SEARCH CLINIC

Research in Motion (RIM), which makes Blackberry phones has announced a delay to the launch of its new Blackberry 10.There was also disappointment at the prediction of sales of between 11 and 12 million smartphones in the current Christmas quarter, down from 14.8 million in the same period last year.

It reported net income of  £171 milion ($265 million) for the quarter to 26 November, down from £603 million in the same period of 2010.

RIM shares fell more than 6% in after-hours trading.

The Blackberry 10 phones were supposed to be on sale in the first three months of 2012, but RIM now says they won’t be available until late in the year.

It blamed the advanced chips for the phones not being available until the middle of the year.

RIM has also taken a charge of £222 million for unsold PlayBook tablets, which were launched with much hype earlier this year.

The new phones will operate the QNX operating system, which is seen as crucial to the company if it is to compete with phones using Google’s Android software or Apple’s iPhone.

The company has had a difficult few months, with a service outage knocking £25 million off its net income.

“As part of our commitment to improving our performance to better meet the expectations of shareholders and customers, we continue to evaluate ways to improve in several areas of the company’s operations,” RIM’s joint chief executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis said in a statement.

“It may take some time to realise the benefits of these efforts and the platform transition that we are undertaking, but we continue to believe that RIM has the right set of strengths and capabilities to maintain a leading role in the mobile communications industry.”

The two chief executives said they had reduced the cash element of their pay packages to $1 per year.

To try to compensate and say sorry for the bad service to it’s users last week Blackberry has announced that it will give away a dozen apps for free.Classic games such as Bejeweled and The Sims are being offered free to Blackberry owners. The games, plus personal productivity tools and utilities, are an attempt at compensation for the three day global blackout.

A faulty switch at a data centre in Slough left millions around the world unable to use messaging and web browsing services on their handsets for three days.

In a statement announcing the giveaway, Mike Laziridis, chief of Blackberry owner Research in Motion, apologised again for the three day service stoppage.

“We are grateful to our loyal Blackberry customers for their patience,” he said. “We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”

In total, 12 apps are being offered to customers and RIM said more would be made available in the coming weeks.

As well as games such as Texas Hold’em Poker and Bubble Bash 2, users can get Photo Editor Ultimate and DriveSafe.ly pro.

The programs, which Blackberry claims are worth more than £66, will be free until 31 December 2011.

The software is available via the Blackberry App World store.

RIM faced serious criticism over the stoppage. Thousands of people turned to Twitter and other social media networks to express their poor opinion of the company and its stuttering efforts to fix the problems.

Business customers are being offered a free month of technical support. Those who already have a support contract will be offered a month of Blackberry’s enhanced support service.

Mobile operators are also mulling compensation packages for customers. Spanish telecoms firm Telefonica, which owns the UK’s O2, said it would offer a package to customers but it is not clear what form it will take.

Millions of Blackberry owners across Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been left without services following a major message server crash.Owners of the smartphones were unable to browse the web, or send email or instant messages.

The problem appears to have originated in a data centre in Slough which handles Blackberry services for the affected regions.

Blackberry UK said it knew about the problem and was “investigating”.

In a tweet sent around 14:42 BST, the company said: “Some users in EMEA are experiencing issues.”

A subsequent statement said Blackberry was: “working to resolve an issue currently impacting some Blackberry subscribers in Europe Middle East and Africa.”

It apologised for the inconvenience that the ongoing problem was causing its customers.

Earlier on yesterday mobile operators in the UK, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and other nations pointed the finger at Blackberry owner RIM when replying to tweets from customers complaining about the problems.

Many corporate customers said they had not lost service, suggesting that the problem was with Blackberry’s BIS consumer systems, rather than its BES enterprise systems.

Such a major outage will still come as unwelcome news to Blackberry’s owner RIM, which has been losing market share to smartphone rivals – in particular Apple’s iPhone.

Many corporate clients have switched to the device after Apple made a concerted effort to improve its support for secure business email systems.

The first signs of trouble emerged about 11:00 BST but seemed to have escalated with tags about Blackberry and its BBM service trending on Twitter.

The only functioning service on Blackberry seemed to be text messaging, prompting many users to voice their frustration online.

Others lamented the loss of the free BBM network saying they did not know what to do without it.

Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM) has seen its second quarter profits more than halve- hurt by low demand for its older models RIM shipped 10.6 million smartphones between June and August but expects a pick up in sales during the next quarter.

The firm started to roll out new smartphones but only late in the quarter.

Net profits fell to £208 million for the three months to 27 August, from £498 million in the same period a year earlier.

In July, the company said it would cut 2,000 jobs – 11% of its workforce – as part of a shake-up of its operations.

Revenue for the second quarter fell to £2.65 billion, a drop of 10% on the same three months last year.

During the quarter, RIM shipped some 10.6 million Blackberry smartphones and about 200,000 Blackberry PlayBook tablets, which was well below analysts’ expectations.

Following the results announcement, RIM’s shares fell by as much as 10% in after-hours trading in New York.

The Canadian firm said it expected business to improve in the third quarter though, forecasting shipments of between 13.5 million and 14.5 million smartphones and revenues of between £3.31 billion and £3.5 billion.

Police say they stopped rioters after monitoring intelligence on social networks like Twitter and BlackBerry Messaging (BBM).Assistant Met Police Commissioner Lynne Owens told a committee of MPs officers learned of possible trouble via Twitter and Blackberry messenger.

He said they provided intelligence but could also be misleading.

A number of politicians, media commentators and members of the police force have suggested that Twitter and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) had a role to play in the riots.

The BBM system is popular among many young people because it is both private and secure – users are invited to join each other’s contacts list using a unique PIN, although once they have done so, messages can be distributed to large groups.

Ms Owens said officers had been attempting to sift through an “overwhelming” amount of “chitter chatter” on social networks during last week’s riots in London, but some had proved vital.

“Through Twitter and BBM there was intelligence that the Olympic site, that both Westfields [shopping centres] and Oxford Street were indeed going to be targeted,” she told the home affairs select committee. We were able to secure all those places and indeed there was no damage at any of them.”

Not only are RIM (Research in Motion, Blackberry’s owner) the most secure messaging operator, they’re also the most fastidious – they log everything. If you were a looter using a Blackberry, you’re going to get found out.

The police have the power to serve RIM with an order to reveal information. Under the same law, RIM are barred from disclosing whether they’ve done so or not.

But although RIM can’t say it themselves, I can say with confidence that they’ll be doing everything they can to help. It’s a reputation issue – these people are a tiny minority of their users and they want the remainder to see them doing all they can to track them down.

RIM don’t need to reveal the actual contents of messages in order do that. They can tell police who sent a message to whom and when. The police can then ask the network operators where that was done – and the sum total will probably be enough to be used as evidence.

If you know a Blackberry belonging to a suspect sent a message to 45 other Blackberries and then those 45 owners all turn up in Ealing or Tottenham an hour later, it’s clear what’s going on.

And while much of the information coming via social media “was obviously wrong and rather silly”, he said police did considered trying to shut the networks down in order to prevent them being used to organise further violence.

Blackberry has offered to co-operate with police investigating the riots – prompting attacks by hackers angry that the company could be prepared to hand over user data to authorities.

There are two inevitable privacy-related consequences of the current spate of riots and civil disorder across the UK. The first is that technology such as social media and mobile networks will feel the heat of condemnation for facilitating the chaos. The second is that there will be a renewed attempt to implement new surveillance and law enforcement measures.

The blame game has already started. Inevitably, it begins with parents.

They should be keeping their children under control – or at least keeping them at home. Parents should certainly be turning their children over to the police if looted items are discovered under the bed.

This, for the moment, is the cross-party line being held by police, government and Opposition. However, as with previous city-wide disturbances elsewhere – including Paris – this fantasy is unlikely to hold viability for long, and so the blame will need to become more specific.

The MP for Ealing – one of the affected trouble spots – told the BBC that the riots are being organised on social media sites, while Twitter is a conduit for disinformation intended to confuse police operations planning. “Something”, she declared, must be done.

For example, the Home Office’s Interception Modernisation Programme – rebranded as the “Communications Capabilities Development Programme” – will almost certainly be presented as a crucial tool for crime prevention.

That project aims to technologically infiltrate social networks on a mass scale but until recently it had been abandoned in the wake of the Coalition government’s commitment to place limits on the extent of State surveillance. The Home Office will at some point argue that the scheme should be escalated and expanded.

