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The Bold and the Beautiful (New Blackberry Fund)
By Mark Evans | May 12, 2008
For all of the Blackberry’s impressive success over the past few years, it has, for the most part, remained the best wireless devices to send and receive e-mail. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a one-trick pony but when people think of the Blackberry, they think of a durable, dependable device for staying in contact.
That, however, hasn’t deterred Research in Motion from aggressively driving into the pro-sumer market with devices such as the Pearl, while trying to diversify into corporate base through software partners with companies such as SAP.
More evidence of RIM’s strategic vision has emerged over the past couple of days:
First up is the creation of the Blackberry Partners Fund, a $150-million venture capital fund that will invest in mobile applications and services for the Blackberry, including m-commerce, enterprise applications, location-based services, media, entreatment and lifestyle and productivity applications. Investors in the fund, co-managed by JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners, include RIM, Thomson Reuters and several private Canadian investors.
The Blackberry Parters Fund comes on the heels of Kleiner Perkins’ $100-million iFund, which will invest in startups to create applications for Apple’s iPhone. The iFund’s focus will be location based services, social networking, m-commerce, communication, and entertainment.
More coverage of the Blackbery Partners Fund can be seen on TechCrunch and VentureBeat, which has an interview with JLA’s Rick Segal.
The other interesting piece of Blackberry news is the unveiling of the much-anticipated Blackberry 9000, now known as the Bold. If RIM wasn’t going directly after consumers and going head-to-head with the iPhone before, the Bold makes it obvious the gloves are off and the battle has begun. The Bold comes wit one GB of built-in memory (which can be expanded to 8GB), a better Web browser (finally!), GPS, brighter screen and a video camera. And it will run on HSDPA networks.
BusinessWeek’s Tech Beat describes the Bold as the “new super-Blackberry” while Boy Genius Report, which was way ahead on the story, has photos and the official press release. The Bold will sell for $300 to $500.
If you’re into smart phones, the biggest challenge in 2008 could be choice.
Update: Rick Segal has a post on the Blackberry fund as well.
Technorati Tags: Blackberry, iPhone, Venture Capital
Topics: Venture Capital, Wireless |
