DoubleTwist’s New Alarm Clock For Android Wakes You With Your DoubleTwist Tunes

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DoubleTwist, the maker of the popular suite of applications for syncing music and media between devices, has just surprised its users with the release of a new application today. And this time, the app branches out from the company’s prior focus on media management – it’s an alarm clock app for Android phones.

But on closer inspection, DoubleTwist Alarm actually does makes sense as an extension of the DoubleTwist brand, as the app is designed to wake you with music. In fact, it even connects with the company’s mobile Player app, allowing you to configure songs or entire playlists as the music you wake to.

The Android-only app has an attractive interface with big, bold numbers, and a number of expected features including the option to switch between analog and digital interfaces, support for multiple and recurring alarms, custom labels, and a built-in selection of alarm sounds to choose from. DoubleTwist users can also set up the app to work with the music they have in the Player app, if they choose.

There’s another nifty feature too: something called “SleepCycle,” which will suggest a handful of times you can wake up that correspond to full sleep cycles. By doing so, the idea is that you’ll wake up feeling more refreshed. Of course, since the app doesn’t actually know when you fall asleep, that functionality is going to be hit-or-miss in terms of results. But it’s kind of a cute thing to add.

The app costs 99 cents during its launch day special, but will double in price after the first 10,000 users. You can grab it from Google Play here.

Amid UDID Uncertainty, AppRedeem Creates New ID Scheme, Groupon Adopts

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Six months ago, Apple began making some big changes to its operating system ahead of the release of iOS5. Among them, was the news that it would begin ramping up the deprecation of the UDID — Apple’s go-to identifier that ties users to their specific iOS device. The company remained silent for months, but, as Kim-Mai reported last week, Apple recently began to take action, and is now rejecting apps that attempt to access those identifiers. Naturally, this has the iOS developer community sounding the alarm bells. Even though Apple made its intentions known months ago, since then, there’s been no consensus among developers as to the best replacement. Some have perhaps expected Apple to propose a solution, but the company has remained silent.

Apps that access UDIDs are still making it into the App Store, but developers now have to disclose the fact that they’re using them, and ask users for permission. Because of the mounting privacy concerns (from Congress, etc.), Apple is going to nix UDIDs altogether, but it remains unclear how long that will take. In the meantime, developers are scrambling to find alternatives, and Kim-Mai yesterday laid out some of the options available to those looking to take preemptive action. Of the choices, MoPub thinks the best near-term solution is the open source project, OpenUDID. Crashlytics has proposed another variation, SecureUDID.

Whatever the solution, there’s no question that the UDID issue has big potential ramifications for mobile advertising, as Amit Runchal pointed out. Developers and mobile ad companies unilaterally need to find a workable solution, and yesterday we caught up with Sheffield Nolan, the Co-founder of AppRedeem, whose team has developed its own alternative to UDIDs with what it’s calling the “Organizational Specific Device Identifier” (ODID).

Nolan says that, while Apple is backing off a bit on UDIDs in the short term with opt-in requirements, it’s really just postponing the inevitable. The “universal” part of UDID will end, and a replacement is imperative so that developers can switch before the next scare. The CEO tells us that the AppRedeem, which, for those unfamiliar, is an advertising platform designed to help developers boost engagement and drive new users to their mobile apps, tried a bunch of options, including fingerprinting, but they were found lacking.

Really, any solution predicated on having a global identifier for the device still doesn’t address the real privacy issues, he said, so the team began working on hashing Mac addresses. They did this for about six months, until they realized that, without the ID being bound to an organization, again, users would experience the same privacy concerns inherent to the UDID.

So, the team created ODID as a way to address user privacy issues. Over-simplifying, an ODID is created by appending a hash of the MAC address to an organization’s “secret key” to create the payload, and then applying a hash wrapper to the payload. Furthermore, the ODID is sandboxed within the specific organization that created it, and the device’s Mac address is used as the seed for the ODID.

This is the key: There’s no way to derive the MAC address from an ODID, because the MAC address is only a seed, so Company A, for example, could not determine if Company B’s ODID belonged to Company A’s users — even if they had the “secret key” — while both companies still have what they need to track their own users. What’s more, the ODID does not disappear with a device reset, so individual game developers can track their users even if there’s a reset, which is really what everyone is clamoring for.

Beginning on Thursday, AppRedeem began rolling out an update to its SDK with ODID support, which will be available for all customers by the weekend. The SDK is in plain source code, so everyone can see how it works, and AppRedeem is sharing the steps to create an ODID to AppRedeem’s spec so that users can do it on their own or just use its SDK.

