Research In Motion has agreed to acquire NewBay Software for about $100 million and the company confirmed that they have a cut a deal for NewBay, but declined to talk about the price, which the story attributes to sources close to the company. It’s clear that RIM has a decent vision and setup for certain aspects of the smartphone war and it’s apparent that RIM’s move to purchase NewBay has to do with creating a cloud-based BlackBerry content service to rival that of Apple’s iCloud and Amazon’s Cloud Drive……………..
Research In Motion has reached a deal to buy Ireland’s NewBay, a provider of photo, video, and social-network tools for smartphones and computers and RIM has been slow to latch on to such content as an asset to help sell its smartphones and tablet computers, which have been geared more to corporate users than to consumers. RIM did not disclose terms of the deal, which has yet to close, but it said it was not financially material to the Canadian smartphone maker and NewBay has more than 80 million subscribers for its white-label content services via deals with network operators including Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, AT&T and Verizon. The company stores media on its own servers and delivers it to any Internet-connected device, including mobile phones, personal computers, tablets and televisions. Analyst Mike Abramsky at RBC Capital Markets said RIM will likely use NewBay’s Internet-based photo and video albums, address books, calendars and other services as a base on which it will build up its content offerings. “RIM is coming later to market than competitive offerings” from Apple’s iCloud, Amazon.com’s Cloud Drive and services from Google,” he said. “It’s not known yet whether RIM’s offering will match or lag the content and user experience of competitors.”
[ttjad keyword=”blackberry”]
