o2 To Build Europe's Largest Free WiFi Zone In London

Operator to offer free Wi-Fi access across London boroughs of Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea in time for the 2012 Olympic games

O2 is working with two London councils to build Europe’s largest free Wi-Fi zone ahead of the London Olympics.

The operator is installing Wi-Fi access points in street furniture across the London boroughs of Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea.

Wi-Fi access will initially be rolled out to a small number of areas, but will eventually be expanded to cover the entirety of both boroughs.

Neither the councils nor the taxpayer are paying for setting up or running the Wi-Fi zone.

O2 chief operating officer Derek McManus said: “This ground-breaking deal is the first of its kind in the UK and will see us deliver high quality connectivity across London in time for London 2012.

“Our longer-term aim is to expand our footprint of O2 Wifi, which is open to everyone, and also intelligently enhance our services at street level, where people need the network the most.

“Our £500m annual network investment programme is focussed on integrating new layers of technology into the existing network to enable a seamless and sustained customer experience.”

Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea deputy leader and cabinet member for environment Cllr Nicholas Paget-Brown said: “I am very pleased that we have been able to come to this agreement and we look forward to working with O2.

“Residents and visitors having free access to the latest mobile technology will help us to continue to offer value for money for residents.”

Westminster City Council cabinet member for strategic finance Cllr Philippa Roe said: “Westminster welcomes over a million tourists a day, is home to 250,000 residents, employs over half a million people and sees 4,000 business starts-ups each year.”

“Next summer’s Olympic Games mean that London will be putting on the biggest show on earth and as Westminster has a starring role, visitors to London will easily be able to share their pictures and updates of the Olympic events across social networking sites.”

Apple Facing $1.88million Lawsuit In China Over Sales Of Illegal Book Downloads

Apple will be required to defend itself in a Beijing court after officials accepted a case filed by nine well-known Chinese writers against the company, demanding that it pays the authors 11.91 million yuan (US$1.88 million) for selling illegal downloads of their work on the App Store.

China’s People Daily reports that the writers are unhappy that unauthorised versions of their works have been submitted to the App Store and that the company is directly profiting from sales of illegal downloads of the books.

A member of the Chinese writers alliance that represents the authors believes it is “total theft,” as Apple may take 30% of total sales of illegal works sold by companies on the App Store.

The writer’s alliance has requested Apple takes into consideration Chinese laws and provide copyright certification of books being sold on the App Store — Apple has reportedly refused to accept the request.

The nine authors include Han Han, Li Chengpeng, Murong Xuecun, who intend to sue Apple for sharing 37 works.

In March 2011, China’s biggest search engine Baidu was forced to delete 2.8 million unauthorised works after users and rights holders campaigned for their removal.

BlackBerry Maker Research In Motion Enters 2012 With A Lot Riding On Its Name

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion will likely have but one goal in 2012: stop the terrible skid that started a year ago before it gets horribly out of control.

RIM (TSX:RIM) enters the new year a very different company than the tech darling it was just 12 months earlier: stock price severely beaten down, PlayBook tablet branded a failure, sliding market share, ever hotter competition, a global server outage, continuing troubles with foreign governments.

It's no wonder the Waterloo, Ont.-based company's leaders, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, have come under fire.

The road to recovery will begin with the launch of a new line of smartphones. But critics say even they will only help it catch up to the Internet-friendly Apple iPhone and Google-powered Android smartphones.

"I just don't see how these guys can turn the tide around," said analyst Anil Doradla.

"I don't think there's any strategic vision for them in 2012 that will turn the company around, short of them releasing an Apple-like experience or an Apple-like phone," said Doradla, of Chicago-based William Blair & Co.

With RIM losing 70 per cent of its market value year-to-date and announcing in early December that it will US$485-million charge before tax on the cost of discounting the price of PlayBooks and $50 million in lost revenues from an October service outage that affected millions of BlackBerry email and text users, "we believe the stakes for RIM have never been higher," says UBS Securities analyst Phillip Huang.

RIM stock hit a high of $140 per share in 2008. By early 2011, it had dropped to slightly under $70 a share, giving it a market capitalization just shy of $37 billion. By December, its stock was trading around $16, and its market value stood at $8.7 billion.

