Five Minutes With BlackBerry India MD - Wall Street Journal

By R. Jai Krishna BlackBerry will open up its popular BlackBerry Messenger Service to iPhone and Android users this weekend, a bold move to strengthen its share in the fast-growing smartphone business that is now dominated by Samsung and Apple. On Thursday, the Canadian smartphone manufacturer partnered with Micromax Informatics Ltd., India's second largest smartphone seller, to make BBM available on Micromax's Canvas platforms. The Wall Street Journal spoke to Sunil Lalvani, the managing director of Blackberry India, to understand how the company plans to widen BBM's use in India. Read an interview with Tyson Verstraete, the head of BlackBerry's app's market development division, on our technology blog. Edited Excerpts: The Wall Street Journal: Why should advertisers chose BBM over other messaging apps? Sunil Lalvani: Ten billion messages are exchanged between the BBM users' community every day. Almost half of them are read within 20 seconds. From an advertisers point, it just shows how engaged that user community is.  What we are looking at is not just the number of users, but how engaged they are to the user community. WSJ: BBM doesn't automatically pick up contacts from the address book like other apps such as Whastapp and WeChat. Is that going to limit the number of users? Mr. Lalvani: Respecting a user's privacy on BBM is of paramount importance; only when you share the BBM PIN with somebody else can the two of them or a group of users stay connected. We don't want to tamper with your address book; that's very intrusive. WSJ: How do you plan to popularize the BBM app in India? Mr. Lalvani: We are targeting three markets: Existing BBM users; those who have used BBM but possibly moved to other platforms; and those who have never used BBM. Even with existing BBM users, there some who use other messaging apps because of cross-platform availability. That's a user base which is comfortable with BBM, have been using BBM, and the only reason they downloaded a second or a third app was because BBM was a closed-user group of only Blackberry users. With BBM on Android and iOS, there is a big user segment that will say, 'Now BBM is across platforms, I don't need a second or third app. BBM will become my primary instant messaging application.' Similarly, there are users who have used BBM earlier, but moved to other platforms. They may want to come back. So, these are former users who will go to the Android and Apple store and download BBM. For those who have never used BBM, we have made registration a lot more simple. One can log on to BBM.com, do a one-time registration and download the app. We are hoping the active BBM user base in India is going make the app viral by word of mouth. Like India Real Time on Facebook here and follow us on Twitter @WSJIndia. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEZ-n2hpvYPG7LOalwFt6Isy6vcPA&url=http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-332825/

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