Sources close to both companies confirmed to AllThingsD that Spence has signed on with Sonos, tapped by CEO and founder John MacFarlane to be its chief commercial officer.

The 14-year RIM veteran was growing disillusioned with the company after being passed over for COO, sources say. He’d recently begun exploring other opportunities. So evidently MacFarlane’s call came at the perfect time.

News of the appointment was first reported by Reuters.

Sonos declined comment on the hire.

Spence, RIM’s head of global sales and a 14-year company veteran, “will be taking on a leadership position in a different industry,” RIM said in an email to AllThingsD. His last day will be June 15.

“The sales function will report directly into Kristian Tear, our newly appointed COO, when he starts this summer,” RIM said in a statement. “In the interim, the sales function will report to Thorsten Heins.”

Spence is the latest RIM executive to depart the company in recent months, following January’s appointment of Heins as CEO. In March, the company announced the departures of software CTO David Yach and Chief Operating Officer Jim Rowan.

The company has also announced two key hires — Tear, and new marketing chief Frank Boulben.

Spence’s departure was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.

According to NPD, Apple shipped 17.2 million mobile PCs* worldwide during the first quarter of 2012, enough to capture a 22.5 percent share of the market — more than double that of its closest rival, Hewlett-Packard. During the same period, HP shipped just 8.9 million mobile PCs for an 11.6 percent market share.

How did Apple manage to dominate PC leader HP in the mobile PC market? The iPad.

Of the 17.2 million “mobile PCs” Apple shipped, 13.6 million were iPads. And in that particular segment of the market — tablets — Apple’s domination is unrelenting. In the first quarter, Apple claimed a stunning 62.8 percent share of the tablet market, dwarfing every single one of its rivals. Samsung, its next closest rival, shipped just 1.6 million tablets during the quarter, for a share of 7.5 percent. Amazon followed with 900,000 tablets shipped and a 4 percent share. Bringing up the rear: Research In Motion and Asus, which sold 500,000 tablets each, for a 2.3 percent market share.

*NPD defines mobile PCs as tablets and laptops.

On Monday, a U.S. International Trade Commission judge ruled one of Kodak’s key patents invalid, undermining the photography pioneer’s efforts to assert it against Apple and Research In Motion. In his decision, ITC Judge Thomas Pender wrote that while some Apple and RIM products did indeed violate some claims of Kodak’s 6,292,218 patent, the patent itself, which covers the ability for a digital camera to preview images on an LCD screen, is invalid.

The ’218 patent is referred to by some as the “crown jewel” of Kodak’s portfolio, so Pender’s ruling is potentially a major blow to the company, which is looking to maximize the value of its IP ahead of a bankruptcy auction. Indeed, just last week Kodak accused Apple of attempting to undermine its efforts by asserting ownership claims over the ’218 patent.

“Apple’s decision to press its ownership claims now … should be seen for what it is, namely, a ploy calculated to prevent the debtors from using the [bankruptcy] sale process to obtain a fair price for Kodak’s digital capture portfolio (or to enable Apple to buy it on the cheap and extinguish its infringement exposure),” Kodak said in court documents filed last week.

It seems now that the ploy was a wasted effort. There are few better ways of extinguishing a company’s infringement exposure than having the patent asserted against it ruled invalid. And, as RIM noted in a statement issued Monday afternoon, Pender is the second ITC judge to rule the ’218 patent invalid.

That said, Apple and RIM aren’t entirely out of the woods yet. Kodak plans to appeal Pender’s ruling to the full commission. And it says it’s confident it will prevail in the end, since the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office confirmed ’218’s validity in 2010.

Regardless, Pender’s ruling couldn’t come at a worse time. Sources say that Kodak has been looking to attract a stalking-horse bidder who would put down an initial offer for its patent portfolio as it gears up for its bankruptcy auction. Having the patent that’s at the center of its high-profile battle with Apple and RIM tossed aside by the ITC isn’t going to aid that effort.

Most of the documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission were kept confidential, but the limited information posted to the agency’s Web site suggests that the tablet contains support for several flavors of wireless connectivity, including Wi-Fi and LTE. The filing also makes reference to Bluetooth and near field communications capabilities.

The move isn’t a shock, given that RIM has promised that an LTE-capable PlayBook would be out later this year.

