On 30 January 2013, BlackBerry served notice that it had rejoined the smartphone wars.

The spotlight was on the first phone sporting its new BlackBerry 10 operating system, the Z10. But, between the scripted lines of the launch event, the company formerly known as Research in Motion (RIM) sent out many signals of a newly fortified brand.

On the surface, the Z10 is merely a high-end device playing catch-up with all the high-end devices from rivals like Apple and its iPhone 5, Samsung with the Galaxy S III, and Nokia armed with its Lumia 920. These three phones also happen to run on the three major rival operating systems, respectively Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows 8 Mobile.

The older BlackBerry 7 operating system, which underpins the current ranges of Curve, Bold and Torch phones, could never be mentioned seriously in this company. The founders and former joint CEOs of RIM, Michale Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, would not bring themselves to admit it – one of many reasons they needed to step aside and make way for the current CEO, Thorsten Heins

While his predecessors had paved the way for BlackBerry 10, Heins instantly set about changing the way the organization thinks about its customers and its technology. One of the many outcomes of his new-broom approach was the announcement, on Wednesday night, that the RIM brand would be killed off, and the company would henceforth be known by the same name as its core brand, BlackBerry.

Symbolically, the new branding buried RIM’s recent past and its one-time culture of attempting to dictate to customers what it thought best for the market.

The Z10, said Heins at the launch in New York, viewed via webcast at local launch venues around the world, including Johannesburg, was a result of listening to what users were asking.

While previous phones were designed on the basis of what the hardware and software allowed, this phone could be said to have been built “from the user up”, making the user experience central to device strategy. This represented BlackBerry coming full circle from the period after Apple had launched the first iPhone in 2007. At the time, it was a tenet of faith within RIM – as it was at Microsoft – that no one wanted a touchscreen phone. They thought they knew better than the market, even while Steve Jobs was leading Apple into a new era by giving users what they really did want.

The death of the RIM brand also spells the end of the arrogance that almost destroyed BlackBerry. Ironically, the lessons that BlackBerry learned from Apple are ones that the latter would do well to learn again. iOS 6.1, released the day before the BlackBerry 10 launch, on the surface shows very little evolution from what was, in 2007, a revolutionary operating system. How easily we forget that BlackBerry itself was once revolutionary, with its powerful e-mail and security applications.

For South Africans, the BlackBerry revolution was driven by the fixed-priced BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), which allowed near-unlimited Internet use on the phone for R59 a month. Its popularity among youth was fuelled by the appeal of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), while the enterprise market was enthralled by the extent to which it was designed to link up with corporate networks and mail systems.

BlackBerry 10 retains BBM, and builds on it: voice chat, video chat, and video-conferencing are built in. It also builds on corporate appeal, especially with a feature called Balance, which allows companies to control the aspects and usage of a phone that is linked to the corporate network, while personal features and usage remain private.

Of the three “killer factors”, only BIS has not fully survived BlackBerry’s reinvention. While it will still be available on BlackBerry 7 phones, which will continue to be developed, the data-intensive environment of BlackBerry 10 would not flow comfortably through the encryption and compression network that makes BIS possible.

But BlackBerry has a potential secret weapon to counter the bleats of the BIS-less. The text chat component of BBM will still be managed through the BlackBerry network that made BIS possible. So, while the Z10 and its successors will be sold with the same kind of data plans that come with most high-end smartphones, it is possible to bundle that with a low-cost BIS subscription that covers unlimited BBM text usage. This kind of text chat uses so little data, it is even possible for networks to offer its use for free, as long as there is a data plan in place.

While the devices are important, it is this versatility of the new operating system, from both a user and network perspective, that signals Blackberry’s re-emergence as a contendor on a crowded battlefield.

• Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter or Pinterest

This is almost always cause for alarm. Invariably, it means the base figure is so low, it would be an embarrassment to the company to reveal its true performance. But anyone can claim 678 percent customer or user growth if they only had 2 customers to start, and anyone can truthfully declare 200 percent revenue growth if revenue started at a few hundred or even thousand dollars.

Let’s be straight about this: it is an insult to present journalists with these kinds of numbers. That many of these claims make it into the media is not a reflection of credibility, but of poor journalism and inability of journalists to think through the claims they report.

This is only marginally more offensive than the use of old data to back up current arguments. Especially in the mobile arena, and especially in Africa, growth is so fast, that old data is all but irrelevant – and yet many companies still base both business decisions and claims on a long gone status quo.

A rule of mobile Internet resrarch has even been coined in South Africa to warn against this form of sloppy data use: Gray’s Rule, named for veteran Internet marketer Scott Gray:

“Research around mobile typically has a relevant life of around three months. Decrease the relevance by about a third for every six months on top of that.”

The rule has been bandied about among South African tech journalists frustrated with the relevance given to old data by large corporations. It’s been modified somewhat by refinements and corrolaries, to allow for the difficulty in accessing fruit-tree-fresh data.