AppRedeem currently has 3.4 million members on its platform, and App Trailers, its iOS app, has been downloaded 1 million times (and is currently seeing 20K downloads a day), the CEO says. The company’s advertisers include Groupon, Zynga, Disney, TinyCo, GameLoft, Priceline, Glu, Addmirred, AOL, and Smule; all in all, Nolan says, over half of the top 100 grossing apps use AppRedeem, which means the startup had good reason to find a solution that works for everyone. Groupon is the first of its advertisers to begin using the startup’s UDID-free SDK, as they were in a rush to realize full compliance with Apple, and wanted to switch as soon possible.

Although the UDID affects mobile advertisers (and mobile ad networks) most acutely, it really touches any iOS developer looking to track usage, downloads, clicks, etc. — all stuff that’s essential to mobile ad rev models. And there are a lot of those. As Amit points out, the UDID debacle really shows that the way Apple deals with its apps isn’t just going to affect individual business models, it has implications for the way an entire industry operates.

Apple likely never intended the UDID to become so vital to the economy they created, but it has. Most companies with iOS apps are scrambling to find a solution, and Nolan says that they’ve been in talks with TinyCo, Zynga, GameLoft, and that the majority of companies he’s talked to, both big and small, are trying to find a workaround. Any mobile business that has as its priorities both consumer privacy and advertisers tracking needs a better alternative to UDID. Nolan says that he hasn’t seen anyone really taking the lead, so the team has pushed to turn ODID into a replacement scheme for UDIDs — in such a way that doesn’t just solve the problem for their own clients, but offers a model for all businesses looking for better privacy tools for their users.

The startup is currently in the process of pushing its SDK live, and is in the process of creating a landing page and docs, which the AppRedeem CEO says should be live on the homepage soon. We’ll include a link when it goes live. AppRedeem homepage here.

What do you think?

Israeli-American Accelerator UpWest Labs Graduates Its First Batch Of Startups

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When it comes to countries with thriving startup ecosystems, Israel ranks among the best. With nearly 5,000 startups currently in business — second only to the U.S. — the country’s pool of entrepreneurial talent has been attracting Western businesses and entrepreneurs for years. But, in January, Gil Ben-Artzy and Shuly Galili launched a startup accelerator that aims to reverse this trend in favor of Israeli entrepreneurs, by bringing the country’s promising founders to Silicon Valley to help them kick start their businesses. And, today, after 10 weeks of mentoring, networking, and iterating, UpWest Labs is revealing the six graduates of its inaugural batch.

As Eric pointed out last month, while Israel has a thriving startup community, challenges remain. The market is small (Israel is roughly the same size as New Jersey), and Israeli venture capital has been making a shift to focusing on late-stage investments. So focusing on early-stage businesses, gathered in small cohorts, is important to UpWest.

Galili also tells us that UpWest is currently the only accelerator in the U.S. focused solely on Israeli startups. Of course, while its entrepreneurs are unique in that sense, UpWest is emulating the litany of accelerators and incubators that have popped up over the last few years, in the sense that it’s bringing entrepreneurs to its offices in Palo Alto, offering them housing in Menlo Park, access to a long list of local mentors, and is providing seed funding in the $15-20,000 range in exchange for up to 8 percent equity.

Though its model may sound familiar, UpWest knows it has to differentiate if it wants to be around for any significant amount of time. So, as opposed to the traditional approach of accelerators, which generally focus on ambitious founders slinging tons of ideas, UpWest is focused on finding entrepreneurs who have already built products that have found some traction, so that they can use their time in Silicon Valley more effectively. UpWest also aims to keep its class size small in order to provide companies with maximum attention.

After officially opening its doors in January, UpWest shortly thereafter welcomed its first class of entrepreneurs to the Valley. As a new generation of consumer-focused startups has emerged in Isreal over the last few years, UpWest is looking to build a valuable resource for this new set of companies tackling the consumer Web.

Last week, the accelerator graduated its first-ever batch of startups, including mobile, social, gaming, and SaaS companies. Six startups are officially being released into the wild, and below we’re offering a glimpse into what makes them tick.

Contapps is a universal contacts platform designed to help you connect, however you want, with the people you care about. The startup is operating under the assumption that the tools and networks we use to communicate all live in apps in our smartphones that are scattered all over our phone, so Contapps has built an app that puts contact info front and center.

