RIM Earnings Grow as PlayBook Set to Launch

Smartphone vendor Research in Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ:RIMM) is hoping to hit a home run with the upcoming launch of the PlayBook tablet platform.

RIM this week reported its fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2011 earnings, showing growth in the smartphone market as competition from Apple's iPhone and Google's Android platform continues to mount.

RIM reported fiscal 2011 revenue of $19.9 billion, a 33 percent year-over-year increase. Net Income for the year was reported at $3.4 billion, or $6.34 per share, which is a 47 percent year-over-year increase. For the fourth quarter of 2011, revenues came in at $5.6 billion, up by 36 percent from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010. Net Income for the third quarter was $934 million, which is an increase over the reported Net Income of $710 million for the same quarter last year.

Overall, RIM reported that it shipped 52.3 million smartphones in fiscal 2011, with 14.9 million smartphones shipped during the fourth quarter.

Moving forward, RIM provided first quarter fiscal 2012 revenue guidance in the range of $5.2 to $5.6 billion.

The big driver for RIM's continued growth is expected to come from its new PlayBook tablet platform which is set to launch on April 19th. In addition to apps specifically built for the PlayBook, the new platform will also run Java and Android apps as well.

"The launch of the PlayBook will be the most significant development for RIM since the launch of the first BlackBerry device back in 1999," Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO at Research In Motion said during the company's earnings call.

Balsillie stressed that he expects the PlayBook to be a highly successful launch for RIM. He noted that many existing BlackBerry enterprise customers including a good portion of the Fortune 500, will receive PlayBooks for review in the coming weeks.

"Many enterprise customers have told us that they have delayed their tablet deployment plans in anticipation of the PlayBook launch," Balsillie said.

The PlayBook leverages the QNX operating system. Balsillie noted that PlayBook marks the birth of a new future-proof architecture, based on the QNX operating system that will benefit bothfuture tablet products and future BlackBerry smartphones.

"We have a powerful roadmap for fiscal 2012 , not only for PlayBook with 4G versions on track to launch later this year, but also for BlackBerry 6.1 based smartphones," Balsillie said.

Balsillie noted that the BlackBerry 6.1 operating system will offer significant enhancements on performance and fidelity compared to BlackBerry 6.0. He added that the upcoming set of releases will include full QWERTY, hybrid and full touch screen models.

"These will be followed by a QNX based BlackBerry superphone that will fully leverage our current investments and is scheduled to hit the market in calendar 2012," Balsillie said.

Microsoft Ships Windows 7 Update

March 24, 2011
Microsoft started shipping its first significant update to Windows Phone 7. The update provides WP7 phones with a copy and paste function, as well as simpler navigation of Microsoft's apps marketplace and improved app performance. When Windows Phone 7 made its debut, developers and users complained that the mobile operating system lacked multi-tasking for apps as well as not having a cut and paste function.
A second update, codenamed Mango, that adds multi-tasking and a mobile version of Internet Explorer 9, is planned for the second half of the year. The second update will also include tight integration with Twitter, and support for Office documents in the cloud.

3 new Search Engines you should try out

Google, Bing and Yahoo. Somebody who's never seen a computer might think that's the cast of a 1930s knockabout comedy. But we know them as the three big players in the search engine marketplace.

It takes a brave company to set up in business against them, but that's what several intriguing startups are doing. The nature of the computing industry is one of giants regularly toppling. Remember Wang, DEC, or even Sun? So why not Google, Microsoft or Yahoo?

Here are three new search engines worth examining, either to use as tools in your workflow or to start considering as targets for search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for your business.

Just do everybody a favor and never mention Cuil.

Blekko

Blekko brings a couple of new tricks to the search party but the main one is the concept of slashtags. These are qualifying words that are added to search phrases after a slash (/) to refine the query.

For example, if I wanted to search for articles about Google Docs sorted by date, I'd type Google Docs /date. If I wanted to search for pages discussing Google Docs in the context of handheld computers like cell phones, I could type Google Docs /gadgets.

Lots of slashtags are already defined but users can make their own, a process involving associating sites with the slashtag so Blekko can get a flavor of the type of content required.