For example, there has been consensus that, if such data is accompanied by solid forecasts based on proven methodologies, it may be used to extrapolate data by a further 12–18 months. However, this does not apply to data more than 18 months old.

The underlying assumption is that the research is based on sampling that is broad enough to be generally representative of a population in question.

In April, during a Virtual Indaba to thrash out further rules around acceptance of statistical claims, Brainstorm editor Samantha Perry pointed to a third broad category of data abuse: the use of undated statistics in press releases or marketing material, in an attempt to avoid having to vouch for their veracity. The refusal to accept such data was accepted as Perry’s Corrolary to Gray’s Rule.

1. #MCSurvey MasterCard Online Shopping Survey part of global study. Local industry context from World Wide Worx research.

2. #MCSurvey sampled 500 SA consumers, 18-64, banked, online at least once a week. Representative of highly active users.

3. #MCSurvey found 58% of active Internet users shopping online in 2011. World Wide Worx puts that at 1,65-million people.

4. #MCSurvey found high growth in % of online shoppers: up from 44% in 2009, 53% in 2010; and % of growing base each year.

5. #MCSurvey showed concern over security falling rapidly: 2009: 59% worried; 2010: 47%; 2011: 38%. Function of experience.

6. #MCSurvey finds key factors in growth are price/value, convenience and secure sites. Backed by World Wide Worx research.

7. #MCSurvey shows product and site reviews increase confidence. Social media (Facebook, Twitter) will be vital in process.

8. #MCSurvey finds virtual products, eg coupons, air tickets, gaming and apps, most likely to be bought online vs offline.

9. #MCSurvey finds grocery shopping in decline, down from 27% to 9%. Mirrors World Wide Worx finding segment stagnating.

10. #MCSurvey finds Kalahari, Amazon and Bidorbuy the biggest online retail drawcards for SA. Groupon biggest contendor.

Thank you for following the #MCSurvey tweenote. Full details of the findings are up on @GadgetZA at http://bit.ly/HHp70c

Here you have an early-stage photo-sharing player that is on a rapidly climbing trajectory, but can still be had cheaply. The question is not why Facebook bought it, but rather, why WOULDN’T Facebook buy it? Fear and greed often go hand in hand, but in this case the simpler answer is that it consolidates Facebook’s position in this arena.

Is it indicative of a bubble?

The Instagram purchase is more a factor of its stratospheric growth at a time when Facebook is prpeparing for a listing, than of a bubble as such. It is a case of Facebook defending its position as the world’s leading photo-sharing environment, and of making an obvious acquisition of the fastest growing player in this arena, rather than of Instagram in its own right suddenly having this high value. Time is tight for Facebook, prior to its IPO, and they obviously made an offer that couldn’t be refused, taking advantage of the current high value of Facebook shares.

Well then, is Groupon a bubble?

Groupon’s biggest mistake may well have been not accepting a similar offer-that-couldn’t-be-refused from Google and believing its own hype about how much it was worth. Although it has a market cap of above $8bn, versus that $6bn offer, it is unlikely they will be able to extract that value from the business. The market has already punished Groupon, and its share price is down to a low of near $13  from a high of $31 (Nasdaq data, 11 April 2012). That looks like fairly sane market response to a business that had previously been over-hyped. If we were in the midst of a bubble for group buying sites, that share price would be closer to its highs.

Of course, both the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook and Posterous by Twitter, not to mention Zynga buying the creators of Draw Something, will spark renewed fervour to come up with the next big app or platform that can be sold to one of the big guys. Every developer is looking for a big payday, and this just fuels the dreams, although in most cases not the reality.

What follows is a tweenote presentation titled “Internet Access in SA 2010 – Tweeted”. For background: http://www.worldwideworx.com

#tweenote 1. By the end of 2011, African undersea cable capacity will increase 150-fold over the 2008 maximum

#tweenote 2. Blanket grant of licenses in SA, along with undersea cables, spark 18% growth in number of access providers

#tweenote 3. ADSL lines grew by 21% last year – versus 88% growth in mobile broadband accounts. The competition factor!

#tweenote 4. Of 1.5m wireless broadband subscriptions, only 930 00 use it as a primary form of broadband. ADSL is better

#tweenote 5. That means wireless broadband is 50% bigger than ADSL as primary form of broadband, from being level in 2008

#tweenote 6. Dial-up is down to 500 000 users. 200 000 migrated to broadband last year, the rest will follow.

#tweenote 7. ADSL in SMEs the big story: aside from the subscribers, they connected an additional 756 000 people in 2009.

#tweenote 8. Cellphone as primary form of access: 450 000 (3m use it in addition to other forms). Corporates connect 2m.

#tweenote 9. Total SA Internet user base end 2009: 5.3m. To grow to 9.9m by 2014. Academic and cellphone the big drivers.

#tweenote 10. The Experience Curve (our model) shows that usage of online services will explode from 2012. Prepare now.

That was a #tweenote presentation; a full research presentation in 10 tweets, from World Wide Worx. Thanks for following.