Exam Code: BCP-710 Practice exam 2023 by Killexams.com team
Selling the Blackberry Solution for Tech. Sales Professional
BlackBerry Professional pdf
Killexams : BlackBerry Professional pdf - BingNews https://killexams.com/pass4sure/exam-detail/BCP-710 Search results Killexams : BlackBerry Professional pdf - BingNews https://killexams.com/pass4sure/exam-detail/BCP-710 https://killexams.com/exam_list/BlackBerry Killexams : ‘BlackBerry’ Review: Energetic Comedy/Drama Details the Smartphone Legend’s Rise and Fall

The entrance and exit of the BlackBerry smartphone is truly an all-thumbs tale – that of a beloved keyboard on a game-changing wireless device, and a Canadian company (Research in Motion) not terribly dexterous with innovation after the market pie went from “CrackBerry”-flavored to Apple-forward.

Equal parts high-tension business saga and nerd comedy, Matt Johnson’s feature “BlackBerry” – adapted with co-writer Matthew Miller from a book about the phone’s meteoric life (“Losing the Signal”) — parses the origins of the device’s success and the seeds of its downfall. Naturally, the story is bracketed by scrappy sorcery on one end and Steve Jobs’ competition-destroying genius on the other, but at its heart is the strange-bedfellows relationship between soft-spoken engineer Mike Laziridis (a silver-haired Jay Baruchel) and his shrewd, take-no-prisoners co-CEO Jim Balsillie (a bald, scarily fulminous Glenn Howerton).

The result, at a well-paced but unnecessarily long two hours, is a seriocomic cautionary tale of butting personalities in a fast-changing world, told in a low-key, off-the-cuff observational style closer to mockumentary than accurate tech-bio approaches like the flashy moral-monologuing of Sorkin (“The Social Network,” “Steve Jobs”) or the Shakespearean heft of “The Dropout.”

Maybe that’s the wry Canadian sensibility in Toronto-based Johnson and Miller, whose previous two movies (“The Dirties,” “Operation Avalanche”) were found-footage larks about the thrills and perils of collaboration. Though they’re working with a true story here – and a Canadian one at that, set mostly where RIM was headquartered, in Waterloo, Ontario – the vibe is the kind you’d get from a lively improv troupe on a fertile night on which an audience member shouts out, “What was BlackBerry?”

As depicted in the amusing first scenes – after an archival opening of author Arthur C. Clarke predicting our hyperconnected future, when “the whole world will have shrunk to a point” – the BlackBerry started in the mid-90s as the all-in-one brainchild (phone/email/pager) of Mike, who with his excitably goofy, headband-and-tee-shirt-wearing business partner Doug Fregin (Johnson) in tow, struggles to pitch their innovation to a bored, disdainful Jim, then an executive at a huge manufacturing outfit.

That nowhere meeting proves fortuitous, however, when Jim is fired and immediately pitches himself to Mike (who’s receptive) and Doug (who’s skeptical) as the sales-savvy savior of their cash-strapped, underexploited geek farm. Though he’s horrified at RIM’s stunted-adolescence culture, when he pushes Mike to get an instant prototype of his phone invention ready to show a telecom giant before someone beats them to it, Jim begins to realize that Mike is a genuine wizard, that they’re selling workplace independence not wireless minutes, and that the product will be life-alteringly huge.

Cut to the heyday of 2003: Mike’s team is finalizing their soon-to-be-addictive encrypted texting network and worrying there aren’t enough towers to handle exploding BlackBerry usage. Jim, practically living on private planes, is fending off a hostile takeover from Palm CEO Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes) with every cunning trick he can think of, one of which – stealing talent from other Internet giants – will come back to bite him and RIM. Meanwhile Doug, now more OG fixture than key employee, wonders where the heart and spirit went in his and Mike’s dream venture. In Johnson’s and Miller’s drolly sentimental narrative estimation, once a company takes away office movie nights, it loses its soul.

Of course, a business implosion is more complicated than that, and as “BlackBerry” whips around from confrontation to negotiation to hair-pulling and back, Johnson and the fine cast – which includes Saul Rubinek as a Verizon exec, Rich Sommer as a poached Google engineer, and Michael Ironside as an operations enforcer – bring plenty of flinty crisis energy to this Mamet-like tale of navigating and misinterpreting a new wireless Wild West. Nobody plays Jobs, but video of his legendary 2007 iPhone presentation is well-deployed as the harbinger it was for a company mindset too invested in holding what it owned (a professional class loving its keyboard) than looking up to see what was next (consumers addicted to touchscreens and apps).

The condensing of consequential shifts in fortune into relateably tense, humanly funny scenes is admirable, and the tech aspects are never too confusing that they pull away from the story’s stakes. Johnson’s verite-informed direction could be more fleet, but editor Curt Lobb keeps a mean pace, and Jay McCarrol’s electronic score does its era-setting part.

