More than 60 million monthly active users on BlackBerry devices with more than 20 million new iOS and Android users in the last week
More than 51 million daily active users who are connecting with friends or colleagues an average of one and a half hours every day.
BBM users send and receive more than 10 billion messages each day, nearly twice as many messages per user per day as compared to other mobile messaging apps
Almost half of BBM messages are read within 20 seconds of being received; indicating how truly engaged BBM customers are.
More than 60 million monthly active users
A positive article (not even considering the Channels Playcard!) on Forbes states:
“BBM Could Be Worth Billions if BlackBerry Can Copy The Line PlayBook” –Tero Kuittinen, October 25, 2013, Forbes.
It is difficult to get a handle on what the early success of BlackBerry’s messaging service on Apple’sAAPL +0.47% iOS and Google’sGOOG +0.49% Android platforms might mean. By Friday 3 PM, BBM has become the #1 app in 80 countries. It hit the 10 M user mark on iOS and Android platforms in 24 hours, yet continues performing remarkably well on its fourth day. It seems that the early wave of super loyal BlackBerry users and curious rubberneckers is segueing into sustained interest in the app. But how to value a free download app that currently offers no paid add-on features or advertising that would create cash flow? The best comparison here is probably LINE, the wildly popular text-messaging service that is now closing on the 300 M download mark.
CEO Thorsten Heins introduces the BlackBerry Z10 (Image credit: AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Nathan Denette)
Here is the tricky part: LINE, one of the most successful monetization cases in the messaging business, only launched its game service in July 2012. At that point, it had hit 45 M users. It seems possible that BBM could build a similar pool of fresh iOS/Android users in a matter of months. After launching the game service, it took just 9 months for LINE to hit 100 M game downloads. By spring of 2013, LINE’s game and sticker revenue was topping $100 M a quarter. LINE’s strategy of leveraging a free messaging app to build a wildly profitable game marketing platform took just 12 months to execute. The approach is still so novel that it’s hard to evaluate whether it can be copied by other vendors and how the revenue growth patterns might look after two or three years. But it is clear that at least in Asia, possessing a popular free messaging app is the most effective way to promote games. Right now, 19 out of Top 20 highest grossing apps in Korea belong to the KakaoTalk messaging app platform.
By Friday afternoon, BBM still clung to #2 position in the US iPhone download chart – and remained the #1 app in major markets like Turkey, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, UK, Switzerland, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia. It is particularly interesting that BBM is performing so well in markets where BlackBerry never broke through as a smartphone. It is a Top 10 app in countries like Hungary and Italy. It has hit Top 30 even in Sweden and Finland, the European markets that used to be the most hostile towards BlackBerry devices, never even yielding 2% market penetration for BB.
It took LINE 400 days to reach 100 M registered users. BBM currently has around 60 M users on BlackBerry devices and perhaps 15 M on iOS/Android. The BlackBerry user base is likely set to erode relatively rapidly – but the strong early iOS and Android momentum seems to indicate that hitting 100 M users across all platforms could well happen by next summer. Of course, it is far too early to make solid projections for BBM growth. But its success in several key markets in its first week has already eclipsed anything LINE has managed. For example, this past summer LINE could only crack the US iPhone download chart for a single day, peaking at #18. App download market is utterly dominated by games – messaging apps very rarely crack the Top 10 chart of any market and often tend to achieve this in a very narrow spectrum of countries.
In contrast to LINE, WeChat and Kakaotalk, the early traction of BBM is surprisingly even across Latin America, North America, Caribbean, Africa, Middle East and South East Asia. The only major markets where it is really striking out are Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. This is to be expected – LINE dominates Japan absolutely, Kakao rules Korea and WeChat has a lock on China. But in markets like USA, UK, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia, BBM has been able to rack up massive early download volumes even against rival services with very high established market penetration. It looks like BBM has a decent chance of vaulting clearly ahead of rivals such as Tango, Kik and Nimbuzz in coming months.
If BBM hits the middle tier between behemoths like LINE and WhatsApp who are closing in on 100-300 M active monthly users and smaller rivals like Tango and Nimbuzz, how would the service be valued? That depends entirely on whether BlackBerry can build an effective content distribution/marketing system on top of BBM. If it can copy the LINE playbook and start offering social games once it has 45 M iOS/Android users, BlackBerry could be hitting the game platform stage already next spring. BBM currently has strong traction in some of the most lucrative mobile game markets in the world, including USA , UK and Germany.
Expecting BBM to match LINE’s $100M a quarter game/sticker revenue by end of 2014 is a stretch, because BlackBerry has no prior experience in managing this type of business and Japanese consumers are more willing to pay for extras than their Western peers. But a successful BBM network across the globe is a potential marketing platform that could reach revenue of tens of millions a quarter in short order. What BlackBerry needs right now is a clear, effective strategy of rolling out LINE-like content offerings and tailoring them to each major market. If the company can manage this, BBM alone could have a substantial valuation by next summer. LINE is planning a Tokyo IPO right now and its market cap is being tentatively estimated to be in the $8-10 B bracket.
