Tag: blackberry

The new chief operations officer had formerly been an exec with Sybase and then at LiveOps.

BlackBerry has now announced that it has recruited a brand new COO, Marty Beard, who had previously been the CEO of the LiveOps cloud customer service company, after having worked as an executive for a stretch at Sybase.

Beard will now be responsible for several areas, including BB10 app development, customer care, and marketing.

The new COO is not the first veteran of Sybase to make his way to BlackBerry. Most notable among the recruitments of that nature was CEO John Chen, himself, who had been the chief executive officer at Sybase before he took the same position, as well as the chairman’s seat, at the Canadian handset manufacturer in November 2013.

BlackBerry has become quite the team of alumni from Sybase, including a number of the top spots in the company.

Mark Wilson, the senior vice president of marketing, also came to the company from Sybase. He had been the head of corporate and field marketing. Similarly, Eric Johnson is now Global Sales President after having left Sybase where he had worn several hats, such as senior vice president, general manager for North America, and general manager for financial services.

The previous COO at BlackBerry was Kristian Tear. Tear left the company only three weeks after Chen came aboard, as a result of a considerable shakeup of the organization’s management. At the same time that Tear left, Frank Boulben, the chief marketing officer, and Biran Bidulka, the chief financial officer also departed.

Many industry experts are now speculating that the similar backgrounds of the new recruits to the company will be quite handy for Chen as he works to change the aim of the business to place a greater focus on its enterprise customers. The next smartphone – the BlackBerry Passport – which has already been unveiled in its prototype form, has already been making technology news with its unique square 4.5 inch screen and its return to the much beloved QWERTY keyboard. This design is meant to make it easier to view documents such as spreadsheets, which could potentially be quite useful to their primary market.

BlackbBerry announces its first digital assistant.

The wireless and telecommunication equipment company has unveiled its new mobile technology, Blackberry Assistant, which is its first digital assistant designed to carry out tasks through voice command and the feature could be new competition for Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Now and Apple’s Siri.

The voice-activated personal digital assistant will allow users to perform daily tasks with ease.

Blackberry’s assistant has been developed to perform simple tasks. For instance, it can complete an email search, discover the latest trends on Twitter, send texts and set reminders. In addition it has been designed to adapt to the behavior of the user. Its Bluetooth capabilities enable users to activate and use it without them having to touch it. According to BlackBerry, its assistant recognizes user’s requests with accuracy.

In a blog post, Donni Halliwell, a social media marketing lead and editor for the official Inside BlackBerry blogs, provided details about the many capabilities the assistant will include. Halliwell said that “It is voice activated when I need it to be, and helps manage simple tasks on my device from searching my email and calendar, finding out what’s trending on Twitter, to sending trivia night invitations.” He added that the more he uses it, “the more it learns and adapts” to him and that the more he speaks with it, the “more tuned-in” it becomes to his queries.

Although Halliwell described the mobile technology to be “hands-free” it is unknown whether it can be activated exclusively through voice prompt, as is the case with certain Android smartphones. However, it will work though Bluetooth. That said, just like other digital assistants, users can directly type their requests into the app, if this is their preference.

The mobile technology will be part of the BlackBerry Passport.

Despite the mobile technology appearing to be a step in the right direction for the company, the digital assistant does seem to lack certain capabilities when compared to its competition. Nonetheless, Blackberry Assistant could prove to be quite popular among mobile users. It will ship as part of the BlackBerry 10 smartphone, the square-shaped mobile device which is BlackBerry’s next big release, for which a price or ship date has not been released.