BlackBerrys are cult devices, inspiring a kind of slavish devotion perhaps matched only by Apple products. But while Apple’s corporate history is familiar to many, no one has written a comprehensive corporate history of Research In Motion, the company behind the iconic BlackBerry.

Canadian historian and author Alastair Sweeny is set to release the first such book in September. Called BlackBerry Planet: The Story of Research in Motion and the Little Device that Took the World by Storm, it tracks the evolution of the BlackBerry from RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis’ 1960s childhood to present day. Forbes reached Sweeny at his Ottawa home to discuss Lazaridis’ similarity to Steve Jobs, what RIM thinks of his book and why future BlackBerrys may morph into telepathic gadgets he calls “telebrain.”

Forbes: What inspired you to write a book about RIM, and why do you think no one has written one before?

Alastair Sweeny: Corporate history is my passion. I know people at RIM and people who do business with RIM who I knew would be helpful in terms of background. RIM is a great Canadian success story, so as a Canadian there’s a nice element there.

I also saw a business opportunity. This year is the 10th anniversary of the first true BlackBerry device. I figured someone would write about RIM sooner or later and it might as well be me. I was amazed no one had done a book yet when Apple and Microsoft have been done to death. It may be the remoteness of RIM, being up in Waterloo, away from Silicon Valley and all its tech reporters.

You mention you spoke to some people at RIM. How much access did the company give you?

It was a hard book to research. RIM was not too friendly. I interviewed some executives, like [former RIM director] Gary Mousseau and corresponded with the big guys [co-CEOs Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie] on e-mail, mostly on background.

I tried to chase some other people down and was unable to. Then I put Chapter 1 in its entirety on a public wiki site, which attracted the attention of several early engineers from RIM and RIM partners like Ericsson, BellSouth and [Canadian operator] Rogers. People came out of the woodwork in May and June, so we delayed the book for a month and added in more information. They were very forthcoming and would say things like, “No, you haven’t quite got it here.” I also have a friend with a BlackBerry collection that goes way back, who gave me some good insight on the devices.

It’s more fun to talk about how RIM got to this point than its current status as a mature corporation, so I concentrated on the peripheral and early guys. There’s also a lot of stuff out there that hadn’t been pulled together. It was like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle.

In the book, Lazaridis, who founded RIM at age 23, is likened to a modern Leonardo da Vinci. What’s your take?

I consider him a visionary who is smart enough to take his vision to market. [Apple CEO] Steve Jobs is like that. In the book, I talk about young Lazaridis being a Star Trek fanatic, tinkering as a student, trying to make force fields. He always had this straight-ahead vision and childlike sense of wonder. I think the Star Trek Communicator is the inspiration for all the machines he builds.

The similarities end at a certain point. Steve Jobs supposedly gets involved in everything. He can drive people crazy, but you see the difference in Apple’s quality of design. Early on, Lazaridis divided engineering from marketing. It insulated the engineers but also meant RIM was using clunky fonts until a few years ago. With RIM, form is function.

With Apple, maybe it’s the other way around.

RIM has had the same co-CEOs since 1992. What accounts for that longevity?

They’re a good tag team. Balsillie’s job is to give feedback to the engineers. He believed in RIM from the beginning; he even mortgaged his house to buy RIM shares. He can execute, and that’s been a large part of RIM’s success. All of a sudden, he arrives and RIM is playing hardball.

You dedicate an entire chapter to patent issues. How central were patents to RIM’s evolution?

The battle with NTP was a big grow-up experience for RIM. The settlement was the largest technology patent settlement in U.S. history, but I argue it was worth every penny. It was great publicity and by the time the trial was over, RIM’s business had quintupled or more, and $650 million was something they shrugged off. Plus, the settlement ensured that NTP had a whole bunch of cash to go after RIM’s competitors like Palm. Those battles are behind RIM now. Lazaridis now says, when anyone has a good idea, RIM patents it right away.

What do you see as the other defining events in RIM’s 20-plus years as a company?

Like any high-tech company, there are a lot of stories about subsisting on Coke and pizza, writing code for 36 hours straight. One of Lazaridis’ teachers told him the real technology breakthrough would be in mobile texting. After college, Lazaridis bounced from one contract to another, assembled a team and discovered a way to do two-way paging. When operators brought in Internet mail, RIM was ready. They had the market to themselves for a few years before people started to catch up.

Sept. 11 and the 2001 anthrax scare really made a case for BlackBerry’s necessity as a security device. The American government has half a million BlackBerrys in operation, making it, far and away, RIM’s biggest customer.

You include twin chapters on BlackBerry’s benefits and its social ills. Has all the talk about “CrackBerrys” affected RIM?

Linda Duxbury, a professor at the Carleton University School of Business did a multi-year study about BlackBerry use and how tough it is on some families. In her study, 66% of spouses felt the only appropriate use of BlackBerrys was during business hours, and 55% felt their partners inappropriately used their BlackBerrys several times a day. My personal view is that businesses should be aware of the damage that can be done if BlackBerrys are not controlled. Every business should have a policy on smart-phone use.