Creating a service that could reach just one quarter of LINE’s success should be in BBM’s grasp – and could be a major reversal of fortune for BlackBerry. Much is now riding on how the company handles its BBM content delivery strategy.
My intention was to express my concern over the sale, to explain why I believe it’s not a just reaction to the current circumstances at BlackBerry.I also wanted to provide clear solutions instead of simply addressing the obvious problems. Perhaps understandably the process of writing the letter and the reaction to it from readers, has lead me to believe more needs to be said.
My biggest concern has always been the muted reaction from Canadians to the potential loss of BlackBerry to a foreign bidder and the reputational loss to the Canadian Stock markets & Canada as a competitor on the 1st world stage. It’s a given, if BlackBerry was to be taken over by a foreign company or even taken private, it will not look good upon the Canadian Stock Market, and on their ability to support their listings. Canada will lose a foothold in high tech/high talent jobs and intellectual IP built by Canadians, as happened with Nortel and the Avrow Arrow:
The question becomes why? Or a deeper look asks, what’s really going on?
Previously I gave examples of how Americans support their publicly traded tech companies. How they support their technology companies through their financial markets.
I provided data on how Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and Tesla among others, trade at hundreds of times their earnings. These massive multiples are amassed in part because of how the American financial system is set up to support their technology industry & other listed stocks.
Hedge funds backed up by massive media outlets provide a megaphone to the American population, extolling the virtues of said companies while simply ignoring the potentially dangerous multiples those companies trade at. The hedge funds provide the analysis and the media provide the megaphone.
American TV networks and news media protect and build value for their companies. It is often the same ownership at the helm of the media and companies being built up, with the same vested interests; the same power makers and lobbyists that offer the venture capital.
Once you take a closer look. You see the connected nature of the system. You see how everyone stands to benefit from the consistent positive spin. It’s true that the media players bring out market bears, that give the opposite view of the market and the companies we’ve been discussing. But by carefully controlling the content and ratio of positives vs negatives, the resulting perceptions are built casting a reality; all this gets to carry on as those companies with the massive valuations, far outside their ability to earn money proceed to use those funds to buy actual value.
Canada lacks the global reach of the American Media, and often the Canadian media just tows the line on what is fed via the American news outlets.With all levels of media being controlled by a select group of lobbyists/venture capitalists/owners at the top, almost as a single entity, it can turn that perception machine into a force against a company. This negative analyst/media frenzy can destroy or devalue a company like BlackBerry to the point where it can be sold at “auction” with the same nay sayers being able to buy up the pieces at half of book value.
All we have to do is look at the American system and how it creates value in very junior companies, even if not public yet. As an example, PATH, a newly formed instant messaging service, started by an early Facebook employee, someone who knows the system, knows the venture capitalists and how the media outlets can be manipulated.
PATH recently reached 10 million users of their service, some say with illegal means:
The financial system in the USA values PATH at $1Billion; they recently received additional venture capital funding. Yet the book value of the company is nowhere near $1 billion dollars, most of the valuation is based on future earnings potential.
By contrast, BlackBerry has an instant messaging system, BlackBerry Messenger. Many would argue BBM is far more feature rich than PATH. Plus, they had 60 million users previous to BBM launching on Android and Apple over the last week, when BBM was downloaded 10 million times in the first 24 hours! It was downloaded over 20 million times before the first 3 days. As I write this, millions more people are about to get started using BBM, now that there is no “line”. Yet with the current Fairfax offer that’s on the table for BlackBerry, at one half of BlackBerry’s book value, BBM is receiving a value of $0. That’s to say that BBM has zero current value or future potential value given to it by the market and analysts.
BBM Quick Facts:
More than 60 million monthly active users.
More than 51 million daily active users who are connecting with friends or colleagues an average of one and a half hours every day.
BBM users send and receive more than 10 billion messages each day, nearly twice as many messages per user per day as compared to other mobile messaging apps.
Almost half of BBM messages are read within 20 seconds of being received; indicating how truly engaged BBM customers are with the platform.
Let’s have a look at another social media company that has yet to go public, Pinterest. Again this company is strictly funded by venture capital. They call it “venture capital” at the early stages but all venture capital is hedge funds & large bank investment arms, often the same funders that have analysts on pay rolls to “review” the market. They’re able, through their market position and ability to promote start ups, to gain early access to the companies in the US. Pinterest is valued at $3.8 billion by the US venture capital system. They have recently reached somewhere between 25 to 50 million users, depending on who you listen to, but they have yet to ever earn a dollar. They admit to not having an actual plan to make money and aren’t even worried about that, at this time.
