The BlackBerry brand has been gaining popularity among their users through social media. Today the official count is 27.1 million fans and followers of the Inside BlackBerry blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I am a follower of BlackBerry through these channels and I find them to be a good source of BlackBerry tips and tricks.
Continue reading ‘RIM Tops 25 Million Social Media Followers of BlackBerry’
Tag: linkedin
The PlayBook is an awesome piece of hardware and one of the funnest things to do with your PlayBook, aside from playing some of the recently launched premium games, is to read. The PlayBook is novel size, making it a great reading device for news as well as eBooks. Recently launched in App World is Taptu, a news reader with a cool twist. The app brings together news from a wide variety of sources including RSS, twitter, facebook and LinkedIn. Even better, the app lest you create your own news streams with a combination of sources, allowing you to “DJ your news”. And best of all, it’s free.
Continue reading ‘Free News Reader App Taptu Lets You Create News Streams From RSS, Twitter, Facebook and More [PlayBook]‘
It has been a long time since LinkedIn announced anything for BlackBerry. Considering RIM’s client base in enterprise, you would think BlackBerry would be a priority. The last time we wrote about an update to the LinkedIn app for BlackBerry, was when it supported OS 6 over a year ago.
Continue reading ‘LinkedIn’s Touch Optimized Mobile Website is the Company’s Future’
Should companies allow their employees to use LinkedIn? By allowing your employees to use LinkedIn, you are allowing them to advertise themselves to other companies for employment, and leaving a point of contact so they can receive an offer. On the other hand, social is here to stay and you should be confident enough in your company to keep employees from being poached.
Today’s news that RIM is losing enterprise sales staff to Apple, as seen on LinkedIn, really seems to drive home the fact that a more open and social ecosystem leaves your employees open for poaching. According to the news from the WSJ, it looks like RIM has lost a number of sales staff over the past 1.5 years, including 5 recently.
These sales execs will surely have their work cut out for them. Who would want a job selling a device that is only a touchscreen to enterprise? That’s like trying to sell coffee with only an espresso available.
This past week in San Francisco I had the pleasure to attend the Open Mobile Summit held at the Marriott Marquis. This year marked the largest Open Mobile Summit with over 650 attendees from across the mobile industry. Google, Verizon, Sprint, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Samsung, Motorola, and RIM were among the speakers and panelists discussing all things mobile.
Topics that dominated discussion included 4G, mobile advertising, tablets, applications, and monetization strategies. In an effort to show some Silicon Valley presence RIM’s Tyler Lessard, VP Developer Relations and Global Alliances, attended the summit and spoke to the crowd about the virtues of BlackBerry and where it’s going. Lessard spoke about the new tablet and how it will come “enterprise ready” so that existing RIM enterprise clients will be able to immediately adopt the solutions into their businesses.
Continue reading ‘Open Mobile Summit San Francisco 2010: More on RIM’s Valley Presence’
The BlackBerry PlayBook is due to arrive in Q1 of 2011 and a lot of developers are plugging away at the SDK and thinking about what apps they’re going to build. At the BlackBerry Developer Group meeting here in Ottawa, Canada last night, we got a demonstration of the SDK by Anthony Rizk, founder of Zeebu Mobile and author of Beginning BlackBerry. The SDK looks incredibly simple and if your application is very graphics heavy (as is the case with BabyGO!), then porting your app to the PlayBook looks like a breeze. According to Anthony, writing the BabyGO! app for BlackBerry took about 2 weeks of development time, compared to about 4 hours for the PlayBook. Also, this 4 hours includes learning how to use the Flash tools which he had never used before.
But will BabyGO! be the type of app that users will be looking for when the PlayBook launches? Consider this: the PlayBook is launching after Christmas when most consumers who are interested in a tablet will have already purchased one. Those who are going to pick up a tablet will most likely be in enterprise, since it’s BES ready and a lot of employees who were normally locked out of the tablet market due to IT policies, will be able to bring their PlayBook on the network and start playing. A lot of these devices will still be locked down and in some organizations they may not be able to use any apps at all. There will also be a huge segment of users who don’t care about the iPad and are waiting for a PlayBook because they know their gadgets and they’re confident they’re buying a superior product.
Continue reading ‘What Apps Are Going to Perform Well on the BlackBerry PlayBook?’