The “contacts platform” brings together free SMS, Facebook, Twitter, and more so that you can choose the best medium to reach out to your contacts — all in one place. The startup’s Android app has racked up over 500,000 downloads, and an average 4.4 star rating across 5,500+ reviews.

OffScale is a database version management platform — or, in its own words, Git for databases — aimed at allowing businesses to focus on creating faster product development cycles and releases by taking the hassle out of copying and managing their databases.

OffScale wants to help you organize and manage those snapshots you take of databases, including offering easy rollback, even if your database runs in a third-party cloud, as the software runs the same on your laptop and on the virtual server. The startup is also offering the ability to create and maintain datasets for automatic testing, along with the protection of being able to speedily tag and restore databases. Offscale is currently in beta, and while in beta, the software is free to download.

Tradyo likens its used goods marketplace to a “StumbleUpon for tangible things.” The startup’s iPhone app enables users to buy and sell used goods in your area in realtime. The app uses GPS to reveal the cool stuff available around you, allowing you to sell an item, search your community for cool stuff, and receive push notifications when an item you want gets listed, or when someone wants to buy what you’ve listed.

Like Antengo, Tradyo wants to improve upon the mobile Craigslist model in an attempt to make classifieds safe, easy, and realtime — in other words, leveraging the popularity of the collaborative consumption movement to re-imagine what it means to shop locally.

Senexx is using its patent-pending technology to help enterprise organizations identify and manage expertise via an internal Q&A platform. The startup’s advanced parsing and knowledge-routing algorithms aim to reduce the amount of time it takes for employees to find answers or domain experts with specific knowledge in a particular subject within their company. This is complemented by the ability to catalog past solutions to certain events or situations — the overall goal being to streamline in-house expertise in order to more effectively deal with problems, or opportunities.

The startup’s private, cloud-based service integrates into your company’s exiting enterprise networking platforms to allow it to take advantage of current collaboration systems, whether it be email, instant messaging, or internal social networks, in an effort to improve cross-team collaboration. To find out more about pricing, contact the founders here.

Bfly is a “mobile experience” which enables users to connect to other people, locally and around the world, using a virtual, 3-D butterfly of all things. The startup is currently in private beta, and will be launching its iOS and Android mobile apps in the next few months. But from what we can tell, Bfly is almost like a mobile, virtual chain letter. Each user creates a unique virtual butterfly and passes it to a friend’s mobile device when they cross paths.

According to Bfly, as the butterfly hops from one mobile devices to another, users can track its journey, view stats and photos taken by other users it meets as it goes. The startup is obviously looking to tap into the far-reaching potential of mobile technology to give users a fun, somewhat serendipitous, and quirky way to meet new people.

Invi is currently in stealth mode, so the team isn’t saying much about its product, other than the fact that it is trying to reinvent SMS, and perhaps iMessage along the way, by building a next-gen texting app for mobile devices. If that piques your curiosity, you can sign up for the startup’s beta here.

What Does A Post-UDID World Look Like For iPhone And iPad Developers?

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This past week has been a big wake-up call for the iOS developer community. The need to move away from UDIDs, or an ID scheme that many developers rely on to power advertising and store data about their users, took on extra urgency after Apple issued a few app rejections related to UDID use over the past week and a half.

Even though Apple told developers that it would deprecate UDIDs about six months ago, the community hadn’t yet converged on a good alternative.

There is a lot of misinformation right now. Because Apple often communicates policy changes through one-off app rejections instead of publishing a clear and transparent notice to everyone, developers get incredibly aggravated by rumors. While being super secretive stokes consumer appetite for Apple products, it’s a ridiculously awful way to operate a platform that 700,000 apps rely on.

Chartboost, which does direct advertising trades between developers, sent out an e-mail last night saying that the stories about UDID rejections are “completely fabricated.”

But another indie developer, TapBots, posted an actual copy of a rejection notice they received this morning (pictured below).

So what is going on? 

So this morning, apps are still getting through the approval process even if they access UDIDs, according to conversations with some of the ad and install networks. The distinction is that they need to disclose this fact to users and ask for permission.

“There is literally not one developer’s app that we could find that had a rejection due to UDID alone,” said Peter Farago, who is vice president of marketing at Flurry, a mobile analytics company that serves more 160,000 apps.