Private briefings to journalists by police and Home Office officials claim that ringleaders are using “clandestine” and more private communications methods such as BlackBerry Messaging – methods that officials argue are largely immune from open scrutiny by police. Law enforcement by this reasoning is being outflanked by systems that are intentionally designed for private communications.

Now technology commentators are being wheeled into television studios with a remarkably similar analysis: new technologies are gifts to criminals.

The consequent media reporting is confused. One BBC report today holds encryption responsible for the cloak of criminal secrecy offered by Blackberry.

This, despite a public statement by the company that it continues to cooperate fully with authorities.

Notably, no government MP has so far pinned blame for the riots on the decimation of police budgets and resources over the past eighteen months. Of equal note, few MP’s have so far pinned blame on failed fiscal policy, a generation of institutional racial abuse by police or the collapse of support for community and family support programmes.

Needless to say, no-one has dared question the quality of media reporting and its’ possible role in the chain of events. Remarkably, little has been said of the role of computer games, though that link will emerge (the acting Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police gave it away when he stated “this is not just a game”).

Where does all this leave us? Clearly new technologies are an easy target for blame, just as monarchs of centuries ago would blame coffee houses as the cause of social disorder and treason.

It remains a mystery why police continue to claim that they have been taken by surprise by the nature of these events. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of actions inspired through 4-Chan would understand that the ground rules changed years ago. To hold information networks liable would be a dangerously short sighted position.

If there was ever a need for an evidence based approach to a social problem, this is it. When Parliament meets to discuss the riots it should demand evidence to back up any claim of blame, and it should institute a rigorous process to ensure that any response is justified, lawful, viable and fair.
This article was origonally at: https://www.privacyinternational.org/blog/privacy-consequences-uk-riots

Three quarters of mobile phone subscribers are overpaying nearly £200 a year because they are on the wrong contract, research suggests.People are over estimating how many minutes they would spend on the phone was the main reason, with most using just a quarter of their monthly allowance.

Researchers concluded that the UK’s mobile phone users were wasting nearly £5bn a year on misjudged contracts.

Mathematical group Billmonitor analysed more than 28,000 bills for the study.

Its research suggested that mobile phone users were sending an average of 300 texts a month.

It also found customers had doubled their use of data in a year, as they surfed the web on smartphones.

The average person spent £439 a year on their mobile phone.

Billmonitor said people were going on to higher price plans than they needed to avoid being penalised for exceeding their free minutes.

The fear of “bill shock” was so great that customers typically bought four times more talk time than they used.

As well as those customers opting for excessively large talkplans, the researchers found that many others were signing up to deals that were too small then being hit with punitive charges.

The study found that a third of customers on the wrong tariff fell into this category.

Taken together, Billmonitor calculated that the two groups – those who underestimated their usage and those who overestimated it – were wasting £4.9bn per year.

That works out at £194.71 each for such customers.

The report also identified new trends that could end up costing mobile users more money.

It said the growing popularity of smartphones meant more customers were now adding on data plans. The average usage was 133MB per month, with around 5% of users exceeding 500MB.

However, the report warned that the many different levels of data tariffs on mobile networks could lead to confusion among users.

Billmonitor was created and is run by a group of Oxford University mathematicians.

The team has developed models for analysing complicated systems where a large number of variables need to be considered.

It has calculated that, in the UK, there are a total of 8,134,979 different contract permutations on offer to mobile phone customers.

Billmonitor‘s comparison system, which is the only one to be approved by telecoms watchdog Ofcom, compares users’ real-life bills to the available deals.

Shares in Research in Motion (RIM) fell 12% in after-hours trading after the firm said profits this quarter will be much weaker than expected.
It blamed the cost of developing it’s new tablet format Blackberry, as well as a migration of consumers towards cheaper handsets in its product range.

The share price fall came despite the Canadian firm reporting £579 million net profits for the last quarter, in line with analysts’ expectations.

Revenues of £3.5 billion – were however slightly short of expectations, according to the results released after the close of trading on the Nasdaq exchange.

The company has seen its share of its core US market steadily eroded by smartphone rivals.

