Blackberry is in to create quite a stir with its new app Viki, with its contenders Google Now and Apple’s Siri towing Blackberry quite closely. The app Viki works for the 10 operating system for Blackberry using natural language processor and artificial intelligence by which your search results are personalized over some time. Agrima Infotech Pvt. Ltd, a startup had developed the app. It was a part of the ecosystem that Blackberry had initiated in 2012 in India. Today it is 35000 strong and the company based in Waterloo, Ontario presently has been tapping around 600 startups based in the village Kochi’s Startup, which is the breeding ground of Indian startups to be very precise.
Blackberry, as a part of its global planning strategy will move the network from a closed platform to the service providers of Blackberry devices and that will also include Google’s Android and Apple iOS devices. Blackberry had initially acquired the startup Movirtu, UK based for its technology of SIM virtualization, a technique that allows multiple phone numbers to be used on a single SIM card. This technology now works through BYOD and COPE, bring-your-own-device AND corporate-owned, personally-enabled environment essentially. The research and development is carried out in Noida.
Rufus Labs, in the startup village of Kochi sprung up in 2012, is a technology lab, the other three centers being Indonesia, South Africa and the US. Each of these Blackberry centers caters to different requirements particular to that region. Annie Matthews, the Business and Alliances development, Blackberry platform has to say, Rufus Labs is a great innovation center in India where the young professionals and engineering students innovate on the Blackberry platform for developing a whole lot of solutions. The number of developers has also skyrocketed from 4000 to 30000 in all three years. The company now has 600 setups that are registered here with the Kochi setup. The IoT or the Internet of Things is the major focus here for the app developers. Through the process there is an automated exchange of data and information over the machines.
Sunil Lalvani the Managing Director of Blackberry before stepping down had spoken in an interview recently in May 2015, mentioning any customer working on Blackberry, Windows, Ios and Android is a potential customer of Blackberry. The solutions and apps have hit the 10 to 25 top mark. There have been more than 100 applications in the innovation centers of Blackberry. In some cases there are also targeting markets outside India for their SIs/ISVs and other solutions.
Blackberry is also working along with Nasa, Cisco Routers and US railroad systems in the IoT space. Their plan is to make solutions in India but solutions catering to the whole world. Last year, they had brought forward the work of Hidden Brains that works on solutions Machine to Machine. The company is working on integrating the hospital data and working out the nitty-gritty to help doctors with the data gathered. Blackberry is thus sprucing up its enterprise business while there is a fall in the consumer business. It is now trying to cater to the enterprises rather than its consumers. Blackberry would create some niche applications and services and make some unique offerings in the fields of communication and security, in the near future according to sources.