Posted on March 4, 2011, at 8:13 PM .
It looks like RIM is already moving to make the developer registration process easier because they have already began changing the requirements for submitting apps to App World. All of this is because of the rant posted by Jamie Murai, which is strange considering how much these issues have already been raised in the forums and on various blogs. If anything, RIM should take this as a cue to be more attentive to the forums and the needs of developers, rather than waiting for one blog post to go viral and blow up the issue.
Whereas developers used to have to fill out an identification form, take it to be notarized with government ID and then return it to RIM, this process is now greatly simplified. According to the email that RIM sends developers:
Previously we required Individuals to provide us with a notarized document to validate their identity. While this is still an option, we will now begin accepting a scanned copy (front and back) of any official Government Issued Identification. This document must clearly show your Full Name and Date of Birth.
Here is a copy of the email that RIM sends to developers:
Continue reading ‘RIM No Longer Requires Notary and Allows Devs to Scan and Send ID’
Posted on March 4, 2011, at 5:30 PM .
RIM’s chief marketing officer, Keith Pardy, has just resigned, citing “personal reasons” for his departure. The resignation is terrible timing as RIM is in a critical phase for marketing as the company launches its first tablet and begins a transition to a QNX OS. Even though the resignation may have nothing to do with events at the company, the resignation doesn’t bode well considering how much marketing is needed in the coming months. Apparently Pardy will stay on for the next 6 months to help transition in somebody new. Hopefully the new marketing officer will do a great job of promoting the “new” BlackBerry.
Posted on March 4, 2011, at 2:27 PM .
Stephen Bates, the UK managing director at RIM, was interviewed about a variety of topics including the PlayBook, social networking, NFC and more. Like most interviews with a RIM exec, you don’t get much out of them, and their answers always have a heavy PR spin, but there’s some interesting points nonetheless.
Continue reading ‘Stephen Bates, RIM UK Managing Director, Talks Social Networking, NFC and PlayBook’
Posted on March 3, 2011, at 6:39 PM .
BlackBerry Protect is a pretty cool service that lets you backup your contacts, SMS, calendar items, bookmarks and more in the cloud. The service also helps you find your BlackBerry if it’s stolen by tracking its location and giving you a web portal. During the beta, the web portal became inaccessible and the URL was overly complicated, but hopefully a lot of this has been fixed for the official release. The official release is potentially slated for March 5th in North and Latin America, and April 2nd for Asia Pacific.
Posted on March 3, 2011, at 6:25 PM .
Rumor has it that RIM will be opening BlackBerry Messenger to Android and iOS. It’s not clear what their strategy is, but it looks like they might offer a watered-down version of BBM to other platforms, with more features like video and picture sharing available only to BlackBerry users, or for a fee. In general, the move makes a lot of sense because it would allow all smartphone users to communicate with each other without using SMS. The “Messenger” app would be a huge success but it would be strange for RIM to charge anything for this service. With respect to RIM’s total revenues, whatever money the messenger app would generate would be insignificant compared to device sales. If the strategy was to leverage messenger to sell more devices, that might be more fruitful for the company.
Read more about the rumor here.
Posted on March 2, 2011, at 7:24 PM .
RIM has made some updates to its GitHub open source projects. Both the Individual Contributor Agreement and the Corporate Contributor Agreement to the BlackBerry WebWorks Open Source Software Project have been added, which allows the community to participate in the contribution of both source code and bug fixes to the project. The company has also posted the source code to the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK and APIs for the BlackBerry Tablet OS in the project. Lastly, RIM has updated the list of new APIs that the team is currently developing for the BlackBerry platform. We’ll be keeping an eye on this list to see if there’s anything new and exciting opening up for developers in the near future.
Read more over at RIM’s Developer Blog.
