Research in Motion tries to go after developers
Steve Chiotakis: Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, kicks off its annual developers’
conference today in San Francisco. The future of the company is up in the air, so that company’s now targeting an important community to hold on to its market share: app developers.
Here’s Marketplace’s Steve Henn.
Steve Henn: Turns out the “crackberry” is a habit the modern technophile can kick. It’s been a rough patch for Research in Motion. There were those service interruptions for millions; Apple launched its latest iPhone, which has already become one of the fastest-selling gadgets in history.
And for software developers, there just aren’t a lot of reasons these days to build apps for the Blackberry. Blame the iPhone.
Scott Schwarzhoff: Ninety-one percent of developers said they are very interested in the iPhone.
Scott Schwarzhoff is a vice president at Appcelerator. He says all those developers make the iPhone fun, productive and entertaining. Thousands of apps do almost anything you can imagine. With the BlackBerry, not so much.
Schwarzhoff: The BlackBerry phone, which is clear down the list: 28 percent saying they it are very interested in the platform.
Schwazhoff says RIM is in serious trouble unless it can unveil some interesting new phones soon and get developers on board.
In Silicon Valley, I’m Steve Henn for Marketplace.
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