 Here we are at New Media Expo and I'm actually in the BBM booth and I'm actually hearing about something pretty darn interesting. I'm here with Jeff Gadway. That's right. Hi. Welcome to the BBM booth. So, you know, for those of you who might not be aware, BBM is an instant messenger app. It originally started on BlackBerry as BlackBerry Messenger, but now it's available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. So it's a cross-platform instant messaging app and social networking app that allows you to chat, send files, photos, and there's new features coming soon like free voice calling between any of your contacts. So we have a lot of options on this. We have Voxer for voice and we've got, oh, all of a sudden they're all escaping me. I've got iMessage. There's a lot of different options. What makes BlackBerry or BBM more compelling? You're right. There are a ton of options out there. There's about a billion smartphone users, but there is no one dominant instant messaging app out there. And some of the things that make BBM really different and compelling, one is the privacy, right? So unlike a lot of other instant messaging apps out there, BBM doesn't work off of a phone number or an email address, right? Think about those times where maybe you're at a conference or you're at a bar and you meet somebody new and you want to connect with them on your iM app, but you don't necessarily want to give out your phone number or your email address. There's a lot of people I don't want to give my phone number to. Exactly. So BBM works off something called a PIN, which is a unique code that you can give out in place of your phone number or email. You said it's an 8-digit code. No, one of the problems with the 8-digit code a long time ago was if I got a new phone, my PIN number changed. Is that still true? Yes and no. So today on a BlackBerry, your PIN is hard-coded to your phone, right? So your PIN would change. But what we're moving to is a system whereby you own your PIN. Your PIN is yours and your own. And so unlike a phone number which could change and you might end up having a bunch of people who aren't who you think they are on your WhatsApp contact list, for example, BBM, you'll always know who somebody is. Okay, all right. That will make me listen even more because I tried using BBM in the old days and then I got a new, or I was always getting messages from people going, oh, I got a new BlackBerry. Let me give you my new number. Yeah. That doesn't work. So that's great. That's a good improvement. So what are the other advantages? Can you tell us about? Sure. So one of the other key things about BBM is that you have delivery and red notifications. So with the text message, you don't know if the message got there, right? There could be room for ambiguity as to whether or not the message was received. But with BBM, when your message is delivered to the other person's phone, you get a D, suggesting that the message has been delivered. And then when the person actually opens up that message and views that message, the D turns to an R. So can the person opt out of that? No, absolutely not. I like to call that the social contract between BBM users because on BBM, unlike some of the other platforms, one person has to request to be a contact and the other person has to agree. So it's not like you can just start spamming somebody because you have their phone number. You have to essentially enter into this relationship with both people consenting to be contacts. So by doing that, you're acknowledging that, hey, I'm going to let you into my kind of inner circle, if you will, and give you that additional transparency as to whether or not I've read your message. So I met you at this conference. I thought you were really swell, but then I realized that you are a spammer. Can I cut you off? Absolutely. One of the things about the BBM community is that it's very self-moderating. So if you want to delete someone off your contact list, you can do that. Very, very simply. We don't make it hard to monitor your contact list to remove people. You can also block people if they're really spamming too. I've actually had that problem with iMessage. They've just now put in a way to stop it, but I had somebody who was facetiming me like every 15 minutes, and I didn't even know the person. And there was no way to make it stop, and they just put that in now. So now you also started talking about another new feature of BBM. Yeah, there's a new feature that we're showing off here at New Media Expo. It's called BBM Channels. And the way I like to describe it is a forum for conversations. So if you think about some of the other platforms that are out there right now, like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, I like to say that BBM channels embodies a lot of the best parts of each of those. So when you start a channel, let's say I'm interested in health and fitness. I could start a health and fitness channel and then post to that channel, kind of like a micro blog where I can present information. And people who also share those interests can subscribe to my channel. And because BBM channels lives within BBM, when somebody publishes to their channel that I'm following, I get a notification, just like I would a BBM message. So it's immediate, it's in the moment. I know as soon as somebody has posted a new piece of content on that channel, it's not like I have to go and check in with that blog. It comes to me. Okay, so it's an interesting way to do subscription. Now what about, can you tell how many people have read what you've written? Yeah, it's really neat actually. I'm gonna kinda sneak around here and show you a little bit of channels. Here are some of the channels that I own and that I subscribe to. So if I go into my Jeff Gadway channel here, I can see that I have 722 followers that have visited just over 12,000 times in response to my 36 posts. And if I go in a little bit deeper, I can see how over time those metrics have changed and what content people are responding to. We also have a desktop login that allows you to get even more detail and more information about your channel to help you manage your channel. This is kinda what a channel looks like. So I've got a number of different posts here. This one that I made just the other day asked my followers where I should eat in Vegas. I can see that 201 people have read that post, 25 of them have liked it. And I actually have 18 responses. These aren't people that I know. These aren't people that are on my BBM contact list. These are part of the 80 million people that are on BBM today, that are just interested in what I have to say. So you see that there are a number of responses. There's a whole conversation that's shaping up around my post and the information that I've put out there. That is really, really cool. Now you've been demonstrating this on a BlackBerry, but you're on other platforms as well. That's right, so BBM is available for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. Right now, BBM channels is in beta on BlackBerry only, but will be coming to iPhone and Android as well in the next couple of months. That sounds really, really cool. Well, this is an interesting advancement, I wish you guys a lot of luck. Thank you very much, thank you.