Will RIM Blackberries 10 be successful with open source?

Figure 1: The ghost of Blackberry Past, Present, and Future [1].

THE BAD

"RIM is rotting from within" [2].

RIM has a bad 2011, and sadly, 2012 is not promising to them either. In 2011, RIM's stock dropped 75% during 2011. Worse, co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who are the main culprits, make RIM falling behind, compare to its competitors. [3]. And, I think RIM is gambling with its open-source decision. It could be a turnover decision or the worst decision ever. Unhappy RIM's shareholders are watching the performance of Blackberry 10.

Blackberry is used to lead the smartphone market, now is so falling behind its faster, smarter, more innovative competitors.

Top design decisions at RIM are made by those who don't really care about the current trend of the market. People working at RIM have the best gig in Waterloo, Ontario. Thus, theirs smugness hinder their motivations and creativities [2].
Consequences:

• A significant delay in the company's planned next-generation smartphone platform, BB 10. By the time BB 10 hits the market, Apple, Android, or even Microsoft's next gen phones are already the main players [1].
• $485 million loss on unsold PlayBook tablets. RIM puts its 2011 time on PlayBook tablet ahead of its smartphone. PlayBook tablets is one of example that RIM does not fully understand what the current market wants [4]. 
• etc.

Blackberry is not charming enough to attract young, talent, creative developers.

4,000 or so apps available for the PlayBook today vs. 330,000 apps for Android Marketplace and vs. 600,000 for Apple’s App Store [5].

etc.

THE SOLUTION

• Priority BlackBerry 10 over PlayBook tablet for now
• Respect its big rivals (Apple, Android, and Microsoft)
• Keep the product prices low since we may all agree that Apple products are expensive
• Focus on the end user experience. Create stuff that customers currently want or will like to use
• Priority new developers, create a market place that young developers can have fun with like AppStore with only $100 for a year, you can freely access to Apple's SDK resource and publish your applications to public for gaining profits
• Find big alliances, important sponsors, experienced developers for their open source initial stages
•  etc [4,5]

THE FUTURE

Since we haven't see the ghost of Blackberry Future yet, we have no clue what it will be. Let's hope BB10 will bring an A game to the smart phone market.

REFERENCE LIST
References are listed in the order they appear in the text, not in alphabetical order.

ONLINE ARTICLE, NO PRINT VERSION
[ 1 ] Shimel A., “2012 Predictions: Will RIM Even Be Relevant By The Time New Blackberries Are Ready?”, 2011; http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/2012-predictions-will-rim-even-be-relevant-time-new-blackberries-are-ready.

ONLINE ARTICLE, NO PRINT VERSION
[ 2 ] Nerney C., “RIM is rotting from within”, 2011; http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/233771/rim-rotting-within.

ONLINE ARTICLE, NO PRINT VERSION
[ 3 ] Zeman E., “RIM's Board As Bad As Its CEOs”, 2012; http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/business/232301232.

ONLINE ARTICLE, NO PRINT VERSION
[ 4 ] Zeman E., “5 Things RIM Must Do In 2012”, 2011; http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/business/232300592.

ONLINE ARTICLE, NO PRINT VERSION
[ 5 ] Lai E., “Four Keys for RIM to Execute a PlayBook-led Turnaround”, 2012; http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sybase/four-keys-for-rim-to-execute-a-playbook-led-turnaround/2339?tag=content;search-results-river.

What will be privacy in the future?

Figure 1: They are watching you.

As we all know,  the concerns about the privacy impacts of new technologies are nothing new. According to Schatz Byford‘s statement back in 1996 “at no time have privacy issues taken on greater significance than in recent years, as technological development shave led to the emergence of an ‘information society’ capable of gathering, storing an disseminating increasing amounts of data about individuals” (S. Trepte and L.Reinecke, 2011, p.33) [1].  As long as there is an existence of information technology, there would have privacy breaches at some levels. But recently, we have seen more and more scenarios where the more advanced technology is, the more it has violated or controlled our privacy directly or indirectly, or both. Let take a look at some recent examples as follows:

Being able to access 11 million children's details 
According to the BBC News in 2009, the scrutiny of 390,000 trained professions is able to
access to 11 million children’s details (S. Trepte and L.Reinecke, 2011, p.34) [1].

Social Networking - Is it too charming for us to sacrifice our privacy?
According to Facebook’s statistics, Facebook has more than 800 million active users. If
you count one user as a potential privacy leakage, there would have 800 million cases.Even though Facebook is constantly improving its security and privacy model, but the amount of private information that Facebook is currently holding is nothing than scary and noteworthy.

SOPA - First attempt to control the whole Internet
For me, SOPA can be seen as the first attempt of high big power organization in order to control the whole Internet. To me, Internet denotes a freedom land, where I can freely do what I want to ethically because I pay for my Internet charges right. What happens if everything I do on the Internet, is being recorded?

Internet Eyes
According to their homepage info, from http://interneteyes.co.uk/, Internet Eyes is the system, which allows their members to spy on daily customers for financial profit. And short time after, there a flood of complains how Internet Eyes violates human privacy [2].

London - one of the world's CCTV capital
The number of CCTV cameras in the UK is around 1.85 million, an average of one camera for every 32 people in the UK. According to the Cheshire report, the average person on a typical day would be seen by 70 CCTV cameras [3].  

...

My Thoughts
Are these technologies used to protect us (to entertainment us) or to watch over us? As we may agree, privacy is used to identify ourselves. What happens if we have no more control of our privacy, (or specifically our personal data)? What happens if our own privacy is not our own property anymore? What happens if we cannot identify ourselves if our privacy is lost, modified, or simply destroyed? What can we do to protect our privacy? ...

REFERENCE LIST
References are listed in the order they appear in the text, not in alphabetical order.

BOOK BY INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR
[ 1 ] S. Trepte and L.Reinecke, Privacy Online: Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure
in the Social Web, Springer, 2011.

ONLINE ARTICLE, NO PRINT VERSION
[ 2 ] Big Brother Watch, “Internet Eyes Falls At The First Hurdle”, 2011;
http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/home/2011/03/internet-eyes-falls-at-the-first-
hurdle.html#.Tygfrfn4Y7U.

ONLINE ARTICLE, NO PRINT VERSION
[ 3 ] Wikipedia, “Closed-Circuit Television”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television.

FIGURE
Figure 1, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8792852/Watchdog-accused-of-burying-own-report.html