Blackberry's executive vice president of the company's blackberry messenger service is exiting the company.
"I can confirm that Andrew Bocking, EVP, BBM has made the decision to leave Blackberry," a Blackberry spokesperson told The Financial Post in an e-mail. "We thank him for his years of leadership and contribution. The BBM organization remains as a group within Blackberry and will continue to focus on Blackberry and BBM strength in messaging and new areas of strength such as mobile marketing, community-building and enterprise messaging. John Sims, president, Global Enterprise Solutions, who has extensive experience in mobile messaging will the BBM team to his organization," the spokesperson told The Financial Post in the e-mail.
BBM hit a record 10 million downloads 24 hours after its release on Android and iPhone smartphones October 21 the company said on its official blog.
Consumers can use the app's new Find a Friend option on its messenger service to locate friends without entering a pin.
The choice shows up once users upload the BBM App, and immediately to people who currently have it according to a post in the Android Community.
New users will receive a request to be added by current users. The Find a Friend option is located in the app's invites menu, and exists on BBM's latest version. The program will soon show on devices within 24 hours if users have trouble viewing it.
Blackberry lost $646 million, last year, when its revenue significantly decreased 40 percent to $11 billion The Wall Street Journal reported. This year, the company lost four million subscribers and suffered another decrease of $84 million in the fiscal quarter that ended June 1.
Blackberry made a smaller amount of cuts over the summer from its sales, and research, and development departments The Journal reported. This comes just a year after the company let go 5,000 people.
Blackberry had 12,700 employees as of March, which was the last time it revealed a total number. Two years ago, over 17,000 employees worked at the company based in Waterloo, Ontorio Canada. Blackberry also had control of 14 percent of the smartphone business. This has since dropped to less than three percent.
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