Tag: blackberry

SEC investigates Blackberry deals

Posted on February 6, 2015 by - News

watchdogWatchdogs  for the US Securities and Exchange Commission are snuffling around the rump of a January 14 spike in trading in BlackBerry options that took place hours before Reuters reported that Samsung Electronics was in talks to buy the Canadian smartphone maker.

One trade took place at 12:06 p.m. on that day, when there was a purchase of options with the rights to buy 200,000 shares of BlackBerry stock at a strike price of $10 a share.

In the afternoon, Reuters reported that Samsung had offered to buy BlackBerry for as much as $7.5 billion, valuing its stock at between $13.35 to $15.49 per share.

BlackBerry’s stock shot up 30 percent on the news meaning that someone was laughing all the way to the bank. If the buyer had been able to sell the options at that high they would have been able to make a profit of $490,000 on a $20,000 investment.

Both companies later denied they were in talks and BlackBerry’s shares tumbled. Reuters subsequently corrected its story to make clear that the discussions were between advisors.

Blackberry denies Samsung buy out

Posted on January 15, 2015 by - News

 blackberry-juicerBlackberry has moved to dismiss claims that it is about to be bought by Samsung.

The source of the rumours was Reuters which claimed that a deal was close and Samsung was  ready to make an offer that John Chen and BlackBerry’s board may be reluctant to refuse. Samsung is willing to pay roughly $7.5 billion for BlackBerry’s assets – including its patent portfolio – Reuters claimed.

Apparently Samsung became interested in Blackberry two months after the two companies entered a strategic partnership to bring BlackBerry’s BES12 cross-platform EMM solution to Galaxy smartphones and tablets that feature embedded KNOX technology. At the time, the two companies indicated that they were looking forward to future ventures together.

The move seems all logical, but it is not quite, but completely and utterly untrue claimed Blackberry.

In a statement the company said it was aware of certain press reports published today with respect to a possible offer by Samsung to purchase BlackBerry.

“BlackBerry has not engaged in discussions with Samsung with respect to any possible offer to purchase BlackBerry. BlackBerry’s policy is not to comment on rumours or speculation, and accordingly it does not intend to comment further,” the phone maker said.

Lenovo in talks to buy Blackberry

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

ripeunripeChinese telecom gear maker Lenovo is in talks to buy Lenovo and is expected to offer the company $15 a share later this week.

Lenovo and BlackBerry refused to comment and this is not the first time that the two have been rumoured to be involved in a tie up.

Senior Lenovo executives have indicated an interest in BlackBerry as a means to strengthen their own handset business. Last year, when BlackBerry said was exploring strategic alternatives, Lenovo was named as an obvious buyer.

The Canadian government put the brakes on any deal when it announced that any sale to Lenovo would not win the necessary regulatory approvals due to security concerns. At the time, the Canadian government had swallowed the US Cool aid which stated that Chinese companies were turning over data to their government through secret spyware. In fact, US companies were turning over data to their government.

BlackBerry’s secure networks manage the email traffic of thousands of large corporate customers, along with government and military agencies across the globe. Under Canadian law, any foreign takeover of BlackBerry would require government approval under the Industry Canada Act.

Analysts also say any sale to Lenovo would face regulatory obstacles, but they have suggested that a sale of just BlackBerry’s handset business and not its core network infrastructure might just sneak past the regulators.

BlackBerry was believed to want to off-load its handset business, even as the arm turned a profit before special items in the last quarter.

BlackBerry chief executive officer John Chen has said in the past he sees the handset business as core to the company for now, as it will foster sales growth over the next few quarters until the software and services business begins to generate new revenue streams in the first half of 2015.

Blackberry loses $207 million

Posted on September 26, 2014 by - News

blackberry-juicerThere’s still a way to go for Blackberry even though it launched a new smartphone earlier this week.

The company turned in a loss of $207 million for its second financial quarter.  That’s way less than the $965 million it made in the same quarter last year.

The Canadian company said revenues for the quarter amounted to $916 million – with 46 percent representing hardware, 46 percent services, and eight percent for software and other sales.

Blackberry shifted 2.4 million smartphones to end users and cut down its channel inventory.

John Chen, CEO and chairman of the company said: “We delivered a solid quarter against our key operational metrics and we are confident we will achieve break even cash flow by the end of financial year 2015. “Our workforce restructuring is now complete.”