Huang says it's time for the company's board "to make a bold move," perhaps a change in leadership, a shift in strategy or some kind of corporate deal — including possibly the sale of the company.

"We struggle to identify a buyer with compelling strategic rationale, though any number of large-cap tech firms, may contemplate such a move (either in part or whole)," Huang says.

"To a potential buyer, RIM's enterprise footprint and patents on messaging/security may be appealing."

A lot is riding on a new operating system, now called BlackBerry 10, that will power the new RIM smartphones, expected to hit stores early next year.

Doradla views the rollout of new BlackBerry smartphones as primarily a defensive measure to help mitigate the loss of consumer market share.

"RIM always thought they could define the consumer experience just like they defined the enterprise experience."

But that strategy didn't work because of Apple's and Google's ability to take a user's experience to a "different level," he said.

But Brigantine Advisors analyst Kevin Dede is more positive, saying there's an opportunity for RIM to change its perception in the marketplace with a "really neat, new design."

Dede notes that consumers want a big screen on their smartphones to watch video, a fast processor and lots of different software applications.

"I'm hopeful they've learned from some of their mistakes," said Dede, who's in San Francisco.

"The market is still growing hand-over-fist. It's a matter of can they do it right this time around or at least get closer to stabilize their handset sales."

If RIM can stabilize the situation, Dede says the generally sour opinion of the company's prospects could change.

"That can mean a lot of great things if you are somehow able to show consumers some neat, hot app that is really only available in the BlackBerry experience," Dede said, citing the success of the BlackBerry's instant text messaging service.

As RIM lost market share in the important and lucrative American market in 2011, sales in international markets grew.

But Wunderlich Securities analyst Matthew Robison said RIM will face more competition in overseas markets next year with the introduction of new, low-cost smartphones. Robison doesn't believe the new generation of BlackBerry smartphones will make much difference for RIM.

"I don't think their brand circumstances change in North America and I think they decay further overseas," Robison said from San Francisco.

Nor does he see the PlayBook as having any significance in the market.

"Nobody cares about the PlayBook since the quarter before last."

Robison said a recent service outage has done damage to BlackBerry maker in its business markets.

"The outage has expedited efforts to accommodate iPads and iPhones by IT personnel,'' he said.

National Bank financial analyst Kris Thompson says he thinks a turnaround is unlikely, even though many investors are expecting the company's new operating system to "resurrect" RIM next year.

"While we are cheering for this outcome, we have little confidence that any management team could save RIM in its current form," Thompson wrote in a research note.

Thompson says RIM's subscriber base will peak in fiscal 2013 as post-paid BlackBerry smartphone contracts expire and prepaid BlackBerrys become "archaic" compared with competing devices.

Technology analyst Carmi Levy says RIM should probably abandon its PlayBook tablet, on which its new operating system is based, but can't.

"It's about the future of a platform that now spans both tablets and handhelds and RIM is stuck with it for better or worse," says Levy, an independent analyst in London, Ont.

"RIM is essentially in defensive mode through the holiday season and through the beginning of 2012 until it can launch new products that can divert attention away from its current troubles."

With its hardware sales flagging, Huang suggests that RIM's salvation could lie in spending less energy developing hardware and more on its very successful

"On strategy, we believe RIM should consider opening its application suite (push email, calendar, secure browser) to other platforms and operating systems (e.g. Android, iOS), de-emphasizing hardware, and morphing into a software company," Huang says

"With this strategy, RIM will be a smaller firm but could get software-like valuation."

RIM closed out 2011 on a few final items of bad news, though they were more black eyes than body blows.

The company was forced to change the name of its new BBX smartphone operating system to BlackBerry 10 after the company lost a trademark ruling in the United States.

The head of Research In Motion's operations in Indonesia could be hit with charges related to a stampede at a recent BlackBerry promotional event that injured dozens of consumers.

And RIM fired two Canadian executives who were slapped with a big fine after their drunken rowdiness forced an Air Canada flight to Beijing to be diverted to Vancouver.

[Apps] SportOn - Sporting moments in the palm of your hand.

