BlackBerry's secret weapon for revival could be automobiles

BlackBerry, once valued at over 67 billion dollars, is sinking today with no taker for less than 5 billion dollars, yet there is a ray of hope for the smartphone manufacturer to rise above the losses by venturing into the automobile sector.

BlackBerry had purchased a little known Ottawa-based company called QNX Software Systems in 2010, and the idea was to use QNX's operating system software to power growing panoply of Blackberry devices, including a tablet computer.

According to Fox News, QNX has primarily been an embedded systems software company, creating the sort of programs that are used in factories, power plants, and routers, apart from creating millions of dashboards supporting systems from the likes of OnStar and Delphi.

Since the automobile business is in the process of undergoing radical change, with self-driven cars, improved navigation systems, the transformation will take years and require supporting communications infrastructure that allows cars to recognize and talk to each other in real time, an opportunity that BlackBerry can use to its advantage.

The report said that Blackberry has got one billion dollars in new investment coming in from several firms now, and the company can use that to venture in the flourishing sector of automobiles, before rivals Apple and Google take charge.