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BlackBerry Launches Twitter-Like BBM Channels
judgecorp writes "BlackBerry has launched BBM Channels, a rather Twitter-like social network that runs on its BBM messaging system. Meanwhile the company had good news in the developing world: it is the second most popular phone in South Africa. From the article: 'The update is available for BBM users on BlackBerry 10 and some older BlackBerry smartphones, but it is promised that support will be added for iPhone and Android soon, with users of those platforms able to access the web version if they have a confirmed BlackBerry ID email address.'"
I'd be happy if my company was doing either of those thngs. If companies threw in the towel just because they couldn't make it to number one blah blah blah.
The problem here is one of economies of scale. You can't be successful both designing and building new smartphones and also spending assloads on marketing if you aren't also a leader in the market, because smartphones are expensive to design and produce. If you're making something with a small sunk cost, that's a valid comment. Smartphones aren't that thing. All those effectively no-name Chinese smartphone makers who turn them out cheap are doing so based on copying others' designs, they don't have to sink the cost on their own.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here's an idea for you: my Playbook would love to run BBM. It might also like to load APK files directly. It's called backporting. A few companies make quite a bit of money at it.