A surprising number of seemingly obvious slashtags have not yet been defined--I tried to search for mentions of myself relating to some Kindle eBooks I've recently written, for example, but there isn't yet a /kindle slashtag.

Blekko's search results aren't too great. Courtesy of a little vanity searching using my own name (surely the standard method of testing a search engine), adding the /date slashtag, revealed that Blekko didn't recognize "Keir Thomas" as a individual's name, and returned separate results for "Keir" and for "Thomas." Surely being able to spot names is the kind of thing they teach in Search Engine 101 class?

Blekko's other big trick is that users can mark results as spam and have them instantly removed from the list, after which they'll never appear again in search results for that user.

Additionally, and usefully for businesses, anybody at all can also see SEO data for a site by clicking the SEO link beneath each search results. Unfortunately, this too was less than perfect. When viewing the data for a site I run, Blekko claimed that the site is "co-hosted with" several other sites I'd never heard of. This is no doubt based on the fact they have in the past shared the site's IP address courtesy of virtual hosting by my ISP. However, it's plain misleading.

Blekko is interesting but the beta tag under its logo does actually mean something this time: Blekko really is a pre-release-quality search engine. However, it can only get better as time goes on. Some of its tools are actually pretty neat and are things Google can't easily emulate.

Qyo

Built on the theory that two (or more) heads are better than one, Qyo attempts to bring collaborative search to the masses. This is a buzz phrase within the search engine world at the moment, especially for organizations like Google and Facebook that want to expand their offerings in new directions. It's rumoured Google will soon be launching its Circles service, for example, that could feature social search.

Upon registering with Qyo, which you must do before you're allowed to search, you're invited to connect to your Facebook account to get friends and associates involved, too. In fact, without friends, Qyo is a fairly sparse experience.

Once you've associated with another person, all your searches via Qyo are visible to them (and theirs to you), unless you specifically choose to search privately. Search queries appear as a message list on the right-hand side of the screen. You can comment on other peoples' searches, perhaps telling them where they went wrong or giving them clues, but that's about it. You can't refine their search, expand it, or alter it in any way. This feels limiting.

A more powerful feature can be found in the subnet feature that lets you subscribe to groups and pass your search out to them (and their searches to you, of course). This also lets you make new contacts when somebody responds, for example.

It's not hard to imagine how Qyo's designers anticipate the site working: Whenever you arrive at the site to search you'll see all your friends' searches too. You can comment on them, or just chat generally. Search suddenly becomes social.

However, I'm not sure any of us want to share our searches in this way. Just like everybody thinks they have a sense of humor, everybody thinks they're the best Googler in the world. Asking for help searching can be a humiliating experience.

Qyo is tagged with a beta icon but in reality it's more alpha-release. The website didn't even display properly in my Google Chrome browser, with some text overlapping graphical items.

Above all I'm left feeling that, while the concept is neat, it could be done a whole lot better, with more creativity, intelligence and finesse.

Above all, it's not searches that users need to share, but results. This has already been successfully done with sites like Delicious.com, which tags sites according to shared topics, but there's significant room for expansion in new directions.

DuckDuckGo

Unlike the other search engines mentioned here, DuckDuckGo appears to be just another search engine in the same mould as Google. However, it respects privacy and doesn't record search results or track you (unlike Google, et al).

It also boasts intelligence that lets it try and figure out what you're searching for, and presenting it in a red box at the top of the search results, drawing information from sites like Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha in order do so.

For example, searching for "PC World magazine" displays a box with a snippet of info from Wikipedia, plus links to various websites, underneath which is listed the usual set of results you might see for the search term.

DuckDuckGo also claims to ban spam sites--the sites that seem to show useful results in search listings but are simply full of ads.

There's a handful of other interesting features, such as bang searches, where a site name preceded with an exclamation mark will use the search feature of the specific site. For example, !wikipedia barack obama will use Wikipedia's own search feature to find pages related to Barack Obama. There's a long list of bangs you can use and some are intelligent--using !java, for example, will search the portion of Oracle's site dedicated to Java documentation.

DuckDuckGo is the most polished of the search engines mentioned here but it doesn't really offer much to switch users away from Google. However, if you really don't like Google, Bing or Yahoo, then it's perhaps the next best option.

