RIM co-CEO touts converged services: Balsillie: ‘This is ‘here and now’-type stuff’

SAN FRANCISCO — Bullish on smartphone growth and confident of his company’s surging market share, Research In Motion Ltd.’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie devoted his keynote address Thursday to … consumer services.
Mentioning – but giving short shrift to – RIM’s three new devices destined for the nation’s top-tier carriers, Balsillie implied that RIM’s ambitions have already grown far beyond near-hegemony over the enterprise device and e-mail platform market.
Thus Balsillie’s presentation embraced the means of creating a work/life balance via mobile devices-and-services and the convergence of “four screens” to make that a reality.
Of course, RIM has an interest in a brave new world of content because it delivers devices and services to more than 375 carriers in 140 countries, a count that includes the four top-tier U.S. carriers and major regionals. Smartphones will represent one-fourth of all handsets sold globally this year and more than one-third next year, Balsillie said, while handset sales in general are flat. In the United States, RIM has 54% market share in smartphones and about 10% of all devices.
But here’s the key metric underlying Thursday’s keynote, courtesy of analyst Avi Greengart at Current Analysis: consumers now account for 34% of RIM’s customer base and as much as 50% of all new sales.
Why not extol the advanced services that fuel the bottom line for your customers?
“Ninety-nine percent of my talk is on services available today,” Balsillie said. “This is ‘here-and-now’-type stuff.”
That means finally linking and synching the mobile phone, the home phone, home televisions and PCs – the four screens in Balsillie’s view.
“We see exciting shifts as growth in social networking approaches 1,000%,” Balsillie said. “This is a remarkable extension of one’s personal lifestyle into the mobile space.”
The co-CEO of RIM ticked off a laundry list of music, sports, gaming, entertainment and news sources that have erased the boundaries between the fixed-line and mobile worlds. That brings iTunes, Slacker, DipDive, Major League Baseball, the NFL and most major news sources to the handset in new, highly personal ways, he said. TiVo will allow remote programming of one’s home television and the ability to take your shows on-the-go. A new deal with Ticketmaster will send concert alerts and ticket purchasing offers to the handset, with virtual tickets soon to follow.
A service dubbed “BlackBerry Unite!” unifies home and office calendars – “that’s a reality today,” Balsillie exclaimed.
The RIM executive also touted a few enterprise goodies, such as new PBX synchronization services and integration of SAP business software with the BlackBerry platform.
But he wrapped up his talk with a quick nod to the devices now launching at top U.S. carriers, with the Pearl Flip 8820 – RIM’s first clamshell model – at T-Mobile USA Inc., the Bold 9000 launching in October (Balsillie hoped) and the Curve 8350i heading to Sprint Nextel Corp.
Satisfied he’d made his case that the brave, new, converged world had arrived, Balsillie also paid homage to the application developers he hoped to lure to Santa Clara, Calif., Oct. 20-22.
“Enjoy the ride,” he told his audience, in as excitable a voice as a Canadian techie can muster.