RIM mulling NewBay and assets sale

RIM is facing troubling times as it continues to lose money, trying to stem the problem by cutting jobs and focusing development on BlackBerry 10 for a rollout in the first quarter of 2013.

 In the meantime, the company is hoping to sell off some unwanted assets, not unlike what Nokia has been doing as of late. According to Reuters, RIM is looking for a suitor for NewBay, its cloud services provider.RIM acquired NewBay, a provider of photo, video, and social-networking tools for smartphones and computers, in October 2011 for reportedly around $US100 million, as it sought to roll out a new strategy to stem its steady decline. RIM declined to comment on the sale report.

When RIM bought it in late 2011, NewBay had over 80 million subscribers. NewBay stores media on its own servers and delivers it to any internet-connected device, including mobile phones, personal computers and tablets.Its share price has fallen more than 70 percent over the course of the last year, as RIM has continued to hemorrhage market share to the likes of nimbler competitors like Apple and Samsung.

RIM's shares closed more than 6 per cent higher at $US8.29 on Friday on the Nasdaq, after Bloomberg reported that tech giant IBM had at one point considered buying RIM's enterprise division.