Whether buyers will be interested in the device is an open question, however.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Defense approved RIM’s BlackBerry 7 devices for agencywide use. And now the device has won similar approvals in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

CESG, the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance in the U.K., on Thursday certified BlackBerry 7 as fit for government and law enforcement use. And the Defense Signals Directorate of the Australian Government did the same for Australia and New Zealand. The reason: Those industry-leading security features RIM is so fond of talking up. Consumers may not pay them much mind, but in government they clearly matter a great deal.

Which is great for RIM’s business, but not quite central to its long-term success. While government sales will certainly help keep RIM afloat, it’s the enterprise and consumer markets where the company really needs some wins. RIM insists that BlackBerry 10 will deliver them, but it won’t launch until later this year.

On Tuesday, the company’s stock price closed at $11.09 — a price it has not seen since December of 2003. Another ugly decline for RIM, which has shed more than three-quarters of its value in the past year alone.

Evidently, the brief run-up in RIM’s stock price prior to the unveiling of the company’s long-awaited BlackBerry 10 operating system at BlackBerry World earlier this month has proved untenable. And the prospect of watching the first BB10 phones go head to head with the next iteration of Apple’s iPhone this fall has sent investors fleeing into the woods.

RIMM data by YCharts

As I write this, RIM’s market cap is hovering at just about $6 billion. Hard to believe that just five years ago that number was about $80 billion, and RIM was the most valuable company in Canada by stock market value.

To wit, the U.S. Department of Defense has approved RIM’s BlackBerry 7 devices for agency-wide use. Vetted by the U.S. Army and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930; BlackBerry Torch 9810; BlackBerry Torch 9850 and 9860; and the BlackBerry Curve 9360 have all been certified for use by U.S. Army and other Defense Department personnel.

Welcome news for DoD employees who’ve been stuck using an older, slower version of the OS, and great news for RIM, which has won a renewed vote of confidence from what must certainly be its single largest customer. According to the DoD’s fiscal 2013 budget, it currently has about 250,000 BlackBerrys in use (along with “5,000 Apple iOS pilot systems” and “3,000 Android pilot systems”). So having its BlackBerry 7 portfolio approved for use across the department is a lucrative win indeed — especially if it paves the way for deployment of BlackBerry 10 at some point in the future.

Both are important hires for RIM, which has been without a CMO since 2011, and without a COO since Thorsten Heins became the company’s new CEO in January. They join the company at a difficult juncture, as it scrambles to launch its new BlackBerry 10 OS this fall, and again go head to head with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, operating systems that have bled RIM of market share with hardware that resonates with consumers and far more well-established application ecosystems.

According to Nielsen, ethnic minorities were highly likely to have a smartphone, with Asian Americans leading the way at 67.3 percent opting for smartphones. Nearly three in five Hispanic mobile subscribers use a smartphone as do a majority fo African-American phone users.

By contrast, only 44.7 percent of white mobile phone subscribers have a smartphone.

Women were slightly more likely than men to have a smartphone, with 50.9 percent of women having a smartphone compared to 50.1 percent of men.

As for which smartphone people are using, recent trends continue as Android is the most commonly used operating system, running on 48.5 percent of smartphones, while the iPhone is the most commonly used smartphone model, at 32 percent of devices. RIM’s share of the U.S. smartphone market is down to 11.6 percent. Microsoft made up 5.8 percent of smartphone users in the U.S, but the old Windows Mobile accounted for more than twice as much of that than did Windows Phone 7 devices.

Nokia on Wednesday filed patent infringement lawsuits against HTC, Research In Motion and ViewSonic in the U.S. and Germany. All told, there are 45 patents at issue, covering everything from dual-function antennas and multimode radios to application stores and data encryption.

“Many of these inventions are fundamental to Nokia products,” Nokia’s chief legal officer Louise Pentland said today in a statement. “We’d rather that other companies respect our intellectual property and compete using their own innovations, but as these actions show, we will not tolerate the unauthorized use of our inventions.”

Presumably, the company would be quite happy to tolerate authorized ones for licensing fees that would boost its flagging quarterly numbers. Which, for Nokia, is really what this is all about: establishing a new revenue stream while awaiting broader adoption of its new Lumia Windows Phones.

Reached for comment, RIM declined to offer one.

HTC had only this to say: “HTC has been a licensee of Nokia on wireless essential patents since 2003. We are waiting to receive a complaint and won’t have any comments until our legal team has received and reviewed it.”

ViewSonic has not yet replied.

The company said it will put its money where its mouth is, guaranteeing that amount for apps that meet certain quality levels and are submitted to its App World store before the launch of BlackBerry 10-based devices.

