BlackBerry Ltd. has bought Movirtu Ltd., which makes a virtual SIM card
that allows mobile customers to have more than one phone number on a single
device as the bedraggled mobile giant continues to build on its plan to target
business users.
As BlackBerry’s share of the smartphone market has diminished, CEO John
Chen has refocused the Waterloo, Ontario - Canada-based company to develop
services for businesses and governments. The Movirtu technology lets employees
who use one phone for work and home switch easily between business and personal
profiles with billing clearly separated, BlackBerry said in a statement
recently.
BlackBerry plans to start offering the phone-splitting software to
customers early next year, with iOS, Windows and Android versions. Though the
strategy will definelty enhance the flexibility and cost-cutting measures of
Blackberry device users, it may not have much impact on Android and Windows
phone users in Nigeria, most of which have devices with physical double SIM
capabilities already.
Though no terms of the deal has been released, it's worthy of note that
Movirtu was founded in 2008 in London,
and is run by CEO Carsten Brinkschulte and has 22 employees.
In a blog posting recently, Brinkschulte said working with BlackBerry gives
his company direct connections to hundreds of mobile operators around the
world. "Leveraging these existing connections would be the best way to
offer quick and reliable deployment of the Movirtu Virtual SIM solution with
minimal effort for the operator. Additionally, BlackBerry will help bring the
solution to market through their wide network of mobile operators,"
Brinkschulte said.
BlackBerry's first new handheld devices to be released under Chen's
leadership, an old-style BlackBerry dubbed the Classic and a new format called
the Passport, are expected this month. The company is planning invitation-only
events on Sept. 24 in Toronto, London and Dubai, but hasn't provided details.
Chen said in August that BlackBerry had completed reductions to its workforce
that began three years earlier and that it was preparing for modest hiring and
small acquisitions.
This acquisition is coming on the heels of the company's recently
celebrated altercation with Apple on the vulnerability of the iCloud hacked
recently.
BlackBerry might be struggling to regain its footing in the mobile market
right now, but it still has a few strengths that outshine some rivals in key
areas. And according to BlackBerry, one of those strengths is the BBM
cross-platform messaging app, which apparently tops Apple’s popular iMessage
service in a number of ways.
Now, in a new post on BlackBerry’s blog, the company has listed five ways
that its BBM product is better than iMessage, and they all focus on BBM’s
ability to avoid the huge number of spam attacks that are currently plaguing
iPhone and iPad users.
“We all hate spam, whether in our e-mail inbox, or, even more jarringly,
when it comes as a mobile message,” BlackBerry’s Jeff Gadway wrote on the
company’s blog. “Yet according to an article in WIRED, ‘Apple’s iMessage is
being taken over by spammers’ and Cupertino is ‘moving slowly’ to help out
‘beleaguered users.'”