And while the script doesn’t get too dimensional or personal about Mike and Jim’s fascinatingly contrarian match-up, what works in Baruchel’s and Howerton’s engaging portrayals is a kind of keenly direct maskwork – the detail-fretting genius and the smiling shark – that befits the movie’s chosen operating system: a fizzy workplace comedy in which opposites memorably attract before they tragically detract. Until that epic fail, “BlackBerry” renders its legendary disruptors with a sometimes teasing, always indie-fortified respect.

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 07:45:00 -0600 Robert Abele en-US text/html https://www.thewrap.com/blackberry-review-berlin-2023/ Killexams : ‘BlackBerry’ Review: The Once-Ubiquitous Smartphone Gets Its Own Spin on ‘The Social Network’

Is there anything worse than becoming obsolete? It’s a fear many share — to be slowly forgotten and discarded, left on a proverbial roadside as the rest of the world continues to innovate at pace around us. It isn’t just a business concern, but a human one: the innate craving for relevancy in a world where something or someone shinier than you is always around the corner.

The BlackBerry, with its distinctive QWERTY click-click keypad, met a sobering fate when it faded into quiet obscurity in the past decade — going from having a 43 percent market share in 2010 to zero percent just six years later — and when it was announced that a film charting the smartphone’s rise and fall had landed a Berlinale competition slot, one’s initial thoughts were: oh, that old thing?

But “BlackBerry,” which follows Canadian software company Research in Motion and the mistakes made by co-CEOs Mike Lazarides (Jay Baruchel) and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), uses lashes of retrospective irony to dive into the precarity of monolithic success. With a good deal of zippy snark à la “The Social Network” and a sense of deadpan comedy straight from the “Succession” playbook, “BlackBerry” is the kind of mid-budget marvel that doesn’t seem to come around often anymore.

With it, director and screenwriter Matt Johnson takes a plot that could be a dull walk-through of the phone’s Wikipedia page and transforms it into something altogether more biting and blithe, less a cautionary tale than a gently mocking takedown of corporate hubris.

It’s hard to remember where it all went wrong for the BlackBerry: one day men were more likely to ask for a girl’s BBM pin than her phone number, and then the existence of the phone was seemingly scrubbed from our collective memory. We meet Lazarides and his bumbling co-founder Douglas Fregin (played by Johnson himself) in 1992, when Research in Motion is more an after-school club of film nerds than budding start-up, before a catastrophic product pitch somehow piques the interest of tech businessman Balsillie.

It’s not long before Lazarides’ innovative product and Balsillie’s shrewd salesmanship sends the phone skyrocketing. The beginning of the end arrives in 2007 when Steve Jobs unveiled the touchscreen Apple iPhone, immediately making the BlackBerry look like a quaint antique.

Beyond plot twists and turns, though — of which there are many, in a surprisingly fascinating peek into the developments of handheld telephony over the past three decades (stay with me) — Johnson’s direction and script is the movie’s secret weapon. While adapted from Jacquie McNish’s book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry,” it is Johnson’s trademark style that elevates the material.

In a scrappy, DIY-esque sensibility also adopted in 2013’s “The Dirties” and 2016’s “Operation Avalanche,” the outlook is zany and the camera is shaky, deploying endless hand-held comic zooms to enforce a kind of mockumentary smarm. His character is obsessed with movie strong men in works like “Wall Street” and “Glengarry Glen Ross,” yet this film lampoons that very image, exposing the hollowness within.

The audience are all in the joke, being fully cognisant of the BlackBerry’s fall from grace; the way Johnson invites us to poke fun at the story and its players initially feels strange, but soon becomes second nature (the phone itself, after all, was dubbed “CrackBerry” and considered the first addictive smartphone). Where it should perhaps feel grating to have the director play such an exaggeratedly bone-headed character of his own attention-grabbing invention (the real Fregin looks like a nice man that you would pay your taxes to), this layer of fictionalization only ameliorates the comic beats. Throw in Jay McCarrol’s tongue-in-cheek electro score and the way company engineers keep pushing up eyeglasses that are already high on the bridge of their nose, and you’re left with something undeniably funny and yet somehow not mean-spirited.

It’s not a film in which the people depicted would be happy or flattered with their portrayal; Baruchel’s Lazarides is a pushover with a severe shortage of charisma, while Howerton’s Balsillie is a comic-book Machiavelli of rapacious unlikeability. Yet, alongside Johnson, this central trio put on stellar performances in a film that seems largely unconcerned with personal backstories or money. Baruchel in particular is playing things startlingly small — not, ahem, phoning it in, but rather acting as a neat and necessary straight foil to the other two leads’ megalomania.

It’s all a rather fascinating story that we didn’t even know we would be interested in — the way that, both personally and professionally, the need to endlessly innovate in order to stay relevant is exhausting at best and soul-destroying at worst, robbing you of the ability to relax and live in the moment. Here, one’s success always means another’s failure, and therein lies the deeply depressing issue at the heart of capitalism. BlackBerry aren’t the first casualty of this and they won’t be the last. And when a shiny new toy catches our eye, we won’t hesitate to upgrade to the next best shiny thing.

