BlackBerry startups get $150 million funding boost from RIM

by John Cox

May 13, 2008 —

Research
in Motion has launched a $150
million investment fund to spur development of mobile
applications and services for its BlackBerry brand.

The fund was announced this week at RIM's annual BlackBerry users conference,
Wireless
Enterprise Symposium (WES). RIM also announced it will bring two Microsoft
Live services, Hotmail and Live Messenger, to the BlackBerry.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company is putting up some of the money, along
with Thomson Reuters, the New York-based business information and news company,
RBC Venture Partners, the investment arm of Royal Bank of Canada, JLA Ventures,
a Canadian venture fund that specializes in technology companies, and several
private Canadian investors. RBC Venture Partners and JLA will co-manage the
fund. (See "Top
10 network venture deals from Q1")

The fund will target a wide range of applications: mobile commerce, including
payments, retailing, advertising and banking; an array of vertical and horizontal
enterprise applications, communications, social networking and location-based
services such as navigation and mapping, media/entertainment, personal productivity
programs and lifestyle applications.

In a sense, the fund is intended to accelerate what's already happening, since
plenty of vendors, from start-ups to carriers and big software
companies, are betting big on the mobilization of the enterprise. At WES this
year, there are 140 companies in the companion exhibit hall, all RIM partners
and nearly all of them software vendors. This BlackBerry ecosystem is a mix
of personal user applications, mobile-designed business applications, middleware
for linking with back-end applications and data, BlackBerry system and device
management, carriers organizing business services around the BlackBerry platform,
and systems integrators, including Alcatel-Lucent
and IBM.

RIM also announced it will bring two online Microsoft applications to the BlackBerry:
Windows
Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger. From the BlackBerry's browser, users
will be able to get automatic message delivery from, and synchronization with,
their Live Hotmail account, with messages displayed in a dedicated onscreen
box, for example. With Live Messenger, BlackBerry users will be able to send
instant messages and join group chats, see the presence of colleagues and friends,
set and customize status messages, and send and receive pictures and files.

Both Windows Live services will be available this summer.

Network World