Written by PatrickJ on Monday, May 12, 2008

Mobile Platform Wars – Blackberry Ups The Ante


iFund

The platform wars are going mobile. Whether it’s the iPhone, Blackberry, Android or Windows Mobile, the mobile platform that will win in the end will be the one with the best and broadest collection of applications.

I hope that thought – from TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld – proves true.  I think in the mobile space there have tended to be other big factors in determining success and failure for individual devices and even platforms, and many smartphone users have barely scratched the surface when it comes to mobile apps usage. 

Hopefully we’ll see that change as more and more of our computing activities are done on mobile devices, and as more great mobile applications are developed.

Today, Blackberry became the latest mobile platform vendor to throw some *serious* money into the ring to help spark development of apps for the Blackberry (and other) mobile platforms.  Google started this recent trend with their $10 million Android Developers Challenge, then Apple’s iPhone SDK launch event brought news of a $100 million iFund for iPhone platform development ventures – and now RIM and its partners have upped the ante even further, with a $150 million venture capital fund "to invest in mobile applications and services for the BlackBerry(R) platform
and other mobile platforms."

That’s an awful lot of money being thrown out there for enterprising mobile developers.  Anybody else wish they had even an ounce of coding talent right about now? 

Very soon we should start seeing some of the results of all this funding and encouragement to all these mobile platforms.  I feel sure we’ll see some great apps, and hope that some of them will even start winning over some of those mobile users who’ve never gone past phone calls and texting up to now …

Via: Gizmodo

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weiganla
May 13, 2008

I wonder what percentage of mobile device users buy third-party software. I think it’s great that the OS makers are pouring all this money into app development, but applications seems like a weird arena for a platform war – Patrick’s right, 3rd party apps aren’t exactly at the top of the list in influencing mobile platform choice.

I also wonder how much of the $150M comes from outside investors and how RIM talked them into staking money. Why is the most money going into the most mature platform (unless RIM is planning a major strategy shift)? For RIM, maybe this is a move to keep developers from running en masse to the iPhone and Android. But what the heck do they mean by “and other mobile platforms” — is RIM going to invest in iPhone developers? Either RIM has something up its sleeve, or this is really weird.

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