Rating: B+

“BlackBerry” premiered at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival. IFC Films will release it at a later date.

Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 08:09:00 -0600 en text/html https://www.indiewire.com/2023/02/blackberry-review-matt-johnson-1234811136/ Killexams : REVIEW: Persistence Pays Off For Samsung With The New Galaxy S23 Ultra

I first started reviewing smartphones back in the days when Nokia, HTC and BlackBerry were around. The number-one phone during this period was the Motorola Razr. Then along came Samsung who, in an effort to compete with the established mobile players, including Apple’s new iPhone that was launched in 2007.

Samsung launched their first Galaxy mobile in 2009 and I still have the Samsung Galaxy S1 and Galaxy S2.

Their early efforts failed due to poor design and limited mobile industry knowledge, and players like HTC, who are dead and gone today, were among the leading brands that gave Samsung a run for their money.

Apple had wrapped up the software side of the business and Nokia were too slow to respond to Apple, who were wowing consumers with their ease of use software.

However, this did not deter Samsung, who today are the global leader in smartphones as well as smartphone components that are found in their competitors’ products.

This week, Samsung is rolling out their all-new Galaxy S23 Ultra, a device packed with the latest in mobile technology, from the camera to the processor to the cutting-edge design and a pen which is unique to the Samsung top-end model.

This is an expensive powerhouse that is a very much a considered purchase that I believe will appeal more to Samsung Galaxy S21 and S22 customers than the current S22 Ultra customer.

The persistence Samsung demonstrated in those early days has paid off, with the South Korean manufacturer delivering the best smartphone in the market today.

While the latest S23 Ultra is a cutting-edge mobile device, the difference between the S22 Ultra and the new S23 Ultra is negligible.

Yes, it has a 200MP camera and shoots 8K video vs a 108Mp camera on the S21, but to the naked eye there is really little difference and the same applies to performance.

There is also little difference between the design of the two devices.

This cannot be said for the difference between the Samsung S20 Ultra and the S21 Ultra, where there is a big difference, with Samsung offering a big reason to step up to a new model.

The all-new S23 Ultra is a massive credit to Samsung and where they’re at in the mobile market today.

The turning point for Samsung was the Samsung Galaxy S2, an early model touchscreen-enabled, slate-format Android smartphone.

They unveiled the S II on 13 February 2011 at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.

I suspect this was a do-or-die device for the company after the failure of the Samsung GT-I7500 Galaxy.

Announced on 27 April 2009, it was the first Android-powered device from Samsung Mobile, and the first in what would become the long-running Galaxy series. Unfortunately, it was panned by reviewers and shunned by retailers.

This did not deter Samsung management, who are well known for their persistence in getting a product offering right.

As for their latest premium smartphone, this device is going to cost you close to $2K. So the big question is, is it worth it and does it deliver a premium capability?

There is no doubt this is a well-engineered smartphone, a workhorse that delivers excellent functionality, however there are issues arising with this device that concern me, and it has nothing to do with hardware or functionality.

Samsung is fast expanding on their obsession to capture private information about your life, and with this device several software apps won’t work unless you comply with Samsung’s demands for information.

Take their health app on the S23 Ultra. This software cannot be activated unless you supply Samsung access to your contacts and email address. This is totally unacceptable as far as I am concerned.

Then there is obsession with Samsung ‘Free’ services.

I for one don’t want free games or movies from Samsung, yet despite this they are constantly prompting users to sign up for free content.

Samsung is then providing this data to app partners who then bombard you with their own emails.

I for one put up with this, because the smartphone product that Samsung delivers is the best in the market today.

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is powered by the all-new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which has been custom configured by Samsung.

This is the heart and soul of this device and is the single reason Samsung is able to deliver better software functionality, such as when shooting pictures or watching a video.

The excellent speed and capability of this device is down to the way the processor has been set up to manage the marriage of hardware functionality and software performance. Simply, data processes faster, especially when shooting 200MP images.

The above image shows a boat over at Manly NSW. The distance is around 4 kilometres. The images below show 50 zoom and then 100X xoom. The S23 Ultra was hand held.

You can shoot 8K video and the device can easily be turned into a pro camera when switching to expert RAW mode. Movies have already been shot with this device.

And if you really wanted to, you can display feeds from four different cameras simultaneously in the Director video mode on the S23.

For the camera enthusiast, you can also shoot full-resolution photos and RAW, with the camera defaulting to pixel-binning 16 pixels into one, so you usually capture 12MP images with higher dynamic range and a whole lot more detail, which comes in handy when zooming in and out of images.

Zoom is a big improvement on this device, however you do have to have a steady hand or a tripod to get the best out of the S23 Ultra.

Samsung has not only taken ownership of super zoom technology in a smartphone, through the use of new software they’ve delivered a whole new zoom capability that is achievable because of the use of an improved and smarter camera sensor that takes advantage of the new Snapdragon processor.

