BlackBerry Security Issue Still Unresolved in India

A solution to the security concerns by the Indian government over BlackBerry services still has to be hammered out. RIM has gone ahead and asked for more time from the Indian government to come up with the solution. It is reported that they have asked until the end of the month to explain their position and address the outstanding issues.

RIM Executives, Indian government officials and various reps from security agencies met Tuesday for the second time after India raised more concerns that the BlackBerry may be used by terrorists because emails can not be intercepted by the government.

India has asked rim to route all calls and emails through servers based in India to allow better security, and to intercept messages in an emergency.

There’s no telling when this will end, as all was looking rosy at the end of March… But the saga continues here and I can only hope that both parties come to an amicable solution.

From: India PR Wire

RIM is a Profit Machine

RIM reported their 4th quarter numbers yesterday, and boy were they good. Profits have more than doubled in comparison to the fourth quarter of the previous year.

The thing that blew me away was the number of new subscribers that were reported: 2 million new subscribers! That’s a whole lot of new subscribers, data plans, and well, just a heck of a lot of money coming to RIM and all of the carriers.

Jim Balsillie reported that the results were led by continuing to diversify the base of BlackBerry users. 38% of the subscriber base are now individuals and not enterprise users.

Retail sales were also huge in the 4th quarter. No doubt all of the pearl promotions that were running around Christmas time had a huge effect. More pearl users = less enterprise users, so I’m not surprised at all that 38% of the new subscribers are non-enterprise. RIM has really taken a jump into the consumer market and it looks like they’re doing well. It’s not just a business device anymore!