With its share of the U.S. smartphone market now at 54 percent, Research In Motion announced a series of new initiatives poised to increase its dominance in the segment, highlighted by an agreement with social networking giant MySpace to develop an integrated MySpace Mobile experience customized for BlackBerry devices. During his keynote appearance Thursday at the CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment event in San Francisco, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie also announced a new partnership with Microsoft to launch Live Search optimized for the BlackBerry platform, as well as an agreement with digital video recording solutions provider TiVo to introduce customized wireless TiVo services. "It's important to create an environment where you support diverse messaging [services]," Balsillie said. "We're now seeing a convergence of the four screens--your cell phone, your home phone, your home Internet and your home content."
MySpace for BlackBerry, launching in October, integrates MySpace's primary social networking components (e.g., messaging, status and mood updates, and photo management) with the BlackBerry platform to provide instant, push-based messaging to BlackBerry and MySpace users. RIM will also introduce a BlackBerry community page on MySpace for users to access the latest BlackBerry smartphone news, content, videos, games, ringtones, skins and related features. Balsillie cited a recent eMarketer forecast that anticipates more than 800 million people worldwide will access social networks via mobile devices by 2012, up from 82 million in 2007. "When you change access to information, you change your relationship to it," Balsillie said.
Research In Motion's partnership with TiVo will enable BlackBerry users to wirelessly browse television schedule guides and program recordings--according to Balsillie, the two firms plan to eventually introduce software applications that further expand mobile access to video content, including caching programming directly on the device. RIM will also team with Microsoft to integrate the software goliath's Live Search apps into the BlackBerry Browser and BlackBerry Maps service, enabling contextual, location-sensitive searches or information on nearby points of interest. Another upcoming partnership will pair RIM with concert ticketing provider TicketMaster.
For more:
- read this RIM and MySpace press release
- Click here for photos of the Day Two Keynotes...
- Click here for photos of the new Pearl Flip phone...
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