It said it hoped to maintain its strong cash position in the future and will look for opportunities to “prudently invest in growth”.

Blackberry goes square with Passport design

Posted on September 24, 2014 by - News, Products

blackberry-juicerMobile phone company Blackberry officially released its Passport device, which has a square touch screen and a touch enabled QWERTY keyboard.

It said the unit follows the design of real passports.

The device uses Corning Gorilla Glass 3 for the display and stainless steel to make it that bit more rugged.

The screen is 4.5-inches square using a 1:1 aspect ratio and a 1440 x 1440 pixel HD display. It has 32GB of storage and a 13 megapixel camera.

The keyboard lets you perform touch functions on the keyboard, scroll web pages, and leaving the full screen space for viewing.

It comes with Blackberry 10.3 operating system along with Amazon Appstore and Blackberry Blend.blackpass

It claims that it has long battery use – and for a very active user provides up to 30 hours of life.

The unit comes with speakers and a quad microphone system/  It’s available now, worldwide.

BlackBerry buys a UK company

Posted on September 12, 2014 by - News

blackberry-juicerMobile manufacturer BlackBerry said it has bought a UK company Movitu. Financial details of the transaction weren’t revealed.

Movitu makes so called virtual identities for mobile operators that lets many numbers to be active on a single device.

BlackBerry said this help device management for bring your own device (BYOD) and corporate environments.

The Movitu Virtual SIM platform lets business numbers and personal numbers be used on the same device with separate billing for voice, for data and for messaging.

The advantage is that employees can use the same phone for both company business and their own personal use.

The Virtual SIM capabilities will be offered by BlackBerry through mobile operators for all main smartphone operating systems, including Android, iOS and Windows.

Blackberry turns back on phones

Posted on August 19, 2014 by - News

ripeunripeThe other fruity company which once had the world in the palm of its hand, Blackberry, is now turning its back on handsets and created a new business unit that will combine some of its most brilliant ideas and patents.

Dubbed BlackBerry Technology Solutions the outfit will be headed by Sandeep Chennakeshu, the former president of Ericsson Mobile Platforms and former chief technology officer of Sony-Ericsson.

John Chen, BlackBerry’s executive chairman and chief executive officer said that by combining all these assets into a single business unit will work rather well and open new revenue streams.

Chen has already stripped out much of Blackberry’s consumer-oriented businesses, sold property and laid off employees.

Analysts say that the new unit reinforces the fact that Blackberry’s days as a handset vendor are behind it as it moves “very aggressively” toward a different business.

Blackberry has not had much luck flogging its gear in the consumer market. It could not get its products out on time and faced stiff competition from other smartphone.

Chennakeshu, who has 73 patents to his name,  is well known in the wireless, electronics and semiconductor industries.

BlackBerry Technology Solutions includes QNX, the company that BlackBerry bought and used to develop the operating system that became the platform for its new smartphones, and Certicom, a former independent Toronto-area company with advanced security software.

BlackBerry Technology Solutions will also include BlackBerry’s Project Ion, which is an application platform focused on machine-to-machine Internet technology, Paratek antenna tuning technology and about 44,000 patents.

 

NSA proof phone rooted in five minutes

Posted on August 11, 2014 by - News

756px-Lu_Zhishen_Water_Margin_2The ultra secure “NSA-Proof “Blackphone was hacked in just inside five minutes during a Blackhat hacking conference.

@TeamAndIRC rooted the device without needing to unlock the bootloader and turned on ADB on the device. The vulnerability that allowed this to happen is now semi-fixed and needs the user to take action to be able to exploit the weakness.

Blackphone was made by Silent Circle and Geeksphone, and it is designed to provide a suite of secure services running on a fork of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Called PrivatOS, it is meant to provide a consumer level access to secure options that protect personal data from being leaked to third parties.

It was dubbed as “nsa proof” by her Majesty’s loyal press mostly as what passes for humour in such circles, because it came out after the Snowden affair.

Still its ironic that yet again even the most secure of Android phones are susceptible to the inherent to Android OS which was never built with security in mind.

Blackberry and Blackphone have been scrapping over which one is the most secure.  BlackBerry, sniffed that Blackphone was okay for the average Joe and plain Jane, but“unacceptable” for enterprise and pretty customers. The reason was that Blackberry could protect the whole of the communication because it controlled the network, while the Blackphone could only look after the client end.

