Android and iOS are running out. It takes a lot of resources to successfully build a mobile operating system and then make partnerships with manufacturing partners and then market the devices. Companies like Nokia and RIM can only keep flowing money into a losing cause for so long before there is nothing left.

On the horizon, two potential operating systems have been in development in 2012 that could have an impact in 2013: Tizen and Firefox OS. Both are HTML5-based and will heavily stress the mobile Web. Tizen is part of The Linux Foundation and is the bastard offspring of what used to be Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo from Intel and Nokia. The Linux Foundation has the backing of companies like Intel and Samsung and there is a chance a real Tizen phone may actually come to market in 2013. Firefox has been building its own operating system for mobile and will target emerging markets with cheap handsets, likely by the second half of 2013. 

Top photo courtesy Shutterstock.

Ever an organization of extremely security conscious agencies, the U.S. federal government has long preferred BlackBerries over any other choice. The combination of security and communications in conjunction with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server gave RIM unique capabilities to serve the federal government in a way that no other mobile device maker could. 

That base of support for BlackBerry in government finally started to erode in the past several years as RIM was unable to keep up with the quick iteration of new devices and touchscreen capabilities coming from Apple and Android. While many government agencies still mandated BlackBerries for their employees, more and more agencies have started to give their employees a choice, most often the iPhone. Progressive agencies like NASA moved towards both the iPhone and Android - and there have been overtures from the Department of Defense (by far the largest federal agency) and prominent contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton. 

In short, BlackBerry use among federal agencies has been declining for much the same reasons that it has among top enterprises and the consumer sector: newer, better options along with increased security and mobile management options for non-BlackBerry platforms. 

BlackBerry 10 On ICE

On Thursday, however, RIM may have notched a small victory in its quest to keep BlackBerries as the preferred smartphone of federal agencies. The Immigrations and Custom Enforcement agency (ICE) has announced that it will begin a pilot program to test RIM’s new BlackBerry 10 (BB 10) mobile operating system along with the BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES 10) starting in January 2013. 

ICE will be among the first government agencies to test BlackBerry 10, but the timing of the announcement is a little odd. Just two months ago ICE announced that it would let its employees use iPhones instead of BlackBerries. In all, about 17,000 ICE employees were being switched away from aging BlackBerries to Apple devices. 

“Our priority is to ensure that ICE and all government agencies understand the full capabilities of the new BlackBerry 10 platform and how it can help them meet their mobility needs today and in the future. We are confident that they will be impressed by what they see and how BlackBerry 10 can help them develop new opportunities, improve service delivery and fully leverage the potential of mobile communications. We look forward to continuing our long-standing relationship with ICE and other global government organizations,” said Scott Totzke, senior vice president, BlackBerry Security, at RIM in an emailed statement to ReadWrite.

BB 10 I FIPS Certified

One big chip that RIM has in its pocket for BB 10 is that the operating system already has FIPS 140-2 (Federal Information Processing Standards) certification well ahead of its January 30th launch. RIM announced the FIPS certification in a surprise announcement in November. Normally, FIPS certification comes for an operating system or a device four to six months after the device is released as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) takes time to work through its queue of devices seeking approval to be used in the federal government. The fact that RIM already has FIPS 140-2 certification suggests that the company has had a close-to-consumer ready version of BlackBerry 10 working since at least the middle of 2012. 

The pilot program by ICE and other government agencies could well end up being very important for the future of RIM and the success of BlackBerry 10. Many large enterprises and top government contractors look towards what the federal government is doing to secure its mobile devices when making decisions on what devices they will roll out to their employees. While there are several enterprise-grade security certifications, FIPS is seen as a standard-bearer in mobile security.

RIM fully understands that it needs to take a proactive attitute to maintain its leadership position in placing BlackBerries in government employees’ hands  - if only for the potential trickle-down effect from governement agency to contractor to enterprise to consumer. The ICE pilot program is a good start. 

Top photo courtesy Shutterstock.

On Friday, analyst firm International Data Corp (IDC) released its top 10 predictions for the information technology industry for 2013. Among several data points, IDC predicts a coming reckoning for RIM and Microsoft in the mobile industry if the companies cannot generate more developer interest in their mobile platforms. 

App Developers Hold The Key

“The market power of these competing platforms – iOS, Android, Windows, and other mobile software platforms – will depend completely on the ability of each platform to attract large numbers of application (app) developers,” IDC states. 

IDC goes on to cite its quarterly report in association with mobile services company Appcelerator of developer interest for each mobile platform. Android (smartphone and tablet) and iOS (iPhone/iPad) lead the way in developer interest, while Windows (33%) and BlackBerry (9%) trail significantly. 

“IDC predicts that either of these two that fail to crack the 50% barrier [in developer interest] by the end of 2013 will be on the gradual track to demise for their platform,” the report states. “Expect some potentially radical changes to Microsoft Windows and Windows app pricing and licensing to help juice up Windows’ attractiveness to mobile app developers and mobile device users.”