Some 48% of its business now comes from outside the key markets of the US, Canada and the UK.

But growth in these new markets has gone hand-in-hand with a shift towards lower-margin entry-point products, the firm conceded.

RIM is banking on its new tablet computer – the Playbook – to regain the initiative.

It will be half the size of Apple’s iPad and will be compatible with Google’s Android operating system.

As well as the new product launch, the company is also revamping its operating system.

The firm lowered its profit guidance for the current quarter, and also broadened its range due to uncertainty over the possible impact of Japanese supply chain problems.

Dr Search points out that the shares could still represent great value- Google’s price earnings is currently rated at 28, Apple at around 20, yet RIM’s is an amazingly only 8.

Smartphones and their mobile apps have been added to the official basket of goods used to calculate UK inflation rates.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS)  updates its 650 item basket of goods and services annually, to better reflect changing public spending habits.

The shifting of goods and services in and out of the basket gives an insight into the changing nature of shopping habits and new technology in the UK.

The ONS collects about 180,000 separate price quotations of this basket of items in 150 areas of the UK.

These are then used to calculate the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) and Retail Prices Index (RPI) measures of inflation.

Smartphone applications have replaced mobile phone downloads, such as ringtones and phone wallpaper, in the ONS’s estimate of a typical shop.

Also added to the 2011 basket were sparkling wines and oven-ready joints, with vending machine cigarettes and pork shoulder being taken out.

The ONS ensures that items or distinct markets where consumers’ expenditure exceeds about £400m a year are explicitly represented in the basket, unless adequately represented by other items.

Where spending on items falls below £100m a year, there should be good reason for their continuing inclusion in the basket, the ONS said.

For example, while spending on acoustic guitars and power drills is relatively low, both are included in the basket to represent wider markets, namely musical instruments and electrical tools.

Microsoft has launched Windows Phone 7, its latest attempt to break into the fast growing smartphone market.

Until now the company has failed to provide a credible challenge to rival operating systems from Apple, Google, Research in Motion and Nokia.

Mobile phone operators predict smartphones will have a 70% mobile phone market share in just three years.

Microsoft says it has made Windows Phone 7 more user-friendly, rebuilding the operating system from bottom up.

The phone system’s experience is built around so-called hubs that aggregate content like contacts, pictures, documents, and music and video. The content on the phone is then synchronised both with storage services on the internet and the owner’s computers at home.

At launch Microsoft’s new phone system will be available on nine phones, and with 60 operators in 30 countries. In the UK the phone will launch on 21 October, while the US launch will be in early November.

Previous mobile operating systems from Microsoft have failed to make an impact with customers; their limited functionality, fiddly user interface and lack of applications to customise the phones had resulted in a steady loss of market share.

The new mobile phone software is indeed startlingly different from Microsoft’s previous attempts. This is probably most highlighted by the disappearance of the menu button; the company’s old “Windows Mobile” software was notorious for leading users into increasingly technical sub menus to execute even simple tasks.

Using the new software has a much more natural flow to it, although some key functions – like “cut and paste” – are missing, but promised to arrive as a software update in early 2011.

However, key apps like Twitter, Facebook, eBay and railway timetables have been fast-tracked to be ready for launch.

While Nokia’s Symbian operating system is still the smartphone market leader, Apple has rapidly gained market share with its iPhones, while phones using Google’s Android software are forecast to overtake Apple soon.
Research in Motion, meanwhile, has seen its Blackberry phones gain popularity beyond its stronghold of business users.

Microsoft is pitching the phone firmly at consumers, integrating it with its popular XBox live service for video games, and the much less popular Zune music service.

In the UK seven of the new phones will be launched on 21 October, while the US line-up will include nine phones that will hit the market in November.

The software will be launched with established partners like HTC, Samsung and LG – three phones makers who have experience building phones for the Windows mobile platform. Another launch partner is computer maker Dell.

Crucial for Microsoft’s success will be whether the new phone software manages to surpass rivals in terms of usability.

In the US the Windows phones will first launch on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks, while around the world Microsoft has signed up partners like Telefonica, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone and SingTel.

Microsoft hopes to build on the recent success of its Windows 7 operating system for desktop computers, the revamped search engine Bing, and the broadly positive review for its new browser, Internet Explorer 9.