Shares of Research in Motion (RIMM) are up 55 cents, or 2.5%, at $22.95, as the company’s keynote progresses at RIM’s developers conference goes on in San Francisco.
(The first part of the general session is available as a Webcast replay here. Part two of the session, from the afternoon, can be viewed here.)
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Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis kicked off the show by calling last week’s service outages “unfortunate,” and reminding folks RIM is offering $100 worth of free apps for the BlackBerry. He thanked app partners, such as game developers, “for working with us on this gift,” which would suggest, I guess, the devs agreed to wave the fees for their apps.
Lazaridis moved on to an accounting of key metrics for the company: More than 70 million BlackBerry subscribers, up from 50 million a year earlier. Sold 165 million smartphones to date. 50 million BBM instant messaging users, up from 28 million a year ago. The company has seen over a billion downloads from its “AppWorld” application downloads store, with about 5 million downloads a day now.
Lazaridis then mode on to the main event, the evolution of its “QNX” software, which today runs the “PlayBook” tablet and is expected to come to the BlackBerry handhelds next year. Lazaridis said “the whole company is getting behind” the next stage, “BBX,” which he called “this single platform and single vision” comprising “open standards, and the best of BlackBerry OS.”
Lazaridis brought up QNX president Dan Dodge, who discussed the importance of “HTML5,” the Web technology standard supported not just by RIM but also by Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Adobe (ADBE), and pretty much everyone.
Dodge said HTML is “the next mass platform for applications” for developers, and Lazaridis said the company is committed to HTML5, and that “We’re leading in HTML5.”
The company then offered several demos of apps written in HTML5 running on the PlayBook.
The next version of the PlayBook will have an “enterprise” version of RIM’s AppWorld, said Alan Panezic, RIM’s head of enterprise product development. That will allow corporate CIOs to provision enterprise-friendly apps through the App store, rather than managing it through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Such apps can be “pushed” to an employees device, which Lazaridis and Panezic said would make provisioning of programs easier for CIOs.
RIM’s head of its QNX unit, Dan Dodge, said the broadly popular Web standard HTML5 was becoming the new “mass platform” for application development.
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