How To Woo App Developers

Microsoft has long tried to encourage its developer ecosystem with various incentives, from free development tools to paying developers outright to build apps for its platform. In general, though, developers go where the eyeballs (and dollars) are - and right now that means iOS and Android. Microsoft will need a huge boost in Windows Phone sales from its primary manufacturing partners Nokia and HTC to generate any real interest from developers. Even with those challenges, Microsoft's 33% interest rate from developers for Windows 8 and related operating systems makes it much better positioned for 2013 than is Research In Motion.

RIM has spent a good portion of 2012 traveling around the world trying to rally developers to its upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform. The BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour has made stops in North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Clearly, RIM does not need to be told that the success of its new operating system will hinge directly on developer enthusiasm. 

Earlier this week, RIM rebranded its BlackBerry App World to BlackBerry World and announced several incentives for developers that move to build for the BlackBerry10 platform. In conjunction with Appcelerator, RIM is offering free BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha devices to the first 1,000 developers that submit applications for review. In addition, up to 10,000 developers will be eligible to receive one free year of Appcelerator Cloud Services and Analytics through RIM. Appcelerator has made its Titantium development platform available to BlackBerry app creators and the two companies showed off the integration this week in Bangkok, Thailand. 

RIM also recently commissioned an independent survey of developers and touts some of the findings as encouraging. For instance, RIM states that 8% of developers surveyed consider BlackBerry to be their primary development platform, a 5% increase. 

While those numbers may buoy RIM's hopes, they don't come close to satisfying IDC’s threshhold of 50% developer interest required to avoid a certain demise. We'll know soon, enough, though. BlackBerry 10 interest will likely spike at the end of January 2013 when RIM finally unveils the first smarpthones running the new operating system. 

App developers: What could incent you to build apps for BlackBerry 10 or Windows Phone? Are smartphone sales the ultimate determining factor or can RIM and/or Microsoft sway you with free services, tools or other ? Let us know in the comments. 

BlackBerry Windows "Frankenphone" artist conception by ReadWrite.

Does Wall Street know something about BlackBerry maker Research in Motion that we do not?

Last week, National Bank analyst Kris Thompson increased his stock target for RIM from $12 to $15, saying that the new BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system had a 20% to 30% chance of succeeding. On Thursday, Goldman Sachs analyst Simona Jankowski increased her 12-month price target projection for RIM to $16 from $9. Jankowski also gave BlackBerry 10 a 30% chance of succeeding. RIM’s stock was up to $11.59 (plus 6.02%) as of 3:38pm Eastern Time EST. The stock hit a high of $12.18 a share at its peak earlier in the day. 

The surprising aspect of these analyst predictions is that they have nothing to do with any financial tomfoolery. We often see stock prices rise or fall based on different accounting practices, write downs, changes in gross margins or other financial practices that take a master’s degree in finance to understand. Both these analysts seem to be basing their projections on BlackBerry 10 actually performing well in the market. 

The projections appear to be based on reported wireless carrier interest in BlackBerry 10 devices. The carriers are supposedly very interested in RIM’s new smartphones, to be announced on January 30, 2013, as a strong Number 3 contender against the iPhone/Android smartphone duopoly. RIM reportedly had 50 global carriers doing lab tests on BlackBerry 10 devices as of the end of October. (As an adide, carrier interest in a strong No. 3 smartphone option from RIM does not bode well for how the carriers think of Windows Phone 8 from Microsoft).

Something, Anything!

Fact is, RIM could release basically anything of any quality at this point, as long as it is new, and the stock price would jump. It has been more than a year since RIM last released a flagship product (if BlackBerry 7, announced in August 2011, counts as a flagship product) and BlackBerry 10 is an entirely new operating system that will not be backwards compatible to RIM's older devices. 

It is not like the analysts are not overflowing with goodwill for RIM. Both give RIM only up to a 30% chance of success with BlackBerry 10, meaning they are 70% confident that the new operating system and smartphones will fail. Only in baseball is a 30% average considered successful.

No BlackBerry 10 Devices Yet

As of yet, we have not seen a complete BlackBerry 10 device from RIM. The company has given out BlackBerry 10 “Alpha” devices to developers at its various “BlackBerry Jam” events this year in Orlando, San Francisco and currently in Asia. RIM is expected to announce at least two BlackBerry 10 devices (one with and one without a physical keyboard) in January that will be shipped by sometime in the spring quarter.

From the little we have seen of BlackBerry 10 at RIM events this year, though, there is at least some hope for the operating system and, hence, RIM’s future. Considering how long BlackBerry 10 has been delayed, though, RIM needs to ship a fully baked and refined product from the starting gun if it has any hopes of gaining continuing to compete with iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Considering how many times RIM has stumbled in the last three years, that is far from a sure thing.

But if we were to take a guess at BlackBerry 10's odds of success, something like 1 in 3 sounds about right. Maybe RIM will end up surprising us with what it will announce in January.