A big disappointment for some is the drop in resolution of the selfie camera from 40MP to just 12MP.

On the plus side, it does have autofocus built in, 60fps for videos, and a Super HDR capture mode.

As for the display screen I think you are going to be hard pressed to find a better screen. Even Apple is relying on Samsung to manufacture their OLED Display screens for their top-end iPhones.

The display is the same as the S22 Ultra at 3,088 x 1,440-pixel resolution, 1750 nit brightness, and 120Hz refresh rate.
If you want to save battery power you can drop as low as 1Hz.

the S23 Ultra’s Super AMOLED display delivers rich colours and great blacks, however Samsung has gone a tad over the top with the colour adjust software, with some images coming out over-compensated with greens way too bright to the real image.

Also built into the new display is vision booster that delivers better viewing in broad daylight.

This software allows you to see in harsh sunlight. I found it useful last week when using my Golf scoring app on an extremely bright day.

I was able to see the screen clearly between holes as other players using their iPhones struggled to read their MIScore app because of the bright light.

Night mode is another key feature.

The Galaxy S23 Ultra camera hardware delivers several shooting options, including wide angle, ultra-wide angle and even telephotography, using three types of main rear lenses and the 3x optical zoom Telephoto Camera.

Each of the rear lenses shoot and create unique images that capture different vibes in various conditions and settings.

With a total weight of 233g and a 6.8-inch display, the Galaxy S23 Ultra, while looking similar to the last model, does deliver marginal improvements when it comes to camera shooting. One of those improvements is the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s Nightography, which basically improves night shots by taking advantage of the new sensor and the combination of faster processing speeds.

The new S23 Ultra is now capable of reducing noise of photos and videos even in dark environments due to the inclusion of a new signal processing (ISP) that uses AI solutions.

Battery Life
The Samsung Galaxy S23 has a large 5,000mAh capacity. I am a talker, on the phone all day, referencing sites, downloading PDF files, watching videos and accessing apps. To me battery life is critical, and despite the hammering I gave this device I was still ending the day with over 25% battery life.

The device I reviewed came with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. This is ample because most of the files I need are in the cloud.

Conclusion
This is the Swiss army knife of smartphones. Superbly engineered, but it’s expensive at nearly $2K. As a former S22 Ultra user I doubt whether I would upgrade, especially if you’re looking to save money during high inflation times and rising mortgage costs.

But if I was a Galaxy S20 or S21 customer or the owner of any other Android-based smartphone, I would be chafing at the bit to get my hands of this device.

It’s a show piece that delivers right across the board — processor camera, battery life and the design is a proven formula that works.

I’s also predominantly manufactured by Samsung, and that counts for me as they are always going to out the best components in their own products first and foremost.

Concerns
I am not a fan of handing out to all and sundry my personal information let alone contacts. Samsung has to stop this practise and above all create an environment whereby users of their mobile who want to use one of their apps can do so without having to hand over access to confidential information.

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 14:32:00 -0600 en-US text/html https://www.channelnews.com.au/reviewpersistence-pays-off-for-samsung-with-the-new-galaxy-s23-ultra/ Killexams : “Pride Before the Fall”: Director of Berlin Competition Film ‘BlackBerry’ on Exploring the Cautionary Tale of the World’s First Smartphone

Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton star in Matt Johnson’s tech drama about real-life Canadian telecom pioneers who dominated the global cell phone market, only to blindly fall victim to their own stubbornness.

February 17, 2023 10:30pm

Jay Baruchel in 'BlackBerry' Courtesy of Budgie Films Inc.

Tech giants sure crash and burn a lot on Wall Street, and Canada’s Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the Blackberry, the world’s first smartphone, eventually fell like a fiery anvil from the sky after achieving surprise global telecom dominance.

But director Matt Johnson, whose Canadian biopic BlackBerry will have a world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, opted against portraying RIM’s dramatic descent into obsolescence. His film has few of the usual business drama tropes like blood-and-guts confrontations between colorful executives scheming behind the scenes and putting the sword to rivals as the mother ship goes down.

Instead, BlackBerry, which stars Jay Baruchel as RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s Glenn Howerton as co-CEO Jim Balsillie, focuses on the origins of RIM to explore how the iconoclastic Blackberry phone, with its physical keyboards, became a status symbol of the early-2000s among top business people and politicians, only to see its Waterloo, Ontario-based creator face fatal execution issues just as Apple’s Steve Jobs launched the first-generation iPhone.

“We show the entire culture of the company as news of the iPhone breaks, and what happens in the months after that, but we don’t go into the moment when stockholders realize that they are going to zero and this company is going to be destroyed,” Johnson explains about his narrative focus in BlackBerry.

That’s because mutual pride shown by Lazaradis and Balsalli typical of Greek tragedies allowed Johnson to foretell the company’s eventual collapse by underscoring the Canadian start-up company’s fatal flaw: character traits in the company founders that helped them succeed, but ultimately became a liability.

