Trademark lawsuit leads to Blackberry’s woes

Image by Roozbeh Rokni via Flickr

Adding to the woes of Research in Motion Ltd, the Canada based manufacturers of Blackberry devices has been sued by BBM Canada for using the BBM trademark. BBM popularly known as Blackberry Messenger (BBM) is the messenger service by RIM with 50mn users’ worldwide.

However, BBM Canada which stands for Bureau for Broadcast Measurement, a broadcast and audience measurement organisation has expressed the trademark infringement citing that it has been in operations longer than RIM. BBM Canada was established in 1944 much before RIM’s messenger service came into existence. Though, Bureau for Broadcast Measurement started using the shorthand of its name BBM only since 2001.

RIM has been known to spend a considerable amount advertising its BBM services and such a suit if settled against it could lead to losses. Earlier in the month, a US court had forced Research in Motion to change the name of its new operating system, which was originally called BBX. BBX has now been renamed to ‘BlackBerry 10.’

It has been possibly the worst year Research in Motion Ltd with several lows. RIM was threatened to be banned from countries like Indonesia and India for non-compliance with government policies and refusing to share encrypted data services provided on Blackberry mobile phones.

After a recent warning last week regarding the delay in the launch of new Blackberry device which is now scheduled to arrive only in the latter half of next year, RIM’s shares had plummeted to a multi-year low. RIM is not doing good sales and is facing tough competition from Apple’s iPhone and other Android based devices. Rim has also shed about $30bn in value this year so far and has been facing problems due to over production of Playbook tablets which amounted to $485million as surplus inventory. The prolonged network outages during October in Europe, Middle East and Africa had played its part in dipping consumer confidence in Blackberry’s ability to provide a seamless service.

This article of mine was originally published in Daily Post. You can access it here

Google’s Android touches 700,000 activations every day

Android

The interest in Android based mobile phones and tablets has been growing and according to a recent update by Google’s mobile chief Andy Robin, there are now 700,000 daily activations on the platform each day. The update was made on Google+, a social network launched by Google in July 2011.

The hike is explosive growth for Google promoted operating system which was pegged at 550,000 devices by Google chairman Eric Schmidt at a Le Web conference held in Paris two week back.

In his public update on Google+ Andy further mentioned that “…and for those wondering, we count each device only once (i.e. we don’t count re-sold devices), and “activations” means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service.”

According to http://www.9to5google.com, a web resource on Google, “to put it in perspective, 700,000 devices a day is almost 5 million every week, or 21 million a month, or over a mind-boggling 250 million a year.”  These figures play a fast catch up to Apple’s iPhone which sold 4mn iPhone 4S within the first week of its launch.

It should be noted here that Apple’s generates bulk of its revenue through the sale of iPhones and ipad leading to iOS activations. However, Android is installed on various mobile and tablet devices through various vendors like HTC and Samsung reaching low cost emerging markets selling products at a cheaper rate compared to Apple’s iOS enabled services.

Google has been aggressively promoting Android and trying to fill in the void left after its mentor Steve Job’s demise. Andy Robin during a AsiaD conference held last week had remarked, “…the DNA in the people walking the halls at Apple is a very powerful combination of the arts and computer science, and I don’t think that’s changed with Steve’s passing. That combination of creativity and computer science, it’s still there. Apple will certainly miss Steve’s leadership, but now it’s time for the other guys to step up.”

Experts on the blogosphere believe that if Android is able to sustain the growth rate then daily activations by the end of next year could touch 2.5 million a day, amounting to at least 900 million activations a day. However, Google may not be making much money out of Android activations as they are routed through third party vendors, meanwhile Apple makes a healthy margin of more than 30% on its activations and sales.

This article of mine was originally published in Daily Post. You can also access it here

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Android is not a copy of iPhone: Schmidt

Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman did some straight talk during the Le Web conference held at Paris earlier this week. In conversation with Loïc Le Meur, founder of Seesmic, he made some startling predictions.

Addressing the issue of Google TV he said, “By the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see will have Google TV embedded in it. A similar strategy to what we did with Android. The price is free from Google, so you are only paying for the television.”