But is the UDID still going away some day? Yes, but I don’t know the timeline. Amid media and Congressional scrutiny, Apple is moving away from letting developers access UDIDs or unique device identification numbers. UDIDs carry more privacy risks than cookies on the web, because they can’t be cleared or deleted and they’re tied to the most personal of devices — the phone we carry with us everywhere.

What can you use instead? Here are a bunch of competing methods for generating IDs. (Forgive me because I’m not technical. But this is my best understanding about the relative advantages and disadvantages of each method.) If you want to read an ad platform’s take on this, Jim Payne at MoPub has a survey of all the techniques as well.

Device Fingerprinting: This is a way of generating an ID number from a number of characteristics about a user, like what kind of mobile browser they have, the device they’re using or their location. You need many parameters to generate enough combinations so there aren’t duplicates.
Who’s doing it? Mobile App Tracking, a Seattle-based firm. The company behind it, Has Offers, counts LivingSocial and Zynga among its clientele. They charge 5 cents per install for 0 to 5,000 installs, 3 cents per install for between 5 and 25,000 installs and a penny an install once you get past 25,000 installs.
Pros: It probably won’t get rejected as it’s outside of Apple’s control.
Cons: It’s a probabilistic approach that carries the risk of generating duplicates. Mobile App Tracking says they minimize this by only generating a fingerprint at one point in time when the user initially opens the app. “Over a long period of time, fingerprinting can produce discrepancies. But the reason we’re seeing such a high percentage of accuracy is because we’re only fingerprinting for a short period of time,” says Micah Gantman, the director of mobile business at HasOffers, the company behind Mobile App Tracking.

Copy-and-Pasteboard Method:
This is roughly analogous to the way you might copy something from one application like Microsoft Word and paste it in Powerpoint. “The copy and paste buffer is really meant for copying and pasting from function to function,” says Craig Palli, a vice president of business development at Fiksu, a Charles River Ventures-backed company that helps mobile developers get users cheaply. “It was not intended to be used this way.”
Who’s doing it? Appsfire’s OpenUDID and Crashlytics’ SecureUDID, and there’s super drama between the two of them! MoPub, which operates a real-time bidding platform more mobile advertising and was founded by some early AdMob folks, is putting its weight behind OpenUDID.
Pros: Probably not getting rejected by Apple. Both OpenUDID and SecureUDID give consumers opt outs.
Cons: There are a couple of developers who have raised concerns around data leakage with OpenUDID, but Appsfire’s co-founder Ouriel Ohayon says those have been resolved. SecureUDID was created by one of the contributors to OpenUDID because they thought that Appsfire’s approach was flawed. It assigned a single identifier to each device. SecureUDID creates multiple identifiers per device and a developer would need a domain and a salt to access them. Ohayon says OpenUDID serves a totally different need than SecureUDID (read his comments below!)

HTML5 First Party Cookies:
This mimics what advertising networks have been doing for years on the desktop web to track users through cookies. If it were implemented in native mobile apps, you’d have to force the user to open a Safari browser window when they first open the app or click on an ad.
Who’s doing it? Don’t know, but it wouldn’t be surprising if companies behind web-based ad targeting companies eventually moved in to create solutions for mobile developers.
Pros: Probably won’t get rejected. “It’s really similar to what we’ve been doing over the last 15 years on the web,” Palli said.
Cons: It’s a bad user experience to make users open a web browser every time they install an app.

Wi-Fi MAC Address:
The MAC or media access control address is an identifier that’s assigned to networked devices (whether they’re smartphones or laptops). Like the UDID, it’s definitely unique to every device.
Who’s doing it? The ODIN, or open device identification number, is generating ID numbers from the MAC Address. InMobi, an advertising network that has raised about $216 million and is backed by Kleiner Perkins, has chosen ODIN.
Pros: It’s definitely unique to every single device, just like the UDID. So it would be an easy one-to-one replacement.
Cons: This probably won’t last very long and it’s our understanding that Apple will also eventually crack down on access to MAC addresses. The MAC Address has the same privacy flaws as the UDID because it’s unique to every device and is hard to erase or clear, unless you jailbreak your device and spoof it (which most people aren’t going to do). “The MAC Address is terrible,” Payne said. “Your phone is constantly broadcasting your MAC Address to find Wi-fi networks. It’s literally being broadcast while you walk around. So it’s got all the same problems at UDID, plus this other huge problem.”