Re-live your favorite sporting moments on BlackBerry smartphones with free, downloadable videotone app

SportOn today announced a videotone application for BlackBerry® smartphone customers, available to download for free in BlackBerry App World™. Whether it is an amazing goal in the Stanley Cup finals or a superb serve in tennis, you can now re-live it all with your BlackBerry smartphone each time your friends or family calls. The application makes it possible to replace your regular ringtone with a videotone that plays your favorite team or sports personality in an unforgettable sports moment. 

“We are excited to make the SportOn app available to over 70 million BlackBerry users through BlackBerry App World. This is a unique way to personalize your BlackBerry smartphone with your favorite sporting moment,” said Mikael Jansson, CEO, SportOn. 
The application, launched by SportOn in partnership with Swedish hockey legend Peter Forsberg, features videos of soccer, hockey, tennis, motorsport, basketball, athletics, lacrosse and many more sports. The National Hockey League and Red Bull Media House are among the first sports media publishers to be featured on SportOn. The video database is updated with fresh clips on a daily basis and there are already over 3,500 video clips available to download. 

“The SportOn app will be available to sports-fans around the world through the global reach of BlackBerry App World, which now averages more than 5 million app downloads daily in over 130 countries,” said Paul Lucier, Managing Director of Northern Europe at Research In Motion.

The SportOn app is free to download on BlackBerry App World and comes with one free videotone. 
 
Further information about SportOn can be found at: http://www.sporton.com/. 

The BlackBerry and RIM families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of Research In Motion Limited. RIM assumes no obligations or liability and makes no representation, warranty, endorsement or guarantee in relation to any aspect of any third party products or services.

 Appworld Link http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/60723?lang=en

Rumors of RIM’s death…

...would be greatly mispelled, ungrammatical and take five times as long to send on an iPhone.

Possessing an ancient affliction known as “shame” I generally try to avoid brandishing opinions in the arena of “investment advice”, as hilarious as that would be. But a few weeks ago I nearly broke this rule when the PE ratio of a company whose products I actually use dipped below my height in feet (5.5.) “There’s gotta be a price for everything,” I figure; and I like to think that even I, were I a publicly traded security, would have levels at which I’d be a “Buy.”

 

Well, four weeks after my editors wisely ignored that column, the PE ratio of the stock in question now looks like it could hit 3.14159.

Moral: if I were a stock, I’d be Research In Motion. And me giving out stock tips is like BlackBerry trying to recommend new bands. As someone who fantasizes daily about bartending, retail, law school, hackccess journalism, and pretty much every other plausible paycheck alternative with the exception of teaching kids, I can totally sympathize with the impulse here. But ultimately these alternate realities don’t really play to any of my strengths, whereas wasting time thinking about them plays right into the hands of my epic self-loathing. (A self-destructive cycle RIM seems to be experiencing right now.)

Which is why I feel compelled to step in right now and tell RIM to get a hold of itself. RIM didn’t bounce three checks last week; RIM still has a job to do and millions of users depending on it. What the market seems to assume is an existential breakdown is actually not much worse than the maddening spiral of despair I experience…every time I lose my phone and attempt to communicate using someone else’s iPhone.

Now, sure, the iPhone is a huge step up from the days of typing 4-4-pause-33-pause-999 just to get “hey”…that defined the pre-smartphone mobile text experience for most iPhone lovers I know. So yes, to be fair, it sucked even more having to borrow a phone three or four years ago. Because at least now you can check email, except you can’t. Not without abandoning any pretense of basic literacy, and suppressing the urge to crack the thing against the skull holding your apparently obsolete brain in the process of mustering a pathetic pseudosentence or two.

It gets easier, I am told. I don’t care, and I know there are gainfully employed people who share my views on this. I’ve had a BlackBerry for ten years, and it’s not because of the deranged misplaced sentimentality I harbor toward the “brand” you find in Apple cultists. It’s because it was never even remotely difficult to type a complete sentence on one.

This may be merely a historical accident. When the BlackBerry was born in 1999, the sentence was still the bedrock of written communication, and email was dominated by white collar professionals justifying their salaries, overcompensating college kids trying to impress their classmates, and v1agra spam. So when the time came to liberate this revolutionary new mode of communication from the shackles of the nation’s offices and computer labs, the little Canadian startup leading the way probably did not think too hard about making “ease of typing full sentences” a top priority.

