BlackBerry boss Stephen Bates answers your questions

One week on from when BlackBerry services crashed for a second time we've put your questions to the managing director of RIM UK, the company behind BlackBerry.

Speaking to Newsbeat, Stephen Bates defended his firm's handling of the outage but admitted mistakes were made.

Tens of millions of people around the world were left without services like BBM, email and internet for three days.

There was also widespread criticism of what was seen by many customers as a lack of communication from the firm.

The complaints were not only about what was happening but, more importantly, when services would be back up and running.

Since the problem was solved RIM has announced plans to compensate people affected by offering them £65 worth of apps for free.

Some BlackBerry users have questioned if that is good enough to persuade people to stick with the troubled firm.

Anna Harding: Is £60 worth of apps really the right way to go about compensating people?

We think it's a good reflection of the patience people have had with Blackberry over the service issues. We think at this stage it's the best way we can show our commitment back to our customers.

At this point we think it's the best way we can do it.

We've identified a set of apps worth about £65 but our intention is to make available a lot of premium apps between now and Christmas, so the value of that may increase.

Newsbeat: Should you be looking at individual compensation claims as some people with businesses lost money because of the problems?

We have 70 million customers around the world - there's a scaling issue here. For us, the approach we've taken provides the best solution to reflect how we feel our customers felt about this issue.

We've organised with some really cool app companies - EA Games, Shazam - to come up with a set of apps that we know people want.

For our business customers with a Blackberry technical support service, we've given them a month of technical support and other businesses will also get a month of technical support.

John E Murray: What are they putting in place so it doesn't happen again?

Since we got the service back up and running on Friday we've been working round the clock to do the analysis of what went wrong.

In addition, our chief technology officer has started a full audit of our full infrastructure. He's got the authority to do whatever he needs to do to ensure that resiliency is maintained.

Darren Eccles: Did you do enough to keep customers up to date, as the biggest cause of dissatisfaction was the lack of empathy and communication?

We didn't spend enough time thinking about the communication, so we've since spent more time doing that.

We have two approaches to communicate with our customers, one for our corporate businesses - we provide them in some instances with hourly updates.

For our consumer customers we were doing a lot of work on Facebook and Twitter, but we know not everyone is linked to us that way so coming out to the media is really important to us and we're going to continue to do that.

The communication can always be improved and part of the review we're doing is about that, so we can be much quicker in future.

Ben Craggs: Apple has just released iMessage, seen by many to be a rival of BBM. How is BlackBerry going to maintain its market share?

BBM is about a user community where you can interact with your friends, family and colleagues.

We've now opened up that platform for developers so we can extend that social experience to games, social networks and music.

You saw recently our announcement around BBM Music, which will enable you to share music among your friends. We think the future of BBM is this social aspect. We're not resting on our laurels, we've got lots of plans.

Newsbeat: Do you think anyone deserves to lose their job over the problems?

It's too early to say those sort of things. For us, we designed a very resilient system in our infrastructure that has lots of backups. This problem happened with a system that should have backed up in the normal fashion, but it didn't.

We test these systems and they work fine - the team have done everything they can and this appears to be an anomaly.

It's early days, we're still investigating and we're not going to come to any conclusions on that point.

Mark Bedford: I would like to thank RIM for solving the problem in a short space of time - and those after compensation need to get real! 3 days!

I've had a lot of comments from customers - both good and bad - and at the end of the day what BlackBerry is about is delivering a reliable service and we're determined to get the service back to levels that our customers 

iPhone 4S: Steve Wozniak is first in line for iPhone 4S

iPhone 4S: Steve Wozniak is first in line for iPhone 4S

Los Gatos, California (CNN) -- A line began to form at the Apple Store here on the eve of the iPhone 4S release, as is often the case around the world during the company's product launches.
At the front of this particular line Thursday, Steve Wozniak sits in a Pico armchair, sipping Diet Dr Pepper and scanning e-mails from his white iPad.
The Apple co-founder, who gets a paycheck of "a couple hundred dollars every two weeks" and still maintains his status as employee No. 1 in company records, hasn't been able to stay put for long. Crowds of Apple fans, family friends and people who have seen him riding his Segway around the neighborhood stop to say hi, take pictures and ask for his autograph.
"I'll be taking a thousand pictures," Wozniak whispered with a smile. "I'm going to sit down and see if I can get a little e-mail done, because there's no way I'm going to get it all done today."
Seconds later, an enthusiastic man in a yellow polo shirt positioned his two kids near the computer legend and pleaded for him to pose. Wozniak immediately sprang to his feet with a grin on his face.
People brought iPhones, iPods and iPads for Wozniak to sign with a marker. "Now your phone is not going to be worth as much when you sell it," Wozniak said to one woman before signing her iPhone 4.
Fans gave Wozniak their condolences over the late Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder who died last week. Flowers, partially eaten apples and notes were laid in front of Apple Stores around the world, including this one, where the memorial was set just a few feet from Wozniak's spot in line.

Best iPhone 4S: My First Night

Best iPhone 4S: My First Night
I upgraded my iPhone 4 to an iPhone 4S on Friday. Here's my report on the phone--and my least painful iPhone upgrade experience to date.

n 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010, I lined up, like thousands of others, in the wee hours of the morning to purchase an Apple iPhone. Each year's story is somewhat similar: Get up early, go to Apple store, wait in line for hours, buy phone, go home.

In 2007, the iPhone went on sale at 6PM local time. I was home with the new device by 7:30. I had waited in line for several hours before the Apple store opened. I would say that there were no more than about 50 people clamoring for the device that year on launch day. With the first iPhone, the phone was purchased in the store, and then taken home to be activated via iTunes on your PC. I didn't have any problems activating my first iPhone, but some people did.