Everyone does their own identifier:
Who’s doing it? Many companies are rolling their own ID schemes just in case.
Pros: It probably won’t get rejected by Apple.
Cons: It’s like the Tower of Babel. If everyone uses their own ID scheme, how will developers know which ad network performed the best for them? There would need to be some kind of complicated, centralized broker that could match IDs from one service against others while preserving user privacy. While mobile analytics service Kontagent didn’t create this to specifically address the UDID issue, the company launched something called the Mobile Acquisition Transparency Alliance today which is meant to standardize reporting from many different mobile advertising networks. It handles many identifiers and has a single API that developers can use to report performance from different campaigns they run.

This whole ordeal is part of a much broader debate among policy makers, platform providers like Apple, Facebook and Google and the public about how to best guard privacy amid an explosion of popular consumer web and mobile apps.

Because the nature of software distribution has changed so much over the last five years with the advent of the Facebook, iOS and Android platforms, it’s possible for a two-man band to wind up with millions of users in a matter of months and personal data on each and every one of them. In most cases, developers are well-meaning and they just want to create great products that people love. But some are unscrupulous.

On top of that, there is also the question of how much notice or control consumers should have around their data. The trend toward free apps has created a world in which consumers are implicitly bargaining their attention and personal data for these products. Like the saying goes: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product!

Even if the Federal Trade Commission does end up setting certain rules and expectations around apps and privacy, enforcing them is very difficult. If the platforms run by the best technology companies in the world can’t do it right 100 percent of the time, what chance do government officials have?

It’s Time To Believe In RIM And The BlackBerry Again

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Research In Motion, maker of the once ubiquitous BlackBerry, just released its Q4 2012 earnings. They’re not good. Revenue dropped to $4.2 billion, down 19% from the third quarter. Likewise, BlackBerry sales plummeted 21% from Q3 down to 11.1M units, but surprising, PlayBook sales were way up to 500k units. One of the company’s former co-CEO’s Jim Balsillie resigned amid what we’re hearing are deep layoffs throughout the company.

This is the first set of financial data released under the new CEO, Thorsten Heins. Even though there are black clouds looming over Waterloo, as my headline states, it’s time to believe in RIM again. The conditions are right for a rebirth.

For several years RIM has been the enemy of every upstart smartphone vender and more telling, innovation itself. RIM once held a staggering piece of the smartphone market share pie, but the company failed to keep pace with Apple and Google. Now, in 2012, a BlackBerry made today, looks, feels and works too similarly to one from five years ago.

RIM failed to curate a proper development ecosystem. The company launched the BlackBerry app store too late and failed to capitalize on the emergence of pure touchscreen devices. The BlackBerry PlayBook was a predictable failure thanks to its lack of core features and late arrival. The company even failed to oust its naive CEOs until just recently. In short RIM doesn’t know how to conduct business in a timely manner.

RIM is unique in the smartphone race. Its success is dictated by hardware sales and also services. Google and Apple know this. iOS and Android devices have been sneaking into RIM’s enterprise market since they were announced. But try as they might for years, they have failed to kick BlackBerrys out of the corner office. RIM’s platform is still the service of choice for many corporations, although that may change just this year.

IT managers and CTOs have stuck with RIM because of familiarity and the cost to change. Much like myself and most of you, they don’t care if one platform dominates over another. These IT managers do not want to see a product die just for the hell of it. They simply want a product that works and keeps the IT service calls down to a minimum. If RIM can keep moving forward at a steady pace — that’s a big “if” — they’ll retain many of these lucrative contracts. If RIM can deliver BB 10 devices on time — that’s an even bigger “if” — then the company might actually regain lost market share.

Thankfully for RIM, smartphone innovation has slowed drastically recently. Android and iOS are turning to novelties like bigger screens and silly voice controls to sell more devices. RIM couldn’t keep up with these platform’s product churn during their roaring early days. Since smartphone development has seemingly plateaued lately, RIM should be able to show up with competitive products that match the current standard feature set.

RIM’s days of ruling both the consumer and enterprise market are likely in the past. Products that are equally innovative and trendy are key to winning consumers. The upcoming BlackBerry 10 products look to be innovative enough although they’ll probably be far from trendy.

BlackBerry fanboys still exist. They’re out there and love their Bolds and Curves. There still isn’t a better email/messaging device than a BlackBerry. I would go back to a BlackBerry in a hot second if they had a similar feature set as an Android device. Much like Windows Phones now, BlackBerrys have always been about core features over apps. The company has also pretty much ignored the importance of apps. In fact the company’s managers seem ignorant on the matter.