If you take these two examples alone & compare, not BlackBerry as a whole, but only BlackBerry’s social arm, BBM, and the forthcoming Channels network, I ask how is it possible that the market gives BlackBerry’s efforts zero dollar value? BlackBerry’s BBM alone, as we speak has better than 85 million users. It’s currently growing by millions a day, with users being spread over 180 countries.
BBM Channels will be an independent arm of BlackBerry’s Social Networks, although every BBM user will have access to channels through its chat feature. Channels is still in late stage beta. As a beta tester and channel owner, I can tell you that BlackBerry is on to something big here. Channels will provide businesses, consumer brands, celebrities and everyday individuals a fantastically colorful and secure and private (if chosen to go private) way to interact. The future potential is clear & valuable. Yet, the market gives Channels + BBM zero worth in the current sale of the company at half of book value. Prem Watsa and Fairfax will get a company at “auction” with much more future earning potential than the share holders will be paid.
A positive article (not even considering the Channels Playcard!) on Forbes states:
“BBM Could Be Worth Billions if BlackBerry Can Copy The Line PlayBook” –Tero Kuittinen, October 25, 2013, Forbes.
A world where smart phones will become the entry point of the connected devices. It’s early but this new world is coming up around us, more and more so, every day. First on the agenda would be automotive infotainment and drive train diagnostics. The hands down leader in this brave new world is QNX. The software code, Real Time OS (RTOS), behind the new BackBerry 10 OS cell phones is present in over 300 million current automobiles and their future products. QNX Car2 is already gaining mainstream acknowledgment as the industry standard. QNX is not just in automotive either. Many fail safe industrial systems rely on the QNX RTOS as the only system reliable enough to stand up to their difficult tasks. Military, nuclear and aerospace are counted among them. The F35 Lightning the Abrahams tanks the International Space Station and many of the world’s nuclear power plants rely on QNX. These vastly important BlackBerry customers are not the point though. They are an example of the power and reliability of the BlackBerry, QNX RTOS. Again, very little press or value is given to this ownership by BlackBerry.
“We Aim To Be The Leading Provider of Machine to Machine Embedded Systems” -Frank Boulben- March 16, 2013
Take QNX and couple it with BlackBerry’s Network Operations Centre (NOC) and we understand that this is one of the world’s largest networks which is connected to over 650 mobile carriers worldwide. The bigger picture starts to emerge. BlackBerry holds the key to the largest private “secure” network there is and which is relied on by the likes of NATO the DOD the DND and many national governments around the world for its unmatched level of security. BlackBerry10 operating system & BES10, BlackBerry’s latest MDM or “Mobile Device Management” solution has recently been employed by all of them. Recently, BlackBerry launched their cloud based #MDM solution. That adds unmatched cloud integration. BlackBerry has also secured Android & IOS with BES10.
Everything ties together, BlackBerry is a vertically integrated secure mobile platform & business solution. From the hardware to the software, through the services, that include transfer of data via the NOC & BlackBerry’s network. They have spent the last 2 + years rebuilding the suite of offerings, rewriting the entire architecture of how everything communicates through the network. The foundation is now in place, and it is built for security first. The future is at hand. The QNX RTOS has the ability to communicate with its own kind or other systems that run QNX RTOS through their “transparently distributed processing”:
The connected world is coming and BlackBerry’s technology, whether Canadian or not will be at the forefront of this massive new market including military, industrial, medical and other segments.
Now is not the time for Canadians to be selling BlackBerry for half the value of their hard assets. Now is the time that Canadians should be investing in BlackBerry and investing in Canada’s future, to be at the forefront of a super-connected world.
The American system is the land of what they call “Activist Investors”. These men and women can be worth billions; they are the venture capitalists that offer money, the key industry leaders that sit on several boards, from bank to media. They make it their business to invest in struggling companies and inact change long before the management of a company can fall so far behind in the perception game. They fully understand how a company’s perception becomes its reality.
Activist investors step in and fight to change those perceptions. At times, just the information that an activist investor has got involved in a company is enough to enact change. Sadly, Canada appears not to have any activist investors of the magnitude, technical knowledge and/ or will needed to complete the change started at BlackBerry.
In my letter to the Government of Canada, I recommended that the government request Jim Balsillie to return to BlackBerry as the CEO to fight for the company he once owned. The company he built into a worldwide $20 billion behemoth! Here’s hoping that Jim Balsillie or some other Canadian steps up and fights for BlackBerry to remain Canadian and public. The current CEO does not appear up to the task of completing the BlackBerry transition. Thorsten Heins, top management, and the Board of Directors appear to have lost their resolve to keep BlackBerry moving. That doesn’t mean that someone else can’t!