Firefox 4 Supports Windows XP unlike IE 9

 Picture credit goes to iTechWhiz

New versions of the two most popular browsers -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox -- are being released. Among their competing features is an unusual twist -- Firefox, which is being released Tuesday, will support Microsoft's venerable and still-popular Windows XP operating system, while IE will not.

IE9 is designed to support Vista and Windows 7, while the new Firefox also supports XP as well as Windows 2000. Microsoft has said it decided not to support XP in IE9 because it will utilize the graphics processor, which isn't possible under XP, which was released in 2001. A Microsoft executive told news media that supporting XP would have meant "optimizing for the lowest common denominator."

Obligation 'Is To the Users'

Like IE, Firefox 4 offers support for hardware acceleration in Vista and Windows 7 by utilizing Direct2D and Direct3D APIs. XP doesn't support Direct2D, but Firefox uses Direct3D on XP to provide partial acceleration in Firefox 4.

According to web-statistics firm Net Applications, XP represents 55 percent of operating systems connected to the web, or 61 percent of all Windows-based systems. Jonathan Nightingale of the Mozilla Foundation told news media that "our obligation is to the users, and Windows XP is not a part we can cut out."

Other browsers, including Apple's Safari for Windows, Opera and Google's Chrome, will continue to support XP, which Microsoft has essentially abandoned as it attempts to move users to Vista and Windows 7.

In a video on Mozilla's web site, Nightingale said the new JavaScript engine in Firefox 4 is up to "six times faster than any previous version we've shipped." He also pointed to a new "streamlined user interface, which takes up a lot less space." Another new feature is app tabs, which pin small site icons for frequently visited sites to the edge of the interface.

Panorama is a new Firefox feature that allows many tabs to be organized, instead of searching for them in the tab strip. For customization, an Add-On Manager includes extensions and plug-ins as well as a search-engine interface for finding new add-ons. Firefox Sync offers the ability to sync personal information between devices, with the information being encrypted locally before moving. Firefox 4 is also offering new support for HTML5, WebGL, CSS3 and downloadable fonts.

IE 9 Features

IE9 also offers extensive support for those web technologies, and Microsoft said its browser rethinks "the concept of fast" and how "people interact with web sites and web applications."

In IE9, Pinned Sites can be accessed directly from the Windows 7 taskbar without having to first open the browser. With IE9's JumpList, a web-site task can be accessed, again without having to launch the browser first. This assumes the site developer has implemented JumpList capabilities, and, if so, composing a new e-mail, checking an inbox, changing a music station, or accepting an invitation can be initiated outside the browser.

There's also Aero Snap, for positioning two sites side by side in separate windows. One box incorporates search functionality into the Address Bar, as well as the ability to navigate to a site, search for a site, switch between search providers, or access browsing history or favorites.

Finally, Microsoft pointed to IE9's built-in security, privacy and reliability technologies. A new Tracking Protection allows a user to limit the browser's ability to communicate your actions to certain web sites, as determined by a Tracking Protection List that the user can determine.

Facebook Buys Startup to Link With More Mobile Phones

Facebook is buying an Israeli startup that specializes in software that connects any type of mobile telephone to the leading online social network and other popular Internet destinations.

Facebook on Monday confirmed that it is acquiring Snaptu with an eye toward extending its reach to the hundreds of millions of mobile phones that don't feature the computer-like Internet capabilities of smartphones.

"As part of our goal to offer people around the world the opportunity to connect and share on mobile devices, we're excited to confirm that we recently signed an agreement to acquire Snaptu," Facebook said in an email response to an AFP inquiry.

"As part of Facebook, Snaptu's team and technology will enable us to deliver an even better mobile experience on feature phones more quickly."

The deal was expected to close in a few weeks. Financial details were not disclosed.

Snaptu was founded in 2007 with the stated goal of making available on "feature phones" innovative services people access routinely on smartphones.

Nearly 1.6 billion mobile phones were sold worldwide last year, with 296.6 million of those being sophisticated smartphones, according to figures released last month by industry tracker Gartner.

In January, Facebook launched a new software application for feature phones that was co-developed with Snaptu.

"We'll be working hard to offer a richer and more advanced Facebook app on virtually every mobile phone," Snaptu said.