“To me, all of the central flaws that led to the destruction of the company were bred in the bone,” Johnson tells THR.

BlackBerry, which was mostly shot in an old turbine plant in Hamilton, Ontario that allowed for extensive use of conference rooms and manufacturing facilities with a late 1990s vibe, reaches its dramatic climax just as Lazaradis and Balsillie are at the top of their game, only to be blindsided as Apple and Samsung swoop in and snap up the global smartphone market they invented out from under their noses.

“They are becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world. And this Blackberry now represents around 50 percent of the global cell phone market,” Johnson recounts in his film as it ends with top RIM execs viewing TV coverage of Apple’s Steve Job famously unveiling his first-generation cell phone.

In Johnson’s telling, BlackBerry boils down to Lazaradis and Balsallie, not a sophisticated tech play.

Their business philosophy on the way to the top is apparently built into every smartphone sold and used today by consumers prizing self-reliance due to an expanding array of apps and services and not having to depend on others to complete everyday tasks, the director adds.

“That worldview was something Jim (Balsallie) was passionate about and Mike (Lazaradis) shared… Even looking at an iPhone, you’ll see the same things, the way the world is built into these devices. And we’ll never be rid of them,” Johnson says of the Blackberry and its legacy.

BlackBerry also has director Johnson playing Doug Fregin, RIM’s third founder and as a character in the film serving as a foil to Balsillie.

But as the company was launched into the telecom stratosphere, BlackBerry portrays amid executive suite celebrations top execs fumbling out of sheer stubbornness their market success as they prove far too slow in adapting to new technology – especially new touchscreen devices.

Lazaradis and Balsallie, who eventually got bogged down with personal grievances and questionable business dealings, ominously discounted tech issues and customer complaints for new product launches, until it was too late.

Lazaradis thought it was “absurd,” according to Johnson, to sell a smartphone without a physical keyboard, which is what Apple and Samsung did with their category-killer touch

screen devices. And even when Steve Jobs famously unveiled his iPhone, with real-time GPS, streaming video and music, BlackBerry has Lazaradis seeming to laugh off the competitive threat, with fatal consequences.

“He thinks this guy (Jobs) has no idea how phone carriers work, and he has no idea how this market works,” Johnson explains. Lazaradis and his team of engineers ultimately failed to grasp the surging consumer interest precisely in those smartphone features from Apple and Samsung, which would force phone carriers to rebuild their infrastructures.

Johnson adds he didn’t need to focus on RIM’s fall because the film’s audience will already know where the Canadian company and its iconic Blackberry device ended up – as a bit player in a global smartphone market.

In the film’s final scenes, as Apple’s iPhone is launched, with its touch screen and access to iPod music, Lazardis and Balsallie unveil Storm, their first touchscreen phone. That innovation in real life sparked mounting customer complaints and investors and Wall Street analysts questioning for the first time the company’s future.

Johnson insists Lazaradis had fatally fallen in love with his own product: “When you do that, you become so resistant to feedback, to outside change.” In one scene in BlackBerry, Lazaradis is arguing with the CEO of Verizon, insisting he and RIM had invented the smartphone market. “How dare he assume that Mike (Lazaradis) doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And that’s the definition of pride before the fall,” Johnson says of the hubris that eventually hobbled RIM and its founders.

The BlackBerry director insists the humble origins of corporate titans, how they scramble to the top, is always more interesting than after they reach the summit. “Mostly because that’s when you’re willing to do the impossible. And then when you have success, you get comfortable,” Johnson says.

He insists few movies are made about wealthy kings doing little more than presiding over a kingdom. “There’s no story there. The story is in a desperate situation where you need to do something you probably never had the gumption to do,” he adds.

In the end, BlackBerry, as its launches in Berlin, becomes a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley and the tech sector overall, where failure after creative disruption by rivals is part of the natural order of things.

“You can literally be the best in the world. But if you’re not willing to change, that crown will be taken by somebody younger, every single time,” Johnson insists.

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 16:57:00 -0600 en-US text/html https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/berlin-blackberry-film-jay-baruchel-smartphone-1235317159/ Killexams : ‘BlackBerry’ director on charting the rise and fall of a smartphone original

Canadian actor and filmmaker Matt Johnson is jetting into Berlin for Friday’s world premiere of his Competition entry BlackBerry, which charts the early 2000s rise and subsequent fall of Research In Motion’s (later BlackBerry) world-beating smartphone.

Johnson and Matthew Miller adapted the book Losing The Signal: The Untold Story Behind The Extraordinary Rise And Spectacular Fall Of Blackberry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff. The cast is led by Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton and Johnson, who previously directed and starred in 2016 Sundance entry Operation Avalanche, 2013 Slamdance selection The Dirties and 2016 TV series Nirvana The Band The Show.