@TeamAndIRC assures everyone that it will be working out how to prove that Blackberry is just as bad and will get onto it right now.

 

 

 

 

 

Blackberry crush over

Posted on August 5, 2014 by - News

blackberry-juicerThe long and painful restructuring of Canada’s Blackberry mobile phone outfit is officially over.

According to an internal memo, spotted by Reuters. BlackBerry’s Chief Executive John Chen has said that the restructuring notification process and the workforce reduction that began three years ago is now behind the company.

So if your bottom is on a seat and you are reading the memo, then your job is safe for now.

Chen said that “barring any unexpected downturns in the market” Blackberry will be starting to hire staff in some areas such as product development, sales and customer service.

He thanked those who stayed with the company through the process and did not flee like rats from a sinking ship.

To give an idea of the scale of the cuts, over the last three years BlackBerry has lost 60 percent of its staff.

Chen, who took the reins at BlackBerry roughly eight months ago, has moved rapidly to stabilize the company by selling non-core assets, partnering to make the company’s manufacturing and supply chain more efficient, and raising cash through property sales.

In the memo, Chen told employees that he believes BlackBerry is now well on its way to recovery and that he is confident the company will meet its goal of being cash flow positive by the nd of the current fiscal year.

Chen stressed in the memo there was “no margin for error to complete BlackBerry’s turnaround to success,” and he called on employees to remain focused as the company rolls out an upgrade to its device management system and its new Passport and Classic devices later this year.

Don’t fear the Big Blue Apple Alliance

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

blue-appleThe glorious alliance between soft fruit Apple and Big Blue has not put the fear of Jehovah into other potential fruity alliances.

According to Reuters  top executives at Dell and BlackBerry scoffed at the deal with their best scoffing sticks.

The pair have been trying to re-invent themselves, and some of the tame Apple press claims that the glorious Apple-IBM alliance will stuff up their efforts.

John Swainson, who heads Dell’s global software business, said that the Apple-IBM made a good press release but there was nothing in it which was worth taking seriously.

Swainson, who spent over two decades in senior roles at IBM, point out that IBM reps will be unable to flog Apple gear to their client base. He said that they were rubbish at selling that sort of thing when it had an IBM logo on it, so they are going to be just as pants at trying to sell stuff with an Apple on it.

While it is true that Apple products are better marketed, Swainson said they lack the depth of security features that many large business clients like banks need.

BlackBerry Chief Executive John Chen told the Financial Times that the alliance was like when “two elephants start dancing”,

Dell and BlackBerry have declined to discuss whether they would consider teaming up, but some analysts, bankers and others have argued in the past that a partnership between the two underdogs potentially made sense.

Dell has a huge sales team, vast network of business clients and is focused on growing its security and device management capabilities which is everything that BlackBerry needs.

Android still miles ahead of iOS

Posted on February 12, 2014 by - News

googleplaycardsA report said that Google’s Android operating system is the leader of the pack for smartphone operating systems.

IDC said that it had a 39 percent share of shipments in the fourth quarter of 2013, amounting to 226.1 million units and giving it a 78.1 percent market share.

Signficantly behind was the Apple iOS, shipping 51 million units and holding a 17.6 percent share.

Next came Windows Phone, with volumes of 8.8 million units and a three percent market share. It showed the largest increase for the quarter with 46.7 percent growth in the quarter.

Blackberry held 0.6 percent of the market and saw a steep decline of 77 percent compared to the same quarter in 2012.

For the whole of 2013, the Android operating system shipped 793.6 million units out of an overall market of just over a billion units.

Daisy provides Blackberry fizz

Posted on January 21, 2014 by - Events, News

DaisyDaisy Distribution is teaming up with BlackBerry by offering a partner incentive.

Daisy’s registered partners need to accumulate points – earned by selling Blackberry10s or BES10.2 CALs.

If partners tip up at its Evolving Solutions event, they’ll get a £50 voucher which can be used to close the fist sale.

BB10s are worth two points while BES10.2 CALs notch up five.  When they get to a minimum of 50 points, the partners can cash in. And if they clock up more than 300 points during the 1st of February to the 3rd of April, they can win up to £1,000.

