RIM plans new contact management features on BB10 devices

RIM plans new contact management features on BB10 devices

Research In Motion plans to provide BlackBerry users with an easy way to tap their contacts' public profiles including blog posts, tweets, emails and other details in its latest push to regain ground in the smartphone market.

The new contact management feature, which pulls in contact details from social media and other Internet sites into a single Blackberry page, will be available on RIM's next generation of smartphones that are set to launch early next year, the company said on Thursday.

RIM has seen its once dominant position in the smartphone market slip away to rivals including Apple Inc and Samsung  and the company's fate depends on the success of the BB10 devices.

"BlackBerry has always had this heritage of productivity ... We are just going to make it better yet again, when we launch BB10," said T.A. McCann, who is spearheading the development of the contacts and BlackBerry Messenger applications for the new platform.

The new smartphones that will replace RIM's current line-up of aging devices will run on the BlackBerry 10 operating system that is currently in development.

McCann said the built-in contacts app on BB10 will aggregate all contact information, status updates and meetings for a contact in one place. It will also pull in any current status updates from contacts on Facebook, Twitter and other places giving users a wealth of up-to-date information on their contacts.

Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM is hoping that its new line of devices will help it regain market share that has been ceded to snazzier devices such as Apple's iPhone and others that run on Google Inc's Android operating system.

McCann, who was the founder and Chief Executive of Seattle-based Gist that was acquired by RIM in early 2011, promises that BlackBerry users will get to enjoy many of Gist's innovative contact management ideas on the new BB10 platform.

McCann said many of the features have already been built into the contact management system on the latest version of the operating system that powers RIM's PlayBook tablet device.

India leads world in junk emails:

India has become the top spam-spewing 

nation on the planet, suggests a report.

Compiled by security firm Sophos, the report ranks nations by the amount of junk mail routed through computers in each country.

India has leapt to the top of the spam chart in less than a year, rapidly overtaking the US, said Sophos.

About 10% of all junk mail sent across the web came from or passed through computers in India, said the firm.

India's rapid rise up the chart of spam producers has been helped by the rapid growth of the web in the country, said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

The inexperience of the many first-time net users in India had led many to fall victim to hi-tech criminals, he said.

"The latest stats show that, as more first-time internet users get online in growing economies, they are not taking measures to block the malware infections that turn their PCs into spam-spewing zombies," he added.

Social networks

About 80% of all junk email is thought to be routed through PCs hijacked by hi-tech criminals who use computer viruses to seize control of the machines. Once a machine is under their control they use them to send out mail on their behalf, typically relaying it from another nation.

Sophos estimates that about 9.3% of all junk mail travels through Indian computers. In second place is the US (8.3%) and South Korea (5.7%) is third.

India's rise up the rankings was also helped by the ongoing shift away from traditional email by spammers. More and more of them, said Sophos, were using social networks as the route to spread their junk messages.

Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest were all being hit with increasing regularity by spammers, said Sophos.