A semi-rigorous scan of the RIM news archives yields no evidence of a “Eureka moment” myth chronicling the magical thing that inspired the company’s founders to equip their prototype with…a QWERTY keyboard, of all things. (The company does refute a persistent “rumor” that the BlackBerry name is meant to reference the trademark miniature keypad with the explanation that it merely “tested well” with focus groups.) In any event, the keyboard was a hit. And in a textbook viral marketing for dummies move borrowed from Hotmail, RIM added “Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld” to the signature of every message sent, which had the effect of deeply impressing anyone on the receiving end of say, a thoughtful 600-word missive of the complexity and accuracy he or she would have theretofore assumed to have required the services of a full-sized word processing device.

Now the reverse phenomenon prevails: nearly everyone changes the “Sent from my iPhone” tagline to apologize preemptively for “any typos, misspellings and/or general inanity” his technological handicap has prevented him from efficiently correcting. Funny how no one ever did that with a RIM device?

Touchscreens are inherently infantilizing, forcing users to simulate the act of fingerpainting in order to achieve anything. If the human finger were a state-of-the-art precision instrument, humans wouldn’t have bothered inventing pencils, knives, QWERTY keyboards, and in lieu of those, limitless varieties of bulky shells to protect their freaking sensitive touchscreen devices from falling victim to another false move of someone’s clumsy human hand. Touchscreens make sense for ATM machines and those self-operated cash registers that are busy destroying all the last bastions of employment in this country, but otherwise they are ridiculous.

Nevertheless the late Steve Jobs, who harbored a pathological affinity for minimalist design (along with a general disregard for competent prose), loved touchscreens and spent nearly two decades attempting to deploy them in the service of some transformational new device before he finally hit the jackpot with the iPhone. Why? God knows, maybe he had never learned to type properly, maybe he was just thinking different, whatever. It’s great business from a branding perspective, because “infantilized” is where any decent technology marketer wants you to be; humbled and awestruck by innovations you never knew you needed, blah blah blah. But when it comes to language—the defining innovation and hallmark competitive advantage of the human species for most of its existence—the company’s product line demonstrates little humility of its own.The BlackBerry was never like that. When it first came along it seemed like an inevitability that had arrived a few years early; today it’s a necessity that seems a bit behind the times. My current model, the Bold 9700, is the first I’ve actually liked more than my very first 850; it took nearly a decade of tweaks to satisfactorily fuse with a mobile phone. But like most users I endured the generation of models with screens so fragile I swear I had one crack spontaneously while I was reading an email and adjusted to the functional asceticism of the era of the Pearl, a much more durable model that squeezed the keyboard onto half the buttons of the original to more convincingly conform to a proper “little black phone” silhouette. None of those phones were much to write home about (so to speak) but I bought them over and over and over and over (repeat approx 24x; I tend to lose phones every few months) because otherwise I couldn’t write anything at all. 

 

Did I mention I loathe touchscreens? Well it took awhile, but late last year the late Steve Jobs finally threw a bone to my people with the second-generation, debugged MacBook Air. What really makes RIM’s core customer base salivate is the MacBook Air. I know this, because whenever I use mine in public strange men who reek of membership in the Top 1% approach me in a semi-hypnotic state, invariably confessing regret for having bought an iPad instead. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, their faces tell you. But there’s more to life than Angry Birds…

Another longstanding component of the BlackBerry appeal is its ability to ease the physical strain of professional life by enabling users to communicate in upright, professional sentences from the bath, the fetal position, and the full assortment of undignified physical positions workaholics pursue in leisure. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger this week bragged (smarmily) that the iPad had enabled the newspaper to “literally get into bed with the audience,” which is fair enough, but what about the audience’s audience? For a Times reader to communicate competently with whoever he needs to communicate to attain the famous standards of affluence that sell ads in the Times, he either has to get out of bed, or use his BlackBerry.

At the moment RIM seems like a thoroughly dysfunctional company staffed with many bright people who understand all these things and dim people who boss the bright people around. But the founders are still in charge, and the core product is still the preference of millions of people like myself, people who value “commitment, consistency and communication skills” infinitely higher than “superficial infatuation” on their list of priorities when it comes to choosing consumer electronics. Perhaps my consumer psychographic is nearing extinction, but we’re pretty goddamned pessimistic people, and even we don’t think so yet.

From Reuters