“Quality certified apps submitted to App World before launch will earn at least $10,000 in the 1st year on the market,” RIM said in a post on Twitter Tuesday, echoing comments made at its BlackBerry World conference in Orlando.

Gaining developer support for the new operating system will be critical for RIM, which has seen developer support wane as the company has been losing market share in recent years.

Earlier on Tuesday, RIM outlined several pieces of the new operating system, showed off a developer prototype running the software and brought out several partners that are building applications for BB10.

Research In Motion is in the midst of a major transition, aiming to shift BlackBerry from its current operating system to one based on the QNX operating system that powers its PlayBook tablet.

“We’re taking our time to make sure we get this right,” Heins said of the transition. “We’re making incredible progress on BlackBerry 10.”

Though final products running the new software are not expected until late this year, RIM is handing out prototypes running the new operating system to developers attending this week’s BlackBerry World conference in Orlando.

“We will be there later this year with an exciting device,” Heins said. “This is not the final hardware.”

In the meantime, though, RIM is rapidly losing market share as smartphone owners defect to the iPhone and Android.

Heins began his BlackBerry World talk by outlining what he believes separates BlackBerry users from smartphone owners generally.

He painted the device as, above all, a time-saving device.

“You are people of purpose,” Heins told the audience. “You believe the more you put into life, the more you get out of it. You do more, and you get more done in a day.”

During the demo, Heins and others from RIM tried to paint the new operating system as designed to be more fluid and elegant than current options, which rely on multiple apps and the “back” button in order to get things done.

RIM showed a number of features of the new operating system, including a keyboard that adjusts to the user, and a camera app that lets you go backward in time to make sure you get that perfect smile.

“It’s like Time Machine for photo-taking,” NPD analyst Ross Rubin said on Twitter during the keynote.

In a clear sign that the company is focused on its core business customers, Heins brought out executives from Cisco and Salesforce.com.

“We’re building WebEx for BB10 right now,” Cisco Senior VP Chuck Robbins told the crowd.

The keynote is Heins’s first major address since taking over as CEO during a leadership shakeup three months ago.

“Until this year, I’ve sat in the audience with you,” Heins said.

Below is a short clip from the keynote:

So RIM’s BlackBerry World conference, which kicks off later today with a keynote address from CEO Thorsten Heins, is sure to be closely watched — both for the harbingers of a turnaround and the telltale cracks and missteps indicative of further deterioration. This is a very important event for the company, one of its last opportunities to restore the faith of the thousands of partners, clients and developers who attend it and rally them behind RIM’s forthcoming new operating system, BlackBerry 10.

As one developer told me, “This is RIM’s big chance to tell the BlackBerry 10 story. And if they tell it well and persuade us to support it, maybe they’ll be able to keep their head above water.”

But that’s no easy task. BlackBerry 10 is vastly different from RIM’s current OS, with which developers are already well acquainted. Developing for it requires learning a new set of application development tools, and having faith enough in the OS to launch them on unproven hardware.

Patience for the former and a prevalence for the latter may be in short supply, given the year RIM has had to date, and developers’ tendency to gravitate toward the larger, more well-established smartphone platforms on which they can actually make money.

So with today’s keynote, Heins faces both a key challenge and an opportunity: To convince developers that RIM is worth backing, and to begin charting that bold new course that he keeps mentioning.

If he pulls it off, maybe we’ll find that RIM really is capable of its long-promised turnaround.

And if not? Well, the future looks pretty grim, as this BlackBerry World scene-setter note from RBC Capital’s Mark Sue demonstrates:

“With iPhone dominating North America and Android rapidly spreading throughout the rest of the world, sell-through of legacy BlackBerry is facing significant headwinds. We believe even RIM’s core enterprise market is at risk to rising Bring Your Own Device pressures and switching to iPhone and Android. RIM is resorting to price cuts to boost sell-through, but that may not be enough to stem the tide, in our view.”

Of the two, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s last CEO, spent the most time on the witness stand. Called by lawyers for Google, he bolstered Google’s argument that it was free to use parts of Java as it assembled its Android mobile operating system.

Scott McNealy, called by Oracle, said it was Sun’s practice to let other companies use Java, but only with a commercial license, the primary requirement of which was that the licensee ensure that Java remain compatible.

While numerous other phones from the likes of Nokia, Research In Motion and Motorola were compatible with Java applications, those on Android weren’t. Compatibility is one of the main points over which Oracle has been arguing with Google. Oracle contends that not only did Google violate its patents and copyrights, but it then went on to build its own incompatible version of Java, fracturing one of the oldest premises of Java’s existence: Write once, run anywhere.