Evolving Solutions kicks off at Whittlebury Hall & Spa on the 23rd of January.

Android leaps ahead in smartphone sales

Posted on November 15, 2013 by - News, Products

Keep taking the tabletsA report from analyst company Gartner shows that while the Android OS has lept ahead in the third quarter of 2013, Apple’s iOS has lost share.

According to Gartner figures, Android has 81.9 percent share, iOS 12.1 percent, and Microsoft 3.6 percent.  In the same quarter last year, the figures were 72.6 percent, 14.3 percent and 2.3 percent respectively.

Gartner attributes growth of Microsoft sales to decline in the shares of other OSes – particularly Blackberry, which had 1.8 percent in Q3 2013 compared to 5.2 percent in the same period last year.

On the smartphone device front, Samsung has 32.1 percent, Apple 12.1 percent, Lenovo 5.1 percent, and LG 4.8 percent for the third quarter.

The figures for smartphones shipped for the whole year is expected to reach 1.81 billion units, up 3.4 percent from 2012. Gartner thinks that in mature markets, people will buy smaller sized tablet over replacing older smartphones.

Midland boys win Grand Prix prize

Posted on October 29, 2013 by - Events, Fun Stuff, News

grand_prixDaisy Distribution has named the two winners of a spiff it was offering on Blackberry products.

Dave Webster and Stuart Mico, who together own Midland Communications, will fly out to the Abu Dhabi F1 Grand Prix, and win five star accommodation for four nights, three day hospitality race access as well as Golden Circle entry to the post race concert.  They also get premium passes to the theme parks on Yas Island.

Daisy partners also had to complete the Blackberry 10 e-learning modules.

Julien Parven, MD at Daisy said: “The promotion proved to be a huge success, being open to our existing partners, those acquired through the recent MoCo Communications acquisition and other independent channel partners.”

Smartphones overtake feature phones

Posted on August 14, 2013 by - News

smartphones-genericSmartphone sales are up again, but growth is slowing. The worldwide market gobbled up 435 million phones in the second quarter, up 3.6 percent over the same period last year. However, worldwide smartphone sales have now reached 225 million units, up 46.5 percent from a year ago.

It was only a matter of time before smartphone shipments outpaced feature phone shipments and according to Gartner, this happened last quarter. Feature phone, or dumb phone shipments totalled just 210 million units, down 21 percent year-on-year.

“Smartphones accounted for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, resulting in smartphone sales surpassing feature phone sales for the first time,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. Asia/Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe exhibited the highest smartphone growth rates of 74.1 percent, 55.7 percent and 31.6 percent respectively, as smartphone sales grew in all regions.

Samsung still reigns supreme, with 71.4 million units shipped last quarter and a 31.7 percent market share. Apple ranks second with 31.9 million units, but it is losing market share fast. LG and Lenovo had a very good quarter, shipping 11.5 and 10.6 million smartphones respectively. ZTE ranked fifth with 9.7 million units. Nokia, HTC, Blackberry and Sony are no longer in the top five. However, the top five vendors accounted for just 60 percent of the market, while 40 percent went to smaller outfits, including an ever increasing number of Chinese white-box manufacturers.

gartner-smartphones-august2013

Gartner found that much of Samsung’s demand is now coming from mid-tier products and high-end devices with ASPs up to $400. It concluded that Samsung needs to do more to make its mid-range offering more appealing.  Oddly enough Apple also saw a dip in ASP, which is currently at the lowest level since 2007. This is the result of surprising strong sales of the iPhone 4 in some markets. Apple has recognized the trend and it plans to introduce a new, cheaper iPhone next month.

But Lenovo is the name to look out for. It’s making a killing in the dreary PC market and it’s doing even better in smartphones, although much of its effort goes unnoticed in the west. Lenovo almost doubled its share over the last 12 months and the company plans to bring its smartphones to western markets soon, possibly even next year.

Android remains the dominant operating system, with a 79 percent share, up from 64.2 percent a year ago. Apple’s iOS ranks second with a 14.2 percent share, down from 18.8 percent in Q2 2012. Microsoft gained some ground, but Windows Phone 8 still has a tiny share, 3.3 percent, up from 2.6 percent last year. Blackberry’s share halved to 2.7 percent and the Canadian company is now looking for a buyer. As with all things Blackberry, the decision comes three years too late.