I guess RIM really DID Listen to Us

I blogged earlier this week about us sending a letter to co-CEOs Lazaridis and Balsillie on some ideas for salvaging their reputation and survive as a company. I suggested that they “stick to their knitting" and do what they do best. In my wildest dreams, I didn’t think they would offer free apps as compensation for the outages they’ve been experiencing. And I really didn’t expect that their first free app was going to be DriveSafe.ly (till Dec. 31st) which on first pass could be thought as competing against what we do at hereiammobile. But we actually welcome the competition and applaud RIM for acknowledging that driving safety is very important- it certainly is to us and it’s also the law.

But before I go into a direct comparison of hereiam™ vs. Drivesafe.ly, let me say that being able to listen to emails by voice or text messages by voice is really important for mobile workers on the go. Having a state-of-the-art voice recognition system, whether it’s our platform or iSpeech®, will differentiate how well users will adopt the system.

And that is basically where our similarities end. With hereiam™, you can reply and forward messages and compose email messages by voice that can be sent to anyone in your Contact List. Memo dictation is included in our base service and we deliver a host of additional business features when mobile including some unique UI in our mobile app. Our hereiam™ service reduces cell charges when roaming and eliminates roaming charges when travelling outside Canada (we have over 200 points of presence worldwide). And we offer a host of additional business functions as part of the service like-
- calling clients in your Contact List by voice
- voicemail to email
- multi-conferencing
- toll free to cell
- free province-wide calling (up to 3 hours/ month depending on the package)

Using your cell, calling anywhere in North America with hereiam™ is only 5 cents per minute. And our Direct Dial feature lets you call by cell with perhaps the best wholesale rates Internationally (or any trusted phone when calling hereiam) such as 5 cents/ min. to the U.K., 6 cents/ min. to France, 7 cents to Italy, China and Australia.

Going back to our letter to RIM earlier this week, our advice that they should stick to their knitting still stands. Having said that, perhaps I should just stop hitting on RIM- I don’t want them to throw anything else at us.

Hey wait a minute! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if RIM offered our hereiam™ feature packages for free (are you still listening to us guys?). That would not only help them get back in business by offering real cool business features but it would also help us!! But if not, don’t be discouraged. We also have mobile apps for iPhone and Android phones because we work with any mobile device or carrier.