Telecommunications – Regional – RIM reaches agreement with 50% of operators for App World 2.0

Research In Motion (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM) has reached agreements with approximately half of Latin America’s operators to preinstall the Application World 2.0 version on its BlackBerry smartphones, Angel Aldana, RIM’s senior alliance solutions manager for Latin America, told BNamericas.

The company announced last week that Application World 2.0 was available in Latin America for paid applications, providing users access to a much broader range of apps. These apps can be purchased using credit card, PayPal and other pay mechanisms.

Agreements have been reached in Brazil with Vivo (NYSE: VIV) and Nextel but not with Claro or TIM.

In some cases it depends on whether operators already have their own white label app store, which is the case for Claro, of America Movil (NYSE: AMX).

RIM is seeking to prioritize applications that have local content, and applications that are seen to have a broad appeal are being translated into Spanish and Portuguese. For example, a fitness application that was popular in the US is being translated.

Aldana has noticed that some 30-40% of applications downloads in the region are those that allow the user to personalize their phones in some way. For example, flags were popular during the World Cup as are apps that allow the personalization of incoming calls.

According to the executive, on a global level, to date the Application World platform has been downloaded 33mn times and, on average, users download some 1mn applications to those platforms daily.

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September 23, 2010 • Tags: Operators App, World • Posted in: Business Tips

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