Rhombus Media and Zapruder Films produced BlackBerry with the participation of Telefilm Canada and Ontario Creates, in association with CBC Films, IPR.VC and XYZ Films, which co-financed and handles worldwide sales. IFC Films will distribute the film in the US and Elevation Pictures in Canada, while Paramount holds international rights.

What’s BlackBerry about?
That time in the mid-1990s when the cellular phone and the smartphone and the pager were all having a major public moment, and a dorm room of young nerds from the University of Waterloo [in Ontario] realised they could combine all these into one product, which catapults them into a multi-billion-dollar company.

Tell us about your casting choices.
My goal was to have almost all Canadians in the cast, specifically Canadians you didn’t know were Canadians like Saul Rubinek from Unforgiven, and Michael Ironside from all the Paul Verhoeven movies. From the very beginning I talked to Jay Baruchel [to play BlackBerry inventor Mike Lazaridis]. A major piece of casting was Glenn [Howerton, US actor] who so embodies [Research In Motion CEO] Jim Balsillie and understood this guy was ambitious at the cost of being nice to people.

What was behind BlackBerry’s downfall?
The central relationships of these characters had such flaws that they weren’t in a position to pivot. In the mid-2000s, data and the sale of data was unheard of. Apple and AT&T saw that future and created the product that was going to use massive amounts of consumer-side data. BlackBerry knew these networks were going to crash and laughed at the iPhone… But they didn’t see that AT&T’s plan meant rebuilding the networks and forcing consumers to purchase a brand-new product.

Did you know much about BlackBerry before reading the book?
I had only thought of BlackBerry as a product, which I had been too young to use at the time.

Is there still a lot of pride for the device in Canada?
Unbelievable pride. We shot much of the film in Waterloo where this happened and everywhere we went they opened their doors to us. [The founders] created not only this product but what’s known as Silicon Valley North, a hub of start-ups in and around the Waterloo area.

Where and when did you shoot?
We shot in Waterloo, Toronto and the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] in London and Hamilton. We shot from the beginning of May until the end of June 2022.

Who funded the film and when did IFC come on board?
We were financed almost exclusively through Telefilm Canada and CBC Films. XYZ Films were the sales company on my first two films and they were our American finance partner. IFC Films read an early version of the script and came on around Toronto International Film Festival last year.

How do you contextualise the BlackBerry in the history of tech start-ups?
In some ways they set the blueprint for start-up companies and major personalities rewriting the rules. We certainly saw that with Uber, WeWork and even Theranos. You have a cult of personality around an individual who basically promises a future vision of the world. BlackBerry had that Canadian modesty which forced them to actually do the work and deliver. It’s easy to think of them as a behind-the-times joke without realising they invented the future that we exist in now.

How do you feel about going to the Berlinale?
I’ve only been to the festival as an actor with Kazik Radwanski’s film [How Heavy This Hammer, Forum 2016]. I love Curry 36, I love Turkish food, I love the zoo and I’ve wanted to screen in the [Berlinale] Palast since I was 26. I can’t wait.

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 16:00:00 -0600 Jeremy Kay en text/html https://www.screendaily.com/features/blackberry-director-on-charting-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-smartphone-original/5179265.article Killexams : ‘BlackBerry’ Review: A Ferocious and Nearly Unrecognizable Glenn Howerton Steals This Rowdy Tech-World Satire

For a hot minute, it looked like BlackBerry might control the smartphone market. They got there first, figuring out how to use the existing data network to put email in users’ hands. Sure, it all came packaged in a device as thick and unwieldy as a slice of French toast — too big for most people’s pockets, not at all comfortable to hold up to one’s ear. Still, Canada-based electronics company Research in Motion revolutionized how mobile phones worked and what they could do, making billionaires of its co-founders. So what happened?

Frantic, irreverent and endearingly scrappy, “BlackBerry” spins comedy from the seat-of-their-pants launch and subsequent flame-out of “that phone that people had before they bought an iPhone,” as one character puts it. Directed by Matt Johnson — the renegade mock-doc helmer responsible for 2013 Slamdance winner “The Dirties” and moon-landing hoax “Project Avalanche” — from a script he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Matthew Miller, this sly tech-world satire freely extrapolates from journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book “Losing the Signal,” refashioning that wild ride into something that approximates their favorite movies.

The outrageous, often quotable dialogue draws inspiration from Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet (whose “Glengarry Glen Ross” is actually name-dropped by the characters). “I’ll keep firing until this room is not full of little children playing with their little penises,” Michael Ironside growls at one point, playing the company’s bulldog COO, seemingly the only adult in the room. Later, forced to use a pay phone after BlackBerry overloads the network, Glenn Howerton smashes the receiver to pieces while screaming, “There are three reasons people buy our phones. … They. Fucking. Work!” Lines like that fit well with DP Jared Raab’s grody, handheld style, which suggests a cross between “The Office” and “In the Loop,” shot from across parking lots and the far side of cluttered workspaces.

