Blackberry Partners Fund announced
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It is rumored ( VentureBeat) that Research In Motion, the RBC and Thomson Reuters have invested in a $150 million venture investment fund, called the BlackBerry Partners Fund, to support developers of applications running primarily on RIM’s Blackberry phones. The BlackBerry Partners Fund website is alive but appears to be still under construction.
As per the released report, The venture firm backing the fund is Canada’s JLA Ventures, a Montreal and Toronto firm active in mobile. JLA Ventures will will co-manage the investing process, together with the investment group of Canada’s largest bank, RBC Venture Partners. RIM, RBC and Thomson are anchor investors in the fund. Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO, Research In Motion, is on the advisory board of JLA Ventures. JLA Ventures is behind the company, Quickplay, that powers XM Radio on blackberry phones.
As more users go mobile for their dayily activities like browsing, social networking, reading e-mail and connecting to their workplace, there is increasing interest in the industry for mobile applications especially in the areas of location-based services, social networking, advertising and payment features, entertainment and communication.
The announcement, if true, follows on the heels of the recently announced iFund, a $100 million Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers bet on the power of Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPod Touch. Apple has seen a slowdown in growth in it’s iPod business but has pinned high hopes on growing it’s iphone revenue. The move is expected to helping the consumer electronics giant meet its goal of selling 10 million iPhones by 2009.
Palm, another leading player in the Smartphone business already has an ecosystem of developers around the PalmOS. However, it is rumored that Palm is now building it’s own Linux based platform and an iPhone competitor slated to come out in 2009.