With today’s earnings report, RIM is likely (hopefully) at the bottom. Its stock price is at its lowest point in nine years. Deep cuts (which seem to be happening) and a renewed focus on core values are needed. They need to stop blaming the press for their problems and not run crying to my editors when I joke that their execs spend more time golfing than working. (Note: That really happened. We all had a good chuckle.) It’s one thing not to champion a company anymore, only ignorant fanboys want to see a company simply die.

RIM is hopefully taking notes from Nokia’s recent resurgence. It wasn’t that long ago that Nokia was labeled as a has-been. Now Nokia is riding on a wave of novel products running a still-obscure operating system. RIM can, and hopefully will, do the same thing with BlackBerry 10 devices later this year.

For what it’s worth, the new CEO, Thorsten Heins, seems surprisingly open to any opportunity that could help turn the ailing company around. During RIM’s earnings conference call this afternoon, he reaffirmed to listeners that as part of his “strategic review,” he will consider options like licensing the the BlackBerry 10 operating system (even though no one knows what it looks like yet). Hell, when asked about the possibility of selling the company, he said he would consider it if his review pointed to it as a viable option, though he was quick to note that it’s not exactly Plan A.

RIM is beaten and laying on the floor. Together, Apple and Google knocked out the champ. Since then, they’ve started fighting each other, seemingly ignoring RIM as regains his strength. He might take another blow from time to time, but with a renewed focus he should stay on his feet from here on out. After years of savage beatings, he’s like the honey badger now and just doesn’t care.

(Chris Velazco contributed to this report)

RIMour: RIM Is Laying Off Execs As Dust Settles Post-Earnings

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An errant tweet points us to the news that Research In Motion CEO Thorsten Heins is “clearing house” and “SVP/VP-level execs” are being fired. What does this mean? Hopefully a turnaround and, more cynically, an effort to reduce costs. Either way, RIM is changing.

As we just learned, BB shipments were down 21% last quarter, shipping a total of 11.1 million handsets. To compare, Apple sold 17.07 million handsets over a similar period and Nokia sold 93.9 million phones.

This cut could be a clear-cutting operation to help revitalize the sputtering company, a noble effort to be sure. While I’m not bullish on BB’s chances in this crowded marketplace, RIM still has a chance if it is sold or, barring that, changes its strategy drastically. I’ve been bearish on the company for most of the year but the right cuts, the right changes, and the right amount of handset and OS consolidation could keep RIM on the job.

via Engadget

RIM Falls Short: BlackBerry Shipments Down 21% From Q3, Former Co-CEO Jim Balsillie Resigns

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This just in folks: RIM has released their Q4 2012 earnings report, and it paints a pretty bleak portrait of the ailing company. RIM posted quarterly revenues of $4.2 billion, down 19% from the previous quarter, and down 25% from the year-ago quarter. The Waterloo company also reported a net loss of $125 million or $0.24 per share diluted in Q4, along with earnings per share of $0.80.

In the days leading up to the release, analysts expected earnings of $0.83 cents a share on revenue of $4.56 billion.

RIM forecasted during their Q3 earnings call that they would ship between 11 and 12 million BlackBerry handsets this quarter, and managed to move 11.1 million — that’s a 21% dip from their Q3 BlackBerry shipments. Interestingly, the company shipped 500,000 PlayBooks in Q4, a considerable jump from the 150,000 they moved in Q3.

CEO Heins can’t be too pleased with the result — this is the company’s first earnings release with Heins at the helm, and while the company played up the leadership change quite a bit this past January, it doesn’t seem to have done much good yet. That doesn’t mean that Heins has been sitting idly by though, as a source close to him told The Globe And Mail that the CEO has just laid off a number of RIM executives at the “senior vice-president and vice-president levels.”

Former co-CEO Jim Balsillie has also announced that he would be resigning from RIM’s board of directors.

While the aftermath of that high-level shakeup remains to be seen, RIM may have a more pressing issue on their hands. In the days leading up to the release, analysts pointed to the company’s stagnant smartphone selection as a big reason for RIM’s substantial dip.

RIM is still working on their forthcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system and the hardware to accompany it behind closed doors. An early version of the OS will make an appearance on a number of developer units at this year’s BlackBerry Jam conference in May, though actual consumer-ready handsets with BlackBerry 10 won’t be available “the latter part of 2012.” Meanwhile, iOS and Android devices continue to dominate the smartphone market in the United States, though recent Nielsen data has RIM currently sitting at a distant third in terms of market share.