No one would mistake this for a documentary, and yet, Johnson adopts the voyeuristic cues that supply audiences a you-are-there feel. If the cast that Johnson has assembled hardly looks old enough to remember the BlackBerry, that perversely winds up working to the film’s advantage. Canadian actor Jay Baruchel still has the soft-chinned face of a teenager, which makes him an odd choice to play BlackBerry superbrain Mike Lazaridis, with his silver-toned, Julian Assange hair. Johnson opts to play RIM co-founder Douglas Fregin as a headband-wearing slob, a brilliant “goof” (and reliably grating comic foil) who seems to care more about getting to work with his friends than becoming a billionaire.

And then there’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” star Howerton, the MVP in an all-around terrific ensemble, who shaved the top of his head to play balding, no-nonsense Jim Balsillie. Like a shark in the kiddie pool, Howerton delivers the kind of performance that can make a career, or force audiences to totally reconsider an actor’s potential. Jim’s ruthless business instincts run directly counter to the nerds’ undisciplined approach. He agrees to leave his job (technically, he’s already been fired and has no other options) and steer RIM to delivering on its promise — the one Mike and Doug fumbled to articulate in the film’s haphazard opening pitch session, quoting their high school shop teacher: “The person who puts a computer inside a phone will change the world.”

Cruising around in a beat-up Honda hatchback, the duo — and the rest of the RIM team — come across as overgrown toddlers, incapable of cleaning their own rooms. They’re far too rowdy and immature to focus on the task at hand, wasting valuable time playing Command & Conquer at the office, where stacks of defective modems line the walls and someone stuck a toilet plunger on top of a computer monitor. Rarely has a film captured the spirit of creative chaos that characterizes so much of Silicon Valley — although it’s important to note that RIM’s rise-and-fall trajectory took place half a continent away in Waterloo, Ontario.

This is a Canadian story, told by Canadian filmmakers, who treat the whole loony affair as a matter of national pride. Sure, it’s full of hubris, from Mike’s incredulity at the notion that consumers would prefer a keyboard-free device (one of the iPhone’s many design improvements) to Jim’s illegal strategy of backdating stock options to lure engineers from rival companies like Google. But “BlackBerry” is surprisingly charitable to the parties involved, acknowledging that these visionaries, while making it up as they go along, still managed to change the way the world communicates. Taking a page from “The Social Network,” it follows these two altogether-too-polite besties through the ringer, as they try to maintain their friendship amid the financial pressure that running a successful tech company imposes.

Avoiding the pitfalls of getting dry or technical, Johnson juices up moments when the company was under intense pressure to deliver, like the all-night session to develop a prototype it could present to Bell Atlantic. “BlackBerry” shows Mike and his RIM team raiding an electronics store, buying pocket calculators and Speak & Spell toys to mock up a clumsy demo model — which Mike subsequently forgets in the back of the taxi. Saul Rubinek patiently listens to Jim’s pitch and then replies, “You are not a tech guy, are you?” Even more satisfying is the stretch that comes right after Palm honcho Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes) threatens a hostile takeover, as Jim scrambles to boost the stock price so that can’t happen. The mad-hustle montage feels like something out of “Wall Street,” or better yet, Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

There are some who look back fondly on the BlackBerry and the way it let them hammer out emails with their thumbs. It’s a wistfulness on par with how Blockbuster has made a minor comeback for those who claim nostalgia for late fees and the obligation of having to rewind VHS tapes. For most, the BlackBerry was a primitive product that served its purpose until something better came along — namely, the Apple iPhone. And though Johnson’s movie suggests other factors may have contributed to its demise, it’s hard to ignore that the company got out-innovated in the end. The film, at least, feels fresh, making geek history more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 08:10:00 -0600 en-US text/html https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/blackberry-review-glenn-howerton-jay-baruchel-1235525577/ Killexams : Berlin Review: ‘BlackBerry’, A Biopic Of A Smartphone, Turns Out To Be As Triumphant And Tragic As ‘Elvis’

Who knew a Canadian biopic of an infamous smartphone could be this entertaining, even poignant and moving? I am here to tell you today’s world premiere Berlin Film Festival competition entry BlackBerry is all that and more.

In the hands of co-writer (with Matthew Miller), director and co-star Matt Johnson (The Dirties), this long and winding tale of the rise and fall of the BlackBerry, the revolutionary device that first combined a computer with a phone all in one, is at once wonderfully funny, suspenseful and ultimately tragic. Here is a business story that has it all, and has much in common with other movies that focus on iconic tales of new-age businesses like The Social Network, Moneyball and The Big Short. Those movies had the likes of Aaron Sorkin and Adam McKay behind them, and this one ought to really put its chief architect Johnson on the cinematic map.

Centering on nerdy and inventive Mike Lazaridis (a terrific and never better Jay Baruchel) and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton — sensational), Johnson’s film starts in 1996 with the emergence of this unheard of idea of a phone that can also send and receive emails with its keyboard built into a magical device no one in the tech world had achieved before these Canadian dreamers actually found a way to make it work.

