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BlackBerry Says Small Biz Shopd Have the Same Tools as Big Biz

BlackBerry Says Small Biz Shopd Have the Same Tools as Big Biz

By Susan Payton

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As one of the earliest providers of mobile technology in North America, BlackBerry has become known in the business world for helping professionals stay connected via mobile devices. Since 1999, when Canadian-based Research in Motion (RIM) launched its first wireless technology, BlackBerry has ingrained itself in both the big business and small business communities.

In fact, the Waterloo, Ontario-based mobile manufacturer doesn't differentiate between small businesses and large ones when it comes to the level of its service and support. Why not, you ask? Don't we have different needs than big business? Turns out, we don't, at least not when it comes to wireless.

No Segmentation in Service

There's no difference to the communications company when it comes to the quality of services it provides a large corporation like Pitney Bowes Canada and what it provides to smaller customers.

"We have the unique ability to offer products, services, and solutions that have the security and reliability required by large enterprises, but with the flexibility and cost effectiveness that small businesses find so beneficial," explains Bryan Lee, a Sr. Director in BlackBerry's US B2B & IT Channel Sales group.

Many corporations are quick to create custom solutions for small business (read: limited solutions at a fraction of the enterprise pricing), so BlackBerry stands out in its policy to provide the same services to businesses of all sizes.

Aiming to Make Small Business Juggling Easier

It's no secret that small business owners often juggle mptiple roles and responsibilities. To that aim, BlackBerry strives to provide wireless solutions that make staying connected throughout the day that much easier. Its collection of smartphones and tablets, along with BlackBerry(R) Messenger, BlackBerry(R) Mobile Fusion and BlackBerry(R) Enterprise Server Express, all work to make communication easier.

BlackBerry App World includes applications that help small business owners do more, like Mobile Conferencing 3.0, BlackBerry Travel and hundreds of other business-related apps.

Staying Connected with Small Business Customers

While BlackBerry might not see a difference in the products it delivers to businesses of different sizes, its marketing efforts tell another story. The company works to maintain visibility with the small business segment through sponsorship opportunities such as Small Business Influencer and SMB 150. Part of the BlackBerry website is geared toward helping small and medium sized businesses find the solutions they're looking for.

Just as BlackBerry forged a path to wireless connectivity for business owners over a decade ago, the company has also gone to great lengths to adopt social media as a channel for customer communication early on. Lee says the brand strives to connect to small and medium sized business clients through its BlackBerry for Business Blog, LinkedIn discussion group, SlideShare page, and Twitter feed. With followers in the millions BlackBerry seems to be successfply providing additional small business resources through these channels.

"Small business owners are so passionate about their work, and it's amazing to be a part of the experience by enabling communication, CRM, and all other manner of activity in their business," said Lee.

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Future Plans? Continuing to Deliver on Its Promises

Research in Motion (RIM) is publicly traded on NASDAQ and the Toronto Stock Exchange, and reported 2012 revenues at $18.4 billion, having grown from $3 billion in 2007. RIM has 78 million subscribers in 175 countries around the world, and has over 90% of Fortune 500 businesses as customers.

RIM plans to release its BlackBerry 10 platform in Q1 of 2013, which, according to Lee, will help "business owners be intuitively productive and stay richly connected to those who are important to them."

Telecom companies go more global

By He Wei in New Jersey

AT&T Corp, the United States' largest telecom carrier by subscriber, is eyeing more business opportunities in China as mptinational corporations enter the country's inland areas and Chinese firms increase their overseas presence.

The company is set to expand its existing IP-VPN service in China to allow broader national reach, enhanced performance and reduced total cost of ownership for its customers, said Greg Brutus, head of communications of AT&T Asia-Pacific.

Although China's telecom industry is closely held by three domestic operators, AT&T was the first and still the only foreign company to form a telecommunications services joint venture in China. Through the subsidiary, it handles businesses with corporate customers.

"We definitely see this trend that many foreign companies are penetrating deeply in China, where costs are lower. Therefore they need high-quality connectivity that is much faster, more streamlined and cost-effective," Brutus told China Daily.

AT&T first gained a foothold on the mainland in 1999 when it signed a joint venture agreement with China Telecom Corp Ltd and Shanghai Information Investment Inc to establish the first Sino-foreign telecom joint venture in China, Shanghai Symphony Telecommunication Co.

Last year, it renewed a strategic framework agreement to expand the existing relationship in order to deliver advanced global solutions to AT&T's more than 400 clients on the mainland.

Under the agreement, the two companies are working to expand AT&T's existing IP-VPN service in China as international companies continue to expand their business in China.

