Plenty of virtual ink has been spilled on Research in Motion’s fall from grace in recent years.
Plenty of virtual ink has been spilled on Research in Motion’s fall from grace in recent years. From being the undisputed king of the smartphone marketplace, especially in the corporate setting, its BlackBerry platform has since been relegated to a position as an also-ran with the emergence of Android and iOS.
As such, BlackBerry 10 – the version of the operating system that’s due out early next year – could very well be RIM’s last chance to make itself viable. To do this, the company may seek to leverage social networking as a core element of its approach, possibly looking towards the youth market as its ticket out of its quagmire.
BlackBerry Messenger Social Community Vice President TA McCann has highlighted this, saying in a Bangkok event that BlackBerry 10 aims to enhance communication, partly through its new Hub feature.
This feature will aggregate all messages, contacts from a variety of social networking services, notifications from social apps, feeds and calendar events. McCann emphasized that RIM aims to leverage the over 60 million BBM users worldwide, and that many of these users would be able to capitalize well on these features.
Adding on to the text-based BBM service, RIM aims to introduce the BBM Voice feature that would allow free voice calls over WiFi.
To address concerns about the application ecosystem, RIM has offered a 10K Developer Commitment, where it promised developers that they would make $10,000 in profit for each app in its first year – a promise underpinned by a pledge that the company will pony up the cash if they fail to do so.