When RIM talks about this issue, it only says people can develop BlackBerry dependence, not addiction. The irony is that RIM thought BlackBerrys would improve quality of life because it allows for a quick, quiet connection that doesn’t bother other people.

What do you think RIM’s next move will be?

They’ve stumbled in a few areas. The company is getting big and bureaucratic; they have to watch that. I think they rushed the Storm to market, but they’re so passionate about getting it right, I imagine they will. RIM also didn’t take the Web experience as seriously as it should have, but I have no doubt it will pull up its socks and do a proper BlackBerry browser.

The real question is, how will they innovate, how will they keep up the pace? I was talking to an engineer who worked with RIM in the early days and asked, “Will RIM ever get away from the BlackBerry form factor and put its operating system out there for laptops and [Internet] tablets?” And he said, “I’ve been trying to get Lazaridis to do that for years!”

Tackling the global mobile market will be up to Balsillie. In order to beat Nokia, RIM will have to [sign deals] country by country, carrier by carrier. If anyone can do it, Balsillie can. He’s a take-no-prisoners guy.

You have this theory that RIM wants BlackBerrys to be “telebrains.”

The idea of the telebrain is a brain in your pocket. Experts say the future will bring many radios on a single chip, mobile storage as big as the human brain, high-definition mobile video and wireless spectrum galore. Lazaridis has been funding an institute of quantum physics [in Canada] for years. One engineer I spoke to said Lazaridis is interested in marrying quantum physics with mobile devices. You could also call it techno-telepathy; technology that allows people to stay in such close touch, it’s almost like telepathy.

A Brief History Of The BlackBerry
Elizabeth Woyke, Forbes

A book in Arabic about gay travel in the Middle East is running into problems because of what gay-rights groups perceive as a derogatory translation of the word describing homosexuals.

The book, ‘Gay Travels in the Muslim World’, is a compilation of stories penned by gay Muslim and non-Muslim authors. It was translated into Arabic by the Lebanon-based publisher, Arab Diffusion.

The Arabic-speaking gay community is taking issue with the publisher’s translation of the word gay into the Arabic word shadh, which means abnormal or deviant.

The book’s editor, however, is pleased, as the controversial translation is fueling a positive debate in a region where homosexuality, for the most part, is taboo.

“Arab Diffusion didn’t mean any harm in using the word,” Michael Luongo, editor and co-author of the book told The Media Line.

He said the word was commonly used in the Arab world to describe gay people, and that gay-rights groups were trying to change this habit.

Gay-rights groups in the Middle East take offense to having their sexual orientation described as a perversion and would much prefer the word homosexual be translated with neutral word such as mithli, which means same.

“Arab Diffusion was very happy to put out the book and it wasn’t their intention that this would be a problematic word, because the word is part of common discourse in the Arabic world,” Luongo said.

The issue of the translation is being debated in the blogosphere and in academic circles.

Algerian blogger L’Algerie en Rose, who claims openly that he is gay and that “the majority of young people are frustrated because of the taboos”, wrote that “the terminology in Arabic related to homosexuality is very derogatory”.

“There is a need for a neutral terminology to identify us; we must work to translate such terms, and enrich the Arabic dictionary,” he added.

But some, like Luongo, see the benefit of this translation, as it vitalizes the debate on homosexuality and the need to be more sensitive to this sector.

The editor of Huriya Blog wrote, “I would have rather they used the word mithli, which literally means same (i.e. same-sex), but it is so nice that there is an Arabic translation to this great book, that one might even overlook the crude word.”

‘Gay Travels in the Muslim World’ (Harrington Park Press, 2007) is a compilation of 18 edited non-fiction stories written by individual gay authors, both Muslims and non-Muslim, looking into gay life in these areas.

U.S.-based Luongo, a Western photojournalist who contributed a segment about homosexuality in Afghanistan, insists it is not a guide book but rather a peek into a world that is widely under-covered.

“A huge reason I did the book is that there are many people who write about homosexuality in the Muslim world-Westerners in particular-who have actually never been there,” he said. “I found things were not as black and white as the news would have you believe.”

“Interestingly, the whole debate about the language issue – academics love it and I think some people are even thinking of doing a thesis on this,” he said, notably amused. “It’s a new audience that we discovered with the Arabic translation.”

Gay-rights groups have been arguing about the use of the word shadh for some time, and the controversy over the book helps them put their argument forward to the media using a live example, he said, and educate their publics about problems that arise in naming things.

While the book in English challenged stereotypes that Westerners have about gay Muslims and about Muslims in general, the Arabic translation will serve to shatter prejudices within the Muslim world about gay people, he said.

Luongo hopes it will also draw more Muslims into the debate about gay rights.

The book is groundbreaking in that is the first book of its kind to be translated into Arabic before being translated into any other language.

Luongo was advised he would be better off translating it first into French, but he said this would have limited the target audience to educated people in the Maghreb and in Lebanon.

Now that it has been translated into Arabic, he hopes it can reach a broader audience, but he is under no illusion as to the distribution limitations of a book on such an explosive topic.

“I don’t know how people are going to get the book,” he admitted, “and not a lot of the books will be published. But just having the book out there allows a valuable discourse.”