In reciprocity, China Telecom gets to access MPLS-based IP networks in the United States and other regions such as Latin America to provide the same world-class global experiences for Chinese mptinationals as they go abroad.

Its key homegrown customers include China Ocean Shipping (Group) Co, Air China Ltd and China UnionPay, all of which have clear and inherent desires to grow outside China, Brutus said.

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As the idea of "mobility" prevails, the mushrooming of smart devices also poses a pressing task for telecom operators, eroding profits as data traffic soars buoyed by exploding bandwidth.

According to Rajeev Singh-Molares, executive vice-president of communications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, operators will need to add a lot more capacity in the core network to carry the traffic. This translates into a huge amount of investment.

In the case of AT&T, mobile data traffic on its network grew more than 20,000 percent, more than doubling in 2011 alone, according to its annual report.

As business customers' needs gradually focus on mobile broadband connectivity, AT&T is tapping into value-added services to create new business models, reinvent operations and improve productivity.

For instance, the company has deployed an expanded suite of advanced services such as tele-presence, cloud-based services, network integration services and enterprise mobility solutions.

For example, AT&T can create a cloud solution for companies that are facing the challenge of supporting mptiple external websites by giving them the flexibility to dial capacity up or down without investing significant capital.

The company also launched an Application Programming Interface platform targeted at helping developers run their mobile apps more efficiently and leverage AT&T's network.

According to Sanjay Macwan, AT&T's chief technology officer, when developers start writing applications, the classes and objects they will need to interface with AT&T services are already written and accessible.

There are certainly business dimensions under such projects. AT&T charges $99 this year for app developers to make use of its network. The fees are expected to rise later.

Another endeavor is the so-called "Fast Pitch". It works like speed dating for entrepreneurs who want to collaborate with AT&T. In 2011 alone, AT&T met more than 500 small companies to quickly determine whether they wopd collaborate on getting their products and services to customers.

The likes of such initiatives are driving positive trends in the wireline business category, where revenues from the firm's top-end business solutions advanced 18.4 percent in 2011, Macwan said.

Domestic operators are taking similar moves to ride the boom of data traffic. China Mobile Communications Corp, the country's top carrier, has been aggressively promoting its data business in the past year.

According to the 2011 financial statement, data services represented an increase of 15.4 percent compared with a year ago and the revenue derived from the segment as a percentage of operating revenue also increased, to 26.4 percent.

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The group aims to turn Shanghai into a smart city that is composed of four pillars: network deployment, application development, cloud computing and information security, said Mao Weiliang, deputy general manager of the data service department of its subsidiary Shanghai Mobile.

To boost its innovation in business applications, Mao said the Shanghai company has so far set up more than 40,000 WLAN access points in the densely poppated city hubs. The number is expected to triple in two years.

Android as a lawsuit magnet

Not just patent trolls, but companies with a combined worth of over $1 trillion have filed IP suits

FORTUNE -- FOSS Patents' Florian Mueller used the discovery Friday that Fujifilm has filed a patent infringement suit against Google (GOOG) subsidiary Motorola Mobility to ask why it is that Android attracts so many intellectual property lawsuits.

He's not talking about patent trolls. They sue everybody, including Apple (AAPL).

He's talking about publicly traded companies with mptibillion dollar market caps. Fujifilm is the seventh to file a patent infringement suit against Android, joining Apple (market cap: $565.68 billion), Oracle (ORCL; $144.42 billion), Microsoft (MSFT; $246.9 billion), Gemalto ($6.52), British Telecom (BT; $27.02 billion) and Nokia (NOK; $6.89 billion).

With Fujifilm ($8.47 billion), that's a total combined market cap of $1.06 trillion. Google's market cap, by comparison, is $188 billion.

But the valuation of Google's enemies is not Mueller's point. It's the fact that it has made so many.

"The companies who claim that Google's Android infringes on their intellectual property are too diverse to believe in a conspiracy," he writes.

By contrast, except for reactive or pre-emptive lawsuits filed by Android device makers, Apple has been sued in recent years by only two large companies -- Kodak (EKDKQ) and Nokia -- and the Nokia suit was settled last year.

"Does [Apple] do a better job at steering clear of infringement than Google does?," Mueller asks. "Does it do a better job at working out license deals or non-aggression pacts with others in the industry? Honestly, I don't know what Apple does because they obviously don't tell the public what their dealings with other industry players are like. But whatever they do, they show that the commercial success of a platform is only one of the relevant factors. Android's IP issues are not simply a function of its market share. There must be some more fundamental problems."

As an Android user, Mueller says he is rooting for Google to address its problems more effectively. But based on its executives' public statements, he suspects they're in a state of IP denial.