Schwartz said he had hoped that Google would take out a commercial license, but in the end, he said, according to a report on CNet News, Sun opted “to grit our teeth” and support it as part of the Java community. He said that he opted not to sue Google over the issue.

Oracle also presented as evidence an email from Schwartz, describing Google as having taken Java “without attribution or contribution,” and then went on: “This is why I love scroogle,” referring to a now-defunct Web-search service that served up Google-like search results anonymously. See it below.

Interestingly, RIM insiders continue to insist that the company needs outside counsel to help it ink the licensing deal it hopes will shore up its business. But that seems an unusual explanation. Typically, bankers are brought in to help negotiate large strategic investments. Or sales. That said, I’m told the company is not planning to put itself on the block anytime soon.

And so, on Thursday, the company will debut in India the BlackBerry Curve 9220, a stripped-down 2G handset with a built-in FM radio, a two-megapixel camera, seven hours of talk time and a dedicated BlackBerry Messenger key. Price? 10,990 rupees, or $210 U.S.

For RIM, which in recent months has been discounting the prices of its smartphones in India to capture a larger share of the country’s growing smartphone market, the move seems a wise one. Targeting massive emerging markets like India with a smartphone specifically designed for them could do quite a bit to preserve RIM’s market share until it is finally able to bring its BlackBerry 10 devices to the rest of the world. CEO Thorsten Heins said as much during the company’s last earnings call, when he noted that the company planned to heavily subsidize a new line of low-end BlackBerry 7 phones. Presumably, the Curve 9220 is the first of those.

RIM plans to bring the 9220 to Indonesia — one of its most lucrative markets — in the coming weeks, as it extends the device’s reach and, hopefully, revenue along with it.

Evidently, the company has no plans to sell — not at this time, anyway.

No, RIM is looking for an investment bank to help it license its smartphone software or broker a strategic outside investment in the company.

An inevitable move, as the company conducts CEO Thorsten Heins’s “comprehensive review of strategic opportunities,” though it does sound like a bit of a dead end. After all, who could possibly be interested in licensing RIM’s BlackBerry platform, particularly the as-of-yet unreleased and unproven BlackBerry 10? Nokia has cast its lot with Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. And Motorola, Samsung and HTC have all cast theirs with Google’s Android OS. Both platforms have broader and stronger app ecosystems than RIM’s.

So, again, who could possibly be interested in licensing an unproven fourth BlackBerry OS with an inferior ecosystem?

The store opened in 2007, six months after Apple Inc. rolled out its first iPhone. It was supposed to mark the beginning of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd.’s retail push in the U.S. and Canada.

Instead, the store serves as a somber reminder of RIM’s failed strategy to stave off competition from larger rivals domestically.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Our own sources familiar with the matter confirm that this is indeed the case.

It’s not yet clear how far along the process is or what specific opportunities RIM is seeking counsel on, but actively seeking outside financial advice is usually a sign that the company is at least mulling a sale or restructuring. It’s also an indication that Heins is willing to consider a wider range of options than his predecessors. Which is a good thing.

That said, if RIM is mulling a possible sale the company is likely going to run into the same issue that has troubled it in the past when chatter like this has cropped up: RIM’s not a takeover target if no one wants it.

As I’ve written before, “Implicit in the phrase ‘takeover target’ is the idea that someone actually desires the target in question.” And in RIM’s case, I’m not quite sure that’s true.

The company’s market cap is currently about $6.74 billion. Is there anyone willing to spend such a sum plus premium on that? For the chance to turn around RIM’s foundering business? The chance to arrive late to market with another ill-conceived BlackBerry? To make sense of the BlackBerry OS-to-QNX transition? And then to go head to head with Apple and Google, which have been wiping the floor with newcomers and pioneers both?

Among respondents who plan to buy a smartphone in the next three months, 56 percent said they’ll purchase an iPhone. That’s two percentage points more than ChangeWave’s last survey, taken in December of 2011.

It’s also a better performance than all Apple’s rivals, save one. According to ChangeWave, interest in Samsung handsets held steady at 13 percent between both surveys. HTC’s also stayed flat at 3 percent. Meanwhile, Motorola fell by one point to 6 percent. And Research In Motion? The interest in the beleagured BlackBerry maker’s smartphones actually rose — from 2 percent to 3 percent.

