Archive for October 19th, 2011

Quick summary of IT company results

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

It’s been a busy few days of earnings results from IT bigwigs. Here’s a quick sum-up of the state of the IT industry:

Brisk days of results from Apple, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, RIM BlackBerry, Amazon, and IBMYahoo! did well with profits beating estimates – could it be because expectations were low?

Conversely, Apple didn’t do so good, missing analysts’ predictions for the first time in at least six years – but that’s probably because expectations were so high!

Google’s doing real well with sales and profit beating estimates – from search advertising growth as usual.

Microsoft is patting itself on its back – for not having bought Yahoo! back in 2008. And taking a swipe at Google’s Android – Steve Balmer says you need to be a computer scientist to use an Android smart phone, unlike Windows Phone 7.

RIM’s still trying to find its way forward by taking a step backward – trying to bridge new QNX with “old” BlackBerry OS 7 – hope that works out.

Amazon is being sued for screwing up the career of an actress by revealing her real age against her will in IMDb.

On the corporate IT front, industry bell weather IBM missed analysts’ estimates on slowing revenue growth at its software, hardware and services businesses.

RIM unveils BlackBerry BBX

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

At BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011, RIM unveiled BlackBerry BBX – the next generation mobile platform that takes the best of the BlackBerry platform for its smartphones and the best of the QNX platform that it uses for its PlayBook tablets.

“With nearly 5 million BlackBerry apps downloaded daily, our customers have made BlackBerry one of the most profitable platforms for developers,” said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at RIM.The BBX platform will include BBX-OS, and will support BlackBerry cloud services and development environments for both HTML5 and native developers.

BBX will also support applications developed using any of the tools available today for the BlackBerry PlayBook – including Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5, as well as the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps – on future BBX-based tablets and smartphones.

Research In Motion (RIM) believes the new BBX will connect people, devices, content and services.