Ruth Ann S. Basnillo                                                                                           6/17/2008   SYSANAL

O0A

Mike Lazaridis

Cofounder

RESEARCH IN MOTION

Story:

            Research In Motion started way back 1984, when the two founders namely Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin were still undergraduates at University of Waterloo. Lazaridis basically started earning extra income to pay for college when he did a computer programming contract work for faculty projects after working on their own research projects and finding out that the stuff was pretty advanced technology. It was then during Lazaridis’ senior year that he started his company which became what is now known as Research in Motion where he had to take a leave of absence from the president of his school. Their first project was a local area network for general motors which gave them a $600,000 contract. After developing LAN from scratch, they started seeking money by acquiring grant from the Canadian government for their company to grow. It was in 1987 that Lazaridis found what his high school electronics teacher was saying about putting computer and wireless technology together. It hit him when he knew that Japan was into a wireless data system for Coca-Cola’s vending machines. He had an interest to work on something like that until the president of Cantel asked him to write some software and help make work the wireless data system they bought called Mobitex. After having it work, they received a contract from Cantel and they ended up writing the very first wireless protocol software, application programming interface (API), and the development tools for the first wireless data networks. That was their company’s first break and that’s the time they really start producing products. At about that time, Lazaridis was getting deeper into wireless data; he had an opportunity to work for a Canadian company named SPAR Aerospace. They were asked then to make a product similar to what they have done before for Canadarm2 on the International Space Station and that’s when the business sense kicked in. Back then, there is a system called Blackberry that was used by NASA to communicate with the International Space Station. By that time, Lazaridis realized that wireless push email had some value but was just tricky to do. Their goal then was to be able to make a product that is handy. They started working on it until they arrived at what they called interactive pager. After knowing that there was also this paging culture in North America, they improved their product to a two-way email terminal where people could send, at the same time, receive messages . in 1999, they launched Blackberry in New York and ended up being one of the all time most famous brands worldwide. RIM went public in 1997, and is one of Canada’s most admired technological companies.

THREE THINGS I LEARNED:

            I learned that certain backgrounds about what your business would be would help you in many ways. It would lead you to success.

            I also learned that you have to have knowledge about what you’re doing for you to accomplish your goals and for you to create certain ideas that would help you with your startup.

            I also learned that having passion for your work will help you to view your startup and envision it to still be alive after a long term view.