BlackBerry increases revenues by 15pc but makes loss of $84m

Shipments up 13 per cent from the previous three months, but subscriber numbers down again as manufacturer predicts another loss in the coming quarter 

BlackBerry saw its revenues rise to $3.1 billion (£2.03 billion), but also made a loss of $84 million (£55.1 million) in the first three months of this year.

Reporting its Q1 financial results for the three months to June 1, revenue was up 15 per cent sequentially and nine per cent annually, while the loss was in comparison to the $94 million (£61.7 million) profit made in the previous quarter.

BlackBerry shipped 6.8 million smartphones, up 13 per cent from the previous three month period. From this, it shipped 2.72 million BlackBerry 10 smartphones, up from the one million shipped in the previous quarter. It also shipped 100,000 PlayBook tablets this quarter.

In the previous quarter, BlackBerry reported that subscriber numbers had fallen from 79 million to 76 million. However it these results, the manufacturer did not reveal numbers.

In Europe, Blackberry’s revenues were $1.34 billion (£879 million), up from $1.23 billion (£807 million) in the previous quarter. This made up 43.7 per cent of the manufacturer’s revenues in the three months, but was down from 45.8 per cent in the previous quarter.

BlackBerry said it expects to make an operating loss in the current quarter. Throughout the remainder of its financial year, it said it will continue to invest in BlackBerry 10 smartphone launches, and the roll out of BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, to continue to establish the new platform in the market.

It added it will also invest resources to evolve BlackBerry Messenger into a leading cross-platform mobile social messaging application, and launch other revenue initiatives associated with new services and emerging mobile computing opportunities.

BlackBerry president and CEO Thorsten Heins (pictured) said: “During the first quarter, we continued to focus our efforts on the global roll out of the BlackBerry 10 platform. We are still in the early stages of this launch, but already, the BlackBerry 10 platform and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 are proving themselves to customers to be very secure, flexible and dynamic mobile computing solutions.

“Over the next three quarters, we will be increasing our investments to support the roll out of new products and services, and to demonstrate that BlackBerry has established itself as a leading and vibrant player in next  generation mobile computing solutions for both consumer and enterprise customers.”

Google Makes Google News In Germany Opt-In Only To Avoid Paying Fees Under New Copyright Law

Google News in Germany will soon change. Starting August 1, it will only index sources that have decided to explicitly opt-in to being shown on the search giant’s news-aggregation service. Google News remains an opt-out service in the other 60 countries and languages it currently operates in, but since Germany passed a new copyright law earlier this year that takes effect on August 1, the company is in danger of having to pay newspapers, blogs and other publishers for the right to show even short snippets of news.

Publishers will have to go into Google’s News tools page to agree to be indexed by Google News. Publishers who don’t do this will simply be removed from the index come August 1.

Many of Germany’s publishers had hoped to force Google to pay a licensing fee for their content, but today’s announcement does not even mention this. Instead, Google notes that it is saddened by the fact that it has to make this change. On its German blog, Google argues that Google News currently gets 6 billion visits per month and that, if anything, it’s providing a free service for publishers that brings them more traffic.

One of the main issues with the “Leistungsschutzrecht” (how’s that for a good German word?) — the ancillary copyright law that the German government passed after large protests earlier this year — is that it’s not clear when a “snippet” becomes a snippet. The law doesn’t feature a clear definition of how long a snippet actually is (140 characters? 160? 250?).

Google always argued that the new law was neither necessary nor useful and that it wouldn’t pay for links and snippets. A number of major German publishers have already said that they will opt-in to being featured in Google News, but there is a good chance that quite a few will decide that they don’t need the traffic.

Nokia Ad Makes iPhone Users Zombies

Nokia capitalizes on the zombie craze in its latest ad for the Lumia 925, targeting the iPhone 5 and its camera. You can watch the clever ad below.

It seems like the diss ads are piling up lately, making the mobile phone market look like the United States during election season. Microsoft has had some gems lately, and the Galaxy S series ads have long taken cheap shots at Apple devices’ shortcomings. This latest ad from Nokia shows a group of pale-faced, red-eyed zombies stalking a man on the night-time streets of a city.

The joke is on the iPhone camera, as the zombiedom is passed through the use of its flash. The zombies are washed out, pale and red-eyed due to the use of the iPhone 5′s back facing LED flash, much like subjects in flash photos often end up.

The Lumia 925 has excellent l0w light capabilities, unlike pretty much any other smart phone camera currently available, its CCD can take clear night-time images without the need for flash.

So, surprisingly, the joke isn’t that iPhone users are zombie like followers (a common theme in Samsung ads), it’s about the camera! Apple generally tends to take the high road with this type of advertising, and doesn’t bite back. But maybe an Apple ad focusing on the plusses of the iPhone camera will be coming soon?

Heyzap Says Its Mobile Ad Network Has Grown To 800 Games (And Makes Up The Majority Of Its Revenue)

Back in March, I wrote about how Heyzap was introducing advertising to its mobile gaming platform. Now co-founder Jude Gomila says the company has become a significant player in mobile advertising.

Specifically, Gomila sent along the chart showing the growth in publishers running Heyzap ads and the corresponding growth in ad impressions over the past six months. You can’t tell exactly where things stand now, because there’s no Y-axis to the chart. However, Gomila did note that Heyzap ads are now running in 800 games (it was 350 in March), and that number is also growing quickly. He also said that the publishers advertising with Heyzap include big names like Zynga and DeNA.

In the six months since the program launched, ad revenue has grown to the point that it already makes up the majority of its revenue. As a result, Heyzap is looking to expand its team beyond the current 25-person workforce.

“This does change our priorities,” Gomila said. “We want to offer full monetization tools for game developers. There’s also opportunity for a lot more automation.”

Gomila refers to Heyzap’s ad program as its “game discovery network” — basically, when publishers pay to promote their games, Heyzap will start recommending that game through interstitial units that pop up in the games. Those recommendations are also based on the gaming data that users share on Heyzap’s social platform, so Gomila said the discovery network and the social tools “go hand-in-hand.”

He argued that this is a much better approach for the mobile gaming ecosystem, because Heyzap can recommend games that users are actually likely to enjoy.