But first it is Lazaridis and his freewheeling, loopy but tech-smart buddy Douglas Fregin (played endearingly by Johnson), along with their unsophisticated tech-y friends, who are out to convince the world they can deliver on the promise of their then unnamed invention. Once they bring a sharp and uber-aggressive businessman, Balsillie, into their company Research In Motion, an idea from nerd-land turns into a reality — especially when Balsillie manages to convince Bell Atlantic, particularly chief skeptic John Woodman (Saul Rubinek), of its value for their servers.

On its way to market the BlackBerry must overcome all sorts of obstacles and impossible business deals, but by the early aughts it is a superstar, beloved by everyone from U.S. presidents to celebrities to average joes — a life-changing communication device. It is a dream come true until shady business deals, infighting and most damaging Steve Jobs and the iPhone combine to bring it crashing down.

Johnson tells the whole saga, soup to nuts, in a highly entertaining and fast-moving fashion that keeps you riveted throughout. You really find yourself rooting for these guys, particularly Lazaridis and Fregin and their ragtag team of tech nerds who hold a world-changing device in their hands, until they don’t. At its heart it is an underdog story straight from the heart of the ironically named Waterloo, Ontario, where it all began, but also a cautionary warning that what goes up must come down. In the fast-moving technological age in which we live, the epic tale of the BlackBerry now plays like a period piece, a nostalgic look back for people like me who deeply loved that little Canadian device and didn’t want to, but ultimately had to, succumb, like Adam, to the temptations of the Apple.

Baruchel, silver-haired for the role, is perfectly cast as a guy with an idea but not really the financial or corporate sense to make it reality. Howerton (It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia) however steals the movie with a dynamic turn as a hard-core, cunning business guy who won’t take no for an answer as he wills the success of this smartphone into being; he drives this movie like J.K. Simmons drove Whiplash. Among the supporting cast is fine work from Rubinek, Rich Sommer, Cary Elwes, Sungwon Cho and Michael Ironside, the latter being the hard-nosed fearsome outsider executive brought in to turn this crew into an efficient factory. Johnson also writes himself a juicy role as the likeable Doug who is the reverse of a corporate suit but good-hearted all the way.

Based on the book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall Of Blackberry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, the filmmakers have taken a tech-heavy business book and given it life, soul and sorrow in the most human of terms, and that is no easy undertaking. Producers are Niv Fichman, Matthew Miller, Fraser Ash and Kevin Krikst. IFC has domestic distribution, while Paramount has it worldwide outside of the U.S..

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 17:36:00 -0600 en-US text/html https://deadline.com/2023/02/blackberry-berlin-film-festival-review-biopic-of-smartphone-1235263514/ Killexams : BlackBerry (BB) Dips More Than Broader Markets: What You Should Know

In the latest trading session, BlackBerry (BB) closed at $4.41, marking a -1.12% move from the previous day. This move lagged the S&P 500's daily loss of 0.61%. At the same time, the Dow lost 0.1%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 0.67%.

Heading into today, shares of the cybersecurity software and services company had gained 26.7% over the past month, outpacing the Computer and Technology sector's gain of 17.44% and the S&P 500's gain of 8.32% in that time.

BlackBerry will be looking to display strength as it nears its next earnings release. On that day, BlackBerry is projected to report earnings of -$0.07 per share, which would represent a year-over-year decline of 800%. Meanwhile, our latest consensus estimate is calling for revenue of $172.28 million, down 6.88% from the prior-year quarter.

Looking at the full year, our Zacks Consensus Estimates suggest analysts are expecting earnings of -$0.21 per share and revenue of $677.14 million. These totals would mark changes of -110% and -5.69%, respectively, from last year.

Any accurate changes to analyst estimates for BlackBerry should also be noted by investors. These revisions help to show the ever-changing nature of near-term business trends. With this in mind, we can consider positive estimate revisions a sign of optimism about the company's business outlook.

Based on our research, we believe these estimate revisions are directly related to near-team stock moves. We developed the Zacks Rank to capitalize on this phenomenon. Our system takes these estimate changes into account and delivers a clear, actionable rating model.

The Zacks Rank system, which ranges from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), has an impressive outside-audited track record of outperformance, with #1 stocks generating an average annual return of +25% since 1988. The Zacks Consensus EPS estimate remained stagnant within the past month. BlackBerry currently has a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy).

The Computer - Software industry is part of the Computer and Technology sector. This industry currently has a Zacks Industry Rank of 106, which puts it in the top 43% of all 250+ industries.

The Zacks Industry Rank gauges the strength of our individual industry groups by measuring the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks within the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

Be sure to follow all of these stock-moving metrics, and many more, on Zacks.com.

Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report

BlackBerry Limited (BB) : Free Stock Analysis Report

To read this article on Zacks.com click here.

Zacks Investment Research

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 13:06:00 -0600 en-US text/html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/blackberry-bb-dips-more-broader-231511841.html BCP-710 exam dump and training guide direct download
Training Exams List

Related

Related

Rating: B+