The Blackberry smartphone company recently announced the launch of a new Blackberry Messenger (BBM) on its smartphones, iOS, and Android which allows BBM users even more privacy and control with the help of the enhanced features that the instant messaging application possesses. BBM users can now enjoy features such as retracting their sent messages and files as well as sending timed messages. And they can do these and many more without any subscription fees.
Blackberry’s new release is aimed at advancing BBM’s security and reliability and assuring BBM users that “what they share is theirs to control”, even after it leaves their phones. However, the Blackberry Company states that some features are not available for all devices, and depending on the mobile platform and region it may take around 24 hours for the update to appear in the Blackberry application store.
Blackberry Senior Vice President, Matthew Talbot spoke with Ventures Africa about the latest features on BBM, how BBM users are set to experience virtual control and privacy smartly, and some of the future plans for BBM.
Ventures Africa (VA): Kindly tell us more about how the privacy and control features work on BBM without a subscription package?
Matthew Talbot (MT): Yes, absolutely. As you would appreciate, Blackberry has always been built on reliability and security and so forth, and that’s what Blackberry is well known for. But, what we’ve continued to build is additional privacy and control features into BBM because we are seeing that that’s what the consumer has always wanted. In Nigerians, we have over 10 million registered users. It’s a critical market and its one of the key markets that has looked for this type of functionality.
When we first launched the privacy and control features, we launched it as a subscription package. But, then we felt that the consumer actually would benefit it was free, and we saw it as a competitive advantage. It helped us continue to accelerate our registered users in the market place. So what we did is we did is we removed the charge from it, and now it’s available to all users globally as a free service.
What we’ve launched is a functionality, and I’ll go through a couple of the functions. One of them is retract a message or put a timing on the message. What that means is that I could send you a message and allow you view it for say five seconds, and after that time it disappears. It could be the same with a picture, or location or so forth. So it’s putting the control with the consumer, and giving them the ability to have a bit of fun with it. In addition to that, you can retract a message, so I can delete a message from your device, if I send you a message, or from both your device and my device.
And then we’ve got another functionality like private chat, which means that if someone, if I initiate a private chat and someone is looking out over my shoulder, they won’t see who am talking to, they won’t see the avatar of the person, etcetera. So it’s like a secret chat. Then we have the ability to oversee added messages that were sent as well. So I can send you a message and I can swap words once I’ve sent it to you.
So it’s all about putting basically the control and privacy back in the hands of the consumers and we continue to look at more and more functionality that enables this as well, around the fundamentals of the security around BBM in general.
VA: But the message with retract option that we are talking about now was introduced almost two years ago, wasn’t it? So what exactly is new or different this time? Is it only because you can do it on a free subscription?
MT: I don’t think that it was two years ago, it was like last October. But basically, the retract message, as I said is the ability to pull a message back. But the timer one is the really interesting one where I can send you something and limit the time. So I think that’s what we are paying a lot of interest in and a lot of people using it as a fun way to correspond with people.
And then the private chat is also very interesting. People still concerned about people looking out over their shoulder, and so forth. You might not want someone to know who you are speaking to, and obviously we can mask the identity.
The average user of BBM has a couple of hundred contacts on their BBM and it’s very easy to send a message to the wrong user, especially if you’ve got multiple chats open. You might have before been guilty of sending the wrong photo or the wrong message to someone else which could be embarrassing or even harming for someone. So giving you the ability to retract that message or retract that picture is important. That’s why we’ve very much talked about giving the user more control.
So I think its protecting consumer and giving the control back to the user. Even on multi-person and group chats with 50 plus people.
VA: What if a picture that has been sent in error has already been saved, can it still be retracted? Because, I guess at that point, the purpose is defeated. Because if I already saved a picture that was sent to me in error or not, what happens to the sender? And if a sender is able to retrieve a picture that has already been saved isn’t that a breach of privacy on the part of the receiver?
MT: if you already saved a picture on the other side, obviously, we can’t stop that. But we can do is still retract it, thereby deleting it from the device.
VA: Controlling your shared items, and retracting them in case you don’t want them to be made public is a very great idea for BBM users. But then how does this affect Blackberry smartphones or the mobile phones being used in terms of security?
MT: Blackberry has maintained the same level of security across BBM on Blackberry devices, android, iPhones, and Windows devices. Just because we’ve allowed the users more control over their messaging experience, does not mean that it is less secure. It is the time level of security that has always been, which is faultless and in the DNA of Blackberry. Our technology continues build on the basis of that.
VA: And how much does the development of the privacy and control features have to do with BBM users’ feedback in comparison to a pure need to evolve in the mobile phone industry?
MT: We continue to drive the innovation of the product from what we hear from consumers. A good example is, we launched our virtual shop for stickers and content, etc. That was all because our users wanted more content and services than they could find in our BBM channel. Now, in Nigeria alone, we have seen nearly two hundred thousand channels per advertised content.
We have just launched video call on android and iPhone in North America, and it would shortly launch in Nigeria. So we have done a first launch in North America and it will roll out to the rest of the world in June. We continue to always listen to our customers and enhance the services. You may have also noticed that we’ve launched payment services as well. We’ve launched a relationship with Paypal, where now as you chat, you can connect to your Paypal account to pay your fees, and also transfer money to your friends,
Once again that’s because the users were looking for more. We’ve also launched a local payment service here in Nigeria with Interswitch where you can pay bills and top up as well. So, there are more services connected to BBM because that’s what the consumer was looking for. We are very in tune to the users and that’s how we drive our products.
VA: Do you think that BBM users on the Blackberry smart phones could be concerned that certain privacy and control features exists only on androids like the Priv for instance, and the IOS phones. And how does that affect the growth and evolution of the blackberry smart phone market?
MT: Not at all, I mean, we continue to develop functionality across all handsets. Blackberry phone users can go into into Blackberry World and download different services. It’s not just restricted to just IOS and android. If you’ve got the latest versions of the Blackberry device, you can use services like time and retract available as well.
VA: Alright, I’m asking because some of your former models, such as your 5270 seem not to be able to use the retract options. Do users who still own this former models of blackberry phones have to drop them for later models to be able to access these current features?
MT: You might not have the latest version of BBM on your handset, so you need to go to the blackberry world and download that.
VA: Right, so definitely, it works on every blackberry smart phones just as on Android and iOS phones?
MT: It works on all our Blackberry Ten smart phones, correct.
VA: Are there any pressing challenges that BBM currently faces in the instant messaging market, seeing as every now and then you hear about new competition popping up or then evolving to suit some of these features Blackberry has?
MT: It would be silly for us to believe that we are the only chat application in the marketplace. There has always been competition. But we believe that the innovations that we continue to roll out, like privacy and control, and all these other payment services that we’re launching, enable us to maintain our presence and grow among the active users in the marketplace. And we’ve proven that in the last ten years.
BBM has been around for ten years. A lot longer than any of the other chat applications. And now, what’s happening is that we are evolving from a chat/message application, into a complete ecosystem where we’re bringing in content, services, and payments. And you’ll see more and more of this over the coming months as we start to open up our Application Programming Interface (API). Where we’re going to have third party service providers and content providers connecting. So BBM is evolving from a chat application to an ecosystem. And we believe that’s very important for the next stage of our lives.
People have and use chat applications, depending on their networks. To strengthen that and continue to grow that, we need to add more services and content to make sure that we’re more relevant going forward. That’s what our purpose is.
VA: Well you just answered my last question what was going to be about the future of improving you applications. So, thank you very much Mr. Talbot, it was very nice to speak with you.
MT: I appreciate the time.
