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October 12, 2011
Canadian BlackBerry maker Research In Motion acquired Ireland-based NewBay software for an estimated $100m. NewBay provides content and social networking services to operators and handset manufacturers through a white-label platform.
Other acquisitions completed by RIM in 2011 include Gist (contact management), Tiny Hippos (mobile app testing), Tungle (scheduling assistant), Ubitexx (device management), Scoreloop (gaming community), and JayCut (video editing).
In order to sustain demand in the consumer space, RIM needs to go beyond its popular BBM messaging service and develop, acquire or partner with services that will help BlackBerry devices remain competitive with ecosystems from Apple, Google and Microsoft/Nokia.
The NewBay acquisition will help RIM develop a cloud content and social networking backbone to complement its strong messaging infrastructure. As it is often the case with consumer services, ease of use and frictionless transactions will determine RIM content services' success.
IHS expects RIM to ship around 50m million BlackBerry handsets in 2011, a comparatively weak growth compared to the 48m shipped in 2010.
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