Not shying from being aggressive and in sync with Google’s much loved Android platform Eric said, “Android is ahead of the iPhone now… based on unit volume, price is lower, more vendors, it’s free. ”

The friction between Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS has been legendary. Steve Jobs the CEO of Apple who recently passed away is said to have strong contempt for the Android which he considered as a ‘stolen product.’ Though Eric made it clear that he doesn’t feel the same and strongly disputed the claim that Android is a copy of iPhone. “Android was founded before iPhone,” he said.

This would not have been music to Steve Jobs’s ears, who in his biography written by Walter Isaacson through a series of exclusive interviews and released shortly after his demise expressed contempt for Android.

The book had quoted Jobs, “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.” During a meeting between Schmidt and Jobs, the latter is said to have told Schmidt, “I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.”

No doubt Google has been aggressively working towards ‘social, local and mobile’ features to make Android a market leader. “We spend time in the social world, mobile first is almost the answer to every question with best engineering going to mobile apps.. and we live in a local context,” Eric said at Le Web.  “The internet revolution is creating more jobs, its creating new markets for existing businesses. The government has to make sure that the citizens get access to broadband,” Eric added.

While discussing other issues Eric talked about the role of  technology and how it has come to the aid of masses and played its part in the Arab revolution referring to Egypt in particular he said, “It is much easier now to start a revolution, it’s harder to finish it… its easy now to mobilise a society but that does not produce the leader to replace the current leader.”

Le web brings together the most influential audience in the Internet ecosystem with 2500 entrepreneurs, leaders, investors, bloggers, and journalists engaging in conversations. The full length of the video hosted on Le Web’s YouTube channel can be accessed below

Above is the full version of my article on Eric Scmidt’s interview at Le Web 2011, originally published at Daily Post. You can also read it here

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A billion HTML5 phones will be sold in two years

Image via CrunchBase

The sale of global HTML5 phones is set to raise to  one billion units by 2013 from 336 million units in 2011. The forecast has been made by Strategy Analytics, a global consultancy on the future of HMTL5 capable mobile phones which expects a surge of 365 per cent between 2011 and 2016.

According to the official release from the company ‘HTML5 has quickly become a high-growth technology that will help smart phones, feature phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, television and vehicles to converge through cloud services.’

According to Neil Shah, Analyst at Strategy Analytics, has been quoted in the report, saying that “we forecast worldwide HTML5 phone sales to surge from 336 million units in 2011 to one billion in 2013. The growth for HTML5 phones is being driven by robust demand from multiple hardware vendors and software developers in North America, Europe and Asia who want to develop rich media services across multiple platforms, including companies like Adobe, Apple, Google and Microsoft. We define an HTML5 phone as a mobile handset with partial or full support for HTML5 technology in the browser, such as the Apple iPhone 4S.”

The consultancy considers HTML5 to play a pivotal role in the emergence of technology for ‘mobile operators, device makers, car manufacturers, component vendors and Web application developers’. HTML5 has been hailed as potentially capable of ‘transcend some of the barriers faced by native applications, such as cross-platform usability, HTML5 is a market that no mobile stakeholder can afford to ignore.’

The six major regions for which the forecast has been done include North America, Central & Latin America, Western Europe, Central & Eastern Europe, Africa Middle East and Asia Pacific.

In an earlier report, ABI Research had reported that by 2016 there would be more than 2.1 billion devices empowered with HTML 5 in comparison to 109 million in 2010. These research forecasts would give an impetus to companies like Abode which last month announce that the company would discontinue the use of flash for mobile stating that ‘HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively.  This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.’

Apple for long has dissuaded the use of Flash for iOS that has driven developers towards HTML5 use, which has also contributed towards wide adaptation of HTML5. ‘

Thomas Kang, Director at Strategy Analytics, suggested caution when it comes to HTML5. ‘Despite surging growth of HTML5 phone sales, we caution that HTML5 is still a relatively immature technology. HTML5 currently has limited APIs and feature-sets to include compared with native applications on platforms such as Android or Apple iOS. It will require several years of further development and standards-setting before HTML5 can fully mature to reach its potential as a unified, multi-platform content-enabler,’ Thomas was quoted.

Above is my article originally published in Daily Post on Oct 7, 2011, view it here

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