We live in a gloabal society and there can be alternative views fostered and developed by alternative thinkers/companies. BlackBerry has invented the global communicating hardware, championed and used by so many of industries’ titans in Canada, the USA, all over the world! There can be a real alternative to Apple, Android (Google) and Microsoft. There can be intellectual creativity from different nations shared globally! The market space is large enough to foster healthy competition! Innovation cannot happen by assimilation! To all my friends, all over the world, on #TeamBlackBerry, who fight the perception campaign daily, as best they can, I encourage you to support many of us in our bid to keep BlackBerry alive as a public, and preferably Canadian, company. Anything can happen in a sale. You can do your part to help BlackBerry #KeepMoving, by supporting this movement. Repost this and re-tweet it by clicking on the “Twitter” or “Facebook” “button” below! Or, copy and paste this 140 character tweet:
Here’s hoping that you will get on board with this movement and support a titan of innovation, BlackBerry, an alternative reality, an alternative future, before it’s too late. Going private will weaken the brand and the biased/unbiased media scrutiny would remain! BlackBerry needs a serious marketing strategy, and perhaps putting BBM on iOS and Android devices is the beginning of a game-plan?!
We can do this!
BlackBerry-An Alternative Reality, An Alternative Future
Darryl McKinnon.
getdjmac@hotmail.com
@getdjmac
C0007CCC8 Channels
Check out our most recent post on the prospective partners for BlackBerry here:
Copyright 2013 (logo/sm, since 1993), all rights reserved, all content on this site! Photos may not be used without explicit permission, in writing, from PFC Systems, Inc.
BBM tops both the iOS and Google Play charts–world-wide! The number of BBM users is near 100 million with the line to download the app for Android and iOS being eliminated. BBM is also the number one downloaded app on Google Play. This is a great way to market BlackBerry OS10, by loading BBM on the competition’s devices, with the OS 10 swipes, panels, and gestures! What do you think of this social marketing? Is it too late?
BBM messaging is totally free over wi-fi or data with no long distance texting charges and no accrued text count. It is secure and private, no need to give up you tel# or privacy. Give it a try and add your international friends as a contact on your iOS and Android devices! Let’s stay together! Keep moving! Share the love! Rome, I’m talking to you! Tell your friends and family that you would like to be able to keep in touch with no extra “roaming” or long distance text messaging charges and to do so in a secure way.
Prior to launching BBM for Android, an unreleased version of the BBM for Android app was posted online. The interest and enthusiasm we have seen already – more than 1.1 million active users in the first 8 hours without even launching the official Android app – is incredible. Consequently, this unreleased version caused issues, which we have attempted to address throughout the day.
Our teams continue to work around the clock to bring BBM to Android and iPhone, but only when it’s ready and we know it will live up to your expectations of BBM. We are pausing the global roll-out of BBM for Android and iPhone. Customers who have already downloaded BBM for iPhone will be able to continue to use BBM. The unreleased Android app will be disabled, and customers who downloaded it should visit www.BBM.com to register for updates on official BBM for Android availability.
As soon as we are able, we will begin a staggered country roll-out of BBM for Android and continue the roll-out of BBM for iPhone. Please follow @BBM on Twitter for the latest updates and go to www.BBM.com to sign-up for updates about BBM for Android and iPhone. These issues have not impacted BBM service for BlackBerry.
Still no offical BBM app. The best way to authenticate, at this time, for the Android Version, on the Google Play site, is to look at the developer contact info, under “Additional information” with both:
We’re still waiting for the real Android App at 7pm EST, September, 2013, 12 hours after the supposed release time! The forums and comments on sites like Crackberry are abuzz with whose to blame. It cannot be BlackBerry to fault if the fakes got on at the same time as the planned launch. Google apparently shows no sign of the authentic app for BBM while the fake apps proliferate. BlackBerry needs to go after the fake developers perpetuating this fraud to protect its trademarks! It cannot go after Google or Google Play as it needs to work with them to get their app on the Google store! Interestingly, the BBM App is apparently available for download on iTtunes in NZ:
We’re checking to see that this is authentic–it may be a fake release as the contact the developer email goes to a “DianaSantan63@GMail.com”! How can Google Play allow this to be listed as the “official” BBM? What is BlackBerry doing about it?
You know you want your BBM! If you have an Android device get the old friend you hated to leave behind–available for free –NOW–on Google Play:
Copyright 2013 (logo/sm, since 1993), all rights reserved, all content on this site! Photos may not be used without explicit permission, in writing, from PFC Systems, Inc.
All abandoned: Chernobyl / Pripyat, Nara Dreamland, Anti-Zombie Fortress, Japanese Sex Museum - and many, many more! Plus: North Korea Special - 2 trips, 16 days / 14 nights! As seen on CNN...
pfcsystems 