The Media Line website

SAN FRANCISCO, July 12 (UPI) — Linda the penguin has split up two male penguins who lived as a nesting couple for six years at the San Francisco Zoo, caretakers said.

Male penguins Harry and Pepper had been so content together they were allowed to incubate and hatch an egg laid by another Magellanic penguin last year, zookeeper Anthony Brown said.

“Of all of the parents that year, they were the best. They took very good care of their chick,” Brown told the San Francisco Examiner in a story published Saturday.

Enter the widow Linda, who began courting Harry in her partner’s old burrow shortly after his death this past winter, Brown said.

“To be completely anthropomorphizing, Linda seems conniving,” Brown said. “She’s got her plan. I don’t think she was wanting to be a single girl for too long.”

Though Harry and Linda have been nesting in recent months, molting season in late summer tends to reshuffle couples, KTVU-TV reported Sunday.

“It’ll be interesting to see if Harry spends any of that time with Pepper,” Brown said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

WASHINGTON (AFP) –

Like Elvis before him, Michael Jackson is topping the charts in death as in life.

And the “King of Pop” is rivaling the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” in another category as well — posthumous sales of memorabilia.

Over 45,000 Michael Jackson-related items were being offered for sale on Saturday at online auction house eBay.com, two days after the sudden death of the singer at his rented Beverly Hills home at the age of 50.

They ranged from Web domain names — michaeljacksonmemorial.com, for example — at hopeful prices of one million dollars or more to copies of US newspapers featuring front-page news of his death for as little as 99 cents.

Of the products offered for sale, nearly 17,500 were music recordings and nearly 17,000 were memorabilia.

EBay’s home page displayed a special “Remembering the King of Pop” category offering “Memorabilia, Music, Autographs, Records.”

The collectibles for direct sale or auction included Michael Jackson posters, dolls, ticket stubs, concert programs, newspapers, magazines, tote bags, pins, badges, stickers, T-shirts and other clothing.

And, of course, albums, thousands and thousands of albums.

One of the more unusual items listed on eBay was a white glove doubling as an invitation to a “Michael Jackson party.” It can be had for 50,000 dollars with the money purportedly going to support an orphanage in Kyrgyzstan.

A “rare and original” black felt fedora said to have been autographed by the pop legend himself had attracted 18 bids by late Saturday, the highest at 9,899 dollars.

An electric guitar also said to have been signed by the singer was being offered for 10,000 dollars. By late Saturday, it had been either sold or removed from the site.

Dozens of replica red leather jackets like the ones Jackson wore in the music videos of “Thriller” and “Beat It” are on sale for prices ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

Earlier, a 1984 Michael Jackson “Thriller” doll had attracted 27 bids with a top offer of 167.50 dollars.

Thousands of items of Michael Jackson memorabilia were also being offered for sale on online classifieds site Craigslist.

Over at online retail store Amazon.com, the top 15 selling albums were all by Jackson, including two made with his brothers when they were the “Jackson 5.”

Nine of the top 10 selling albums at Apple’s iTunes music store were from the “King of Pop” with “The Essential Michael Jackson” leading the way.

Seven of the top 10 songs being downloaded on iTunes were by the singer, with “Man in the Mirror” the most popular.

The surge in Jackson popularity was not limited to the United States.

Jackson was also set to top the British album chart on Sunday.

His greatest hits album “Number Ones” was set for top spot and up to half a dozen of the singer’s other albums could also make the Top 75, according to the Official Charts Company.

“We always find where a great icon dies that there’s a massive uplift in their music sales as fans want to connect and express their grief through the records,” said Gennaro Castaldo of retailer HMV.

“We’ve seen this with people like John Lennon, Elvis, Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra over the years. With Michael Jackson in particular, he was just on the cusp of a big comeback anyway and we were already beginning to see a lift in sales.”

Jackson had been scheduled to play the first of 50 comeback concerts in London on July 13.

itproportal.com

(1) The N97 is not Nokia’s most expensive phone. This crown belongs to the Nokia 8800 Gold Arte which costs £1399 but the £499 N97 is the Finnish company’s flagship model, its nec plus ultra and the one which is set to take on the Apple iPhone head on.

(2) The N97 is only Nokia’s second touchscreen phone, the first one being the 5800 Xpressmusic. One can argue though that the N800 and the N810, which were technically mobile internet devices, were the first touchscreen devices from Nokia.

(3) The N97 has the most onboard storage found on any mobile phones. It comes with 32GB worth of storage onboard and users can add an additional 16GB through a microSD card. 32GB microSD cards will be available later this year and could bring the total storage to 64GB.

(4) Hardwarewise, the N97 is quite middle-range without any significant improvements over past Nokia mobile phones. Apart from the beefed up memory, it has a 5-megapixel camera (Sony, Samsung and LG all have plans for 12-megapixel models), a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen (the iPhone, the G1, Sony Ericsson’s Aino, the Pre all have capacitive displays) and a rather slow CPU, an ARM11 running at 434MHz (the Toshiba TG01 has a 1Ghz Qualcomm processor).