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Follow UsBy Sue Thomas
TORONTO - Research In Motion will put such Yahoo Inc.
Web offerings as search, e-mail, instant messaging, and
news on its BlackBerry devices, and will start rolling
out the service in 60 countries in about two weeks, the
two companies said on Wednesday.
The deal greatly expands RIM's relationship with Yahoo,
the operator of one of the Web's most-visited sites.
Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM is seeking to widen its
sales to include everyday consumers and enhance services
to its existing, mostly corporate, base.
"Our job is to create a rich user experience for our
community so that they want to use Yahoo on it, and
hopefully we create such a rich experience for the Yahoo
community that they want to buy a BlackBerry and run
Yahoo on it," RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said in an
interview with Reuters.
The two companies, who already offer a limited Yahoo
service, did not say how much the deal is worth, but
Marco Boerries, senior vice-president of Yahoo Connected
Life, described it as "significant".
"We have 200 million mail users worldwide, and we're
using that user base of Yahoo to connect them to the
premier device today," Boerries told Reuters.
Parts of the service, including Yahoo's instant
messaging and communications service, will be rolled out
to new and existing BlackBerry users over the next two
weeks, as RIM starts making it available to 160 carriers
in 60 countries.
The Yahoo Go service, which includes real-time access to
Yahoo's community information and content services, will
follow later this year, Boerries said.
"This is killer," Boerries said. "The cool thing about
this is that in the same way we now seamlessly connect
personal communications, your personal address book to
the BlackBerry, we also connect personal information you
are already using on Yahoo, like sports, news or
weather."
He warns that it could make the BlackBerry, dubbed the
"crackberry" because it is so addictive, even more habit
forming.
Some new devices will have Yahoo preinstalled, and
existing users will use a bookmark on their BlackBerrys
to install the application.
The deal adds to Yahoo's ongoing program to extend its
services beyond the personal computer to mobile
customers and into homes.
The California-based company announced a similar deal
with wireless phone maker Motorola last year, and is
working on others with U.S. phone partners AT&T Inc. and
Cingular Wireless.