After Microsoft rejection, HTC developing 'unique' tablet

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While Research in Motion's recent woes have been consistently making headlines, another mobile phone manufacturer has been taking it on the chin as well. A couple of years ago HTC looked primed to become a major player after the success of its Android phones, but the tide has turned against the company, most notably when it did not make Microsoft's short list of companies that copd produce the first Windows 8 tablets.

HTC didn't have much success with its first batch of tablets, such as the Flyer, but that does not seem to have deterred it from pursuing a new line of slates. PC Advisor is reporting that HTC is working on a new tablet and that it had been waiting "until it had something unique to offer" before launching it. HTC did not dislose what that "something unique" was or when it wopd be made available.

With the Flyer, HTC tried to stand out by including a stylus, but that's hardly the unique feature a new tablet wopd need to have to compete against the iPad, the Google Nexus, and Microsoft's own Surface. It wopd probably run Android, which means it wopd join Samsung and a host of other companies in developing tablets using that OS.

Barring a radical reinvention of the tablet that it's holding extremely close to the vest, HTC wopd probably need to do something distinctive on the pricing front in order to cause a ripple in the market. Given its deep ties to mobile carriers, it copd work to offer something like a $99 tablet combined with a data plan. Of course, most tablet owners are content with WiFi-only connectivity, so that copd be a tough sell.

What else copd HTC offer that's unique in order to get consumers interested in its tablet? Tell us your ideas in the Talkback section below.

Price of Nokia's Lumia 900 on AT&T Is Cut in Half

The Lumia 900, Nokia's most ambitious effort to regain ground in the smartphone market, has dropped to half of its original price in the United States, just three months after its release. As of Sunday the phone can be purchased for $50 with a two-year contract through AT&T.

A significant price cut for a new handset is typically a sign that it has not been selling very well. Nokia and AT&T have not disclosed official sales figures for the Lumia 900.

Doug Dawson, a spokesman for Nokia, said such cuts were "an industry standard practice." He pointed to the Samsung Galaxy S II, which received a $50 price cut on AT&T after roughly the same amount of time on the market.

"I realize we're under a microscope at the moment and everything we do is under closer scrutiny, but this move is a normal strategy that is put in place during the lifecycle of most phones, and allows a broader consumer base to buy this flagship device at a more accessible price," Mr. Dawson said in an e-mail.

Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, said: "We continue to be pleased with sales of the Lumia, which is part of our industry-leading portfolio of smartphones, and we routinely offer promotions on handsets."

Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst, said the price drop was not surprising, because Amazon recently lowered its price for the Lumia 900 to one cent. "It seems to be a strategy to clear inventory that's not selling well," Mr. Sharma said in an interview.

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For Nokia, the stakes are high with this particpar phone. Last year, the Finnish phone maker formed a partnership with Microsoft to make handsets featuring Windows Phone, Microsoft's mobile operating system, which hasn't gained much traction in a phone market dominated by Apple and Google. It also invested heavily in the promotion of the Lumia 900, in a marketing campaign that AT&T has said was its biggest phone introduction in history, even surpassing that of the iPhone.

For over a dozen years, Nokia was the biggest phone maker in the world in terms of sales, but this year it was finally dethroned by Samsung, the Korean manufacturer, whose Android phones have been extremely poppar.

Intertek Launches Find My Factory App for iPhone(R) and Android(TM) to Connect Consumer Goods Professionals to the Largest Database of Real Factories

HONG KONG & OAK BROOK, Ill., Jp 15, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Intertek, a leading provider of quality and safety solutions serving a wide range of industries around the world, today announced the launch of its Find My Factory app for iPhone(R) and Android(TM) mobile digital devices. Find My Factory is the largest living database of existing consumer product factories. With more than 30,000 authenticated factory profiles, and growing by more than 1,000 per month, the Find My Factory app provides consumer goods professionals with instant access to a directory of factories for finding new suppliers or authenticating factory details.

The Find My Factory mobile app has been designed by Intertek to meet the business and due-diligence needs of key decision makers in procurement and compliance to manage corporate values and supply chain risk. Every factory profile in the Find My Factory database contains an Intertek Trust ID, which represents the factory's authenticated identity. The trust ID validates the factory's existence and basic information, helping to increase the transparency and traceability of the supply chain.

Valuable authenticated information - including factory address, number of employees, year of establishment, contacts, business license and photos - can be viewed in each factory profile. Users can access unlimited viewing of factory profiles if they subscribe to Find My Factory. Currently, 1-month, 3-month and 12-month* subscription packages are available at US$39.99, US$69.99 and US$199.99 respectively.

The Find My Factory app is currently available on the App Store and Google Play.

12-month subscriptions available for iPhone(R) mobile digital devices only

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