In 2008, the iPhone went on sale at 8AM local time. This was the year AT&T had terrible, terrible activation problems. iPhones were being activated in the stores for the first few hours devices were for sale, but eventually, Apple stores gave up and sent people home with unactivated phones. Once I got home--at 1PM--I spent about three more hours trying to activate the phone. Others had it far worse than me, waiting all weekend to get their iPhones activated. That year kind of sucked.

This year, I decided to do it a little differently. I knew I was returning from a business trip late the night of October 13, with the iPhone 4S going on sale at 8AM the next morning. I knew I'd be tired, and I knew I didn't want to get up early and deal with crowds after being away from home for five days. I preordered the iPhone 4S (black, 32GB) and opted for first-day delivery.

I've worked from home for five years. The UPS driver assigned to my neighborhood is as regular as a German cuckcoo clock. He shows up between 12:30 and 12:45 whenever there is a delivery for me. Only twice has he not arrived within that time frame: when the first iPad went on sale (he arrived at 2:30PM that day) and yesterday, when he showed up at 4:45PM--four hours later than normal.

I asked him if he'd been delivering a lot of the tiny little packages, which he handed to me. He said yes, he'd been delivering them all day. In fact, his normal daily volume of packages was about double, he said, and quipped, "That thing sure is popular today." No doubt.

Of course, by this time, I knew there were problems activating the device, and that the activation servers were having trouble handling the load. Since it was about 5PM, I decided to set the iPhone 4S aside for later (though, of course I opened it up and played with it for a few moments.)

Fast forward to 9PM (eastern), when my kids were in bed and I had some time to devote to the iPhone 4S.

Of Windows smartphones in India has come to make a splash!

The American computer software giant Microsoft Corporation India the Indian arm of Mikrosoft India has introduced the first Windows phone. Windows Phone 7.5 is the name of the handset. Windows will tell you that the handset is also said Mango. While the handset to launch in India Microsoft India chairman Bhaskar Pramanik said that this phone is equipped with the best user interface. And the customer will like it enough. Live tiles in the phone, Xbox, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.


Start the call live on the screen instead of the traditional application Aikan is tiles. The Linked inbox you can see many email account. The phone is able to use any Web browser. The log and map users can find your lost phone and it can lock. Interestingly, it also has applications in more than 30 thousand.

Blackberry Snags Threaten U.S. Customers as RIM Apologizes

Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Research In Motion Ltd. apologized for disruptions to its Blackberry service that halted messaging for three days in Europe and may be spreading to the U.S., its largest market.

“Right now we’re letting you down,” Chief Information Officer Robin Bienfait said in a statement on the company’s website yesterday. The company is investigating reports of delays in the BlackBerry Messenger service in the U.S., Canada and Latin America, and Web browsing is temporarily unavailable in Europe, Middle East, India and Africa, she said.

RIM, which has built a reputation as a maker of secure and reliable e-mail devices, is struggling to stem declines in market share to touch-screen phones such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone that offer more consumer applications. The service disruptions began in areas that RIM is counting on for sales growth as revenue in North America drops.

The disruptions began in Europe and Asia early this week. BlackBerry users continue to have problems accessing data services as RIM works to clear the backlog of data, U.K.-based mobile-phone operator Vodafone Group Plc said yesterday.

“We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation,” Bienfait wrote. “We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can.”

RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, fell 2.2 percent to $23.88 at the close in New York yesterday. It has lost 59 percent this year.

Data Backlog

RIM routes its traffic through two main centers, in Waterloo for North America and in Slough, southern England, for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said Nick Dillon, an analyst at research firm Ovum in London.

That network concentration “has always been a risk to the service,” Dillon said. BlackBerry “is still the most robust e- mail system.”

RIM said the delays were caused by a core switch failure within its infrastructure. While the system is designed to transfer to a backup switch, that didn’t happen, it said. The result was a large backlog of data.

The company believes it has identified the root cause of the problem, though it will do further tests to make sure, David Yach, RIM’s chief technology officer of software, said yesterday on a conference call.

The problem is centered on its U.K. hub and service disruptions in North America were primarily caused by the backlog, not by technical faults there, Yach said.

Race Against Time

For RIM, facing investor demands for a shakeup in strategy and calls for new leadership, the interruption comes at an inopportune time. The company has to fix the problem quickly to avoid sacrificing customer data as the backlog grows too great and alienating clients, Malik Saadi, an analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media in Guildford, England, said yesterday.

“They cannot afford to have the problem for one more day, because the data backlog will just be massive,” Saadi said. “It’s really a race against the clock.”

Yach said the company has no plans to erase data to cut through the backlog.

Regions outside the RIM’s traditional stronghold of North America are accounting for an increasing share of its revenue and new subscribers. As RIM’s U.S. revenue dropped 50 percent last quarter to $1.11 billion, sales outside the U.S., U.K. and Canada jumped 38 percent to $2.33 billion.

Users in India, one of RIM’s growth markets, were among those experiencing disruptions. BlackBerry users in South Africa that use local carrier Vodacom Group Ltd. received a text message yesterday telling them about a disruption in Blackberry services.

Services were also disrupted in Brazil, Chile and Argentina this week.

--With assistance from Jonathan Browning in London, Hugo Miller and Sean B. Pasternak in Toronto, Antony Sguazzin in Johannesburg and Adi Narayan in Mumbai. Editors: Anand Krishnamoorthy, Subramaniam Sharma

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Lee in Hong Kong at wlee37@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net