The document reveals that in RIM’s February 2012 fiscal year, gross margins on hardware fell to 20 percent from 36 percent on a GAAP basis, and to 25 percent on a non-GAAP basis. And, according to Jefferies analyst Peter Misek, if you factor operating costs and inventory charges into those numbers, hardware-operating margins slip into negative territory: -8 percent on a GAAP basis; -3 percent on a non-GAAP basis, or -4 percent on an adjusted non-GAAP basis.

Nasty numbers, all of them. So which is the most accurate?

Misek believes it’s the adjusted non-GAAP number, which excludes restructuring, litigation and goodwill-impairment charges, but includes the $752 million in inventory write-offs RIM took for the quarter. Some might argue that including those write-offs skews the numbers here a bit, but Misek points out that RIM has written off inventory in the last two quarters, and is likely to do so again in the next.

So, whether it was 8 percent, 3 percent or 4 percent, RIM’s hardware division probably spent more than it made. Indeed, that may well have been one of the drivers of the “comprehensive review of strategic opportunities” CEO Thorsten Heins announced after the company reported abysmal fourth-quarter earnings. But that review isn’t likely to do much for the hardware business for some time. If hardware is in the red, then it’s probably going to remain there for a while longer — at least until the debut of RIM’s BlackBerry 10 devices. And that’s not scheduled to happen until late in the year.

The market research firm said today it expects worldwide tablet sales to surge 98 percent to 118.9 million units. Of those, Apple’s iPad is expected to account for a staggering 61 percent. Android tablets will account for 31.9 percent, tablets running Microsoft’s Windows 8 another four percent and RIM’s PlayBook about two percent.

The iPad’s lead in the tablet market is clearly a commanding one and tough to follow, let alone match, as Gartner’s Carolina Milanesi observed in her report on the new data.

“Despite PC vendors and phone manufacturers wanting a piece of the pie and launching themselves into the media tablet market, so far, we have seen very limited success outside of Apple with its iPad,” Milanesi said. “As vendors struggled to compete on price and differentiate enough on either the hardware or ecosystem, inventories were built and only 60 million units actually reached the hands of consumers across the world. The situation has not improved in early 2012, when the arrival of the new iPad has reset the benchmark for the product to beat.”

Worldwide Sales of Media Tablets to End Users by OS (Thousands of Units)

Source: Gartner (April 2012)

In a post to the BlackBerry Developer Blog this morning, RIM VP of Developer Relations Alec Saunders denied that the company is dropping sideloading from the PlayBook, though that is exactly what he said just a few days ago. According to Saunders, there is a more “nuanced” interpretation of the statement he made on Twitter.

What Saunders really meant when he said “we’re removing sideloading for consumers” is this: “We’re not getting rid of sideloading on the BlackBerry PlayBook OS or in BlackBerry 10.”

In other words, “removing” was simply a euphemism for “not removing” that went right over all our heads.

Clever!

So now Saunders is setting the record straight. In short, RIM will retain sideloading as a developer feature, and will add some antipiracy measures to it that will prevent its abuse by consumers.

“Sideloading on our platform is changing in nature,” Saunders wrote. “Sideloading is a developer feature. It exists so that developers can load their apps onto their own devices to test. It’s there so developers can send a beta release to their testing community for review. It is definitely not there for some people to side load a pirated app. … Starting with our next release of the BlackBerry PlayBook OS, we’re introducing a feature that will encrypt apps so they can only be run by the user who purchased the app.”

At least the way RIM tells it, anyway. Scott Totzke, RIM’s senior vice president of BlackBerry Security, tells Bloomberg that sales to the federal government are generally pretty good.

“Compared to the enterprise over the last year and a half or so, the federal business on whole is up,” said Totzke. “The employee base is shrinking, so if we’re looking at a market with fewer employees and our install base is stable to slightly up, that would seem to indicate that we have an increasing market share.”

There is a caveat to that argument, though. Until recently, RIM’s BlackBerry was among the only mobile platforms to be awarded FIPS 140-2 certification, the security requirement mandated by the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA) as standard for security in government agencies. But that’s beginning to change. There are now some FIPS 140-2 certified Android devices on the market and Apple is known to be seeking FISMA certification for the iPhone.

In other words, the BlackBerry doesn’t have the government market cornered anymore. And with more devices winning FISMA certs and more IT managers considering bring-your-own-device plans for their employees, RIM’s government stronghold may not be as solid as Totzke would like to think.