Mike Lazaridis Session

RIM President and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis: The Full D7 Session Video

Beth Callaghan in D7 on June 22, 2009 at 11:12 am PT

We kick off the week of full posts of the onstage interviews at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference with Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of Research in Motion, which is best known as the maker of the BlackBerry. Lazaridis has been key to developing the BlackBerry smart phone, which means he is directly responsible for the CrackBerry problem too. And it means he’s in the thick of the new handheld platform wars.

D7 Video: RIM’s Mike Lazaridis

Beth Callaghan in D7 on May 27, 2009 at 2:30 pm PT

In 1999, Mike Lazaridis introduced the BlackBerry as a two-way pager. Today, it’s part of the landscape that includes the iPhone, the soon-to-be-introduced Palm Pre and countless other smartphones, perched squarely at the intersection of PC and cellphone.

D7 Interview: RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis Says It’s Not a One-Size-Fits-All Business

John Paczkowski in D7 on May 27, 2009 at 2:22 pm PT

If the iPhone and Palm Pre are perfecting the convergence of cellphone and PC, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry anticipated it. And that’s largely thanks to co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, its patron saint, who conceived the BlackBerry in 1999 as a two-way pager, and over the ensuing years, transformed it into the device we know today. The BlackBerry revolutionized corporate life with a famously addictive real-time, almost-anywhere connectivity, which prompted Merriam-Webster to recognize its “Crackberry” alias as the 2006 Word-of-the-Year. But that was three years ago–a lifetime in the mobile market. In 2009, “Crackberry” is a cliche, and RIM, though still a handset juggernaut, must work harder to maintain its dominant player status in an enterprise smartphone space crowded with formidable challengers: Apple, Nokia, Microsoft, Google and its open source Android OS.