Last week, BlackBerry announced their latest financial numbers and they were even worse than predicted, with a loss of $4.4 billion for their last fiscal quarter. It was bad all around and as it turned out, it wasn"t the only news item revealed that day that will disappoint the BlackBerry faithful.
In a post that quietly went live on BlackBerry"s business blog on Friday, the company also announced it would not be holding a BlackBerry Live developer conference in 2014. The company first held the event in 2002, under its original name the Wireless Enterprise Symposium. BlackBerry Live served as the company"s largest developer and partner event of the year. 2013"s show was held in Orlando, Florida, and was the place when BlackBerry first announced that it would offer its BBM service to Android and iOS platforms.
So what will take the place of BlackBerry Live? The blog stated, " ... we’re planning to continue with an engaging lineup of smaller, targeted events taking place all around the world over the next 12 months." Anyway you look at it, it"s clear that the company is trying to cut costs and removing a huge developer event off their schedule seems like an easy way to save money.
The company also quietly shut down two smartphones that were in development; the Wall Street Journal reports that BlackBerry revealed that information in a filing on Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The site"s own unnamed sources claim that the phones had the code names "Café" and "Kopi" and were supposed to be made as low cost devices for emerging markets; BlackBerry is now going to let Foxconn design the hardware for future low cost BlackBerry 10 smartphones.
Source: BlackBerry and Wall Street Journal | Image via BlackBerry