From the desk (and BlackBerry) of Keith Parnell

I sent out this quick tweet last night to my JZ, Twitter and Facebook network but thougth I’d run it by you guys in the blog network to see what your thoughts are.

TBS MLB playoffs are “presented by BlackBerry”. Not Rim. Product brand recognition bigger than company brand. Good thing?

What do you think? Should a company make it standard practice to spend millions of dollars to brand one of their products rather than their company name? Should the MLB playoffs on TBS be “presented by Rim”?

I think a very important question for company decision-makers is, How Tethered Should My Team Be?

My world is very interesting and overall I think unique. Not unique for the tech industry but unique as compared to the work force as a whole. I require myself to be electronically connected at almost all hours of every night and day. Much to Nicole’s chagrin, yes, ‘every’ night and day. My tech team is nearly the same and during their disconnected times there should be another connected person capable of filling the needs of the organization.

Let’s move to other member (sets) of the organization’s team. Should the Operations team be consistently connected? Should the Creative team be consistently connected? Should the Sales team be consistently connected? Should the Marketing team be consistently connected? Within each of these teams an evaluation of senior management, team leads and team members should also be weighed. Should they, or at least their role, be consistently connected?

Here’s my answer - YES! Yes, they absolutely sure should. Each of these teams occupy a vital role in the decision-making processes that are important to the organization’s success. A senior member of each of these teams should be always available, reachable and able to communication at any given time as dictated by the real-time needs of the organization.

So how do we make this connectability happen? Smartphones. Smartphones that are reliable, (platform) stable, secure, usable, functional and yes, okay attractive. RIM’s BlackBerry tops the list of recommendations from every top organization around the globe. Nokia (the N95) makes fine smartphone products as does Palm (the Treo).

CIO.com’s Survey Results for “How Addicted to Your SmartPhone Are You?
5% - My phone is for business. I put it away at night, unless I’m traveling for work.
2% - I check messages every few hours after work and on weekends. But I’d never bring my smartphone on vacation.
19% - I’m more productive because of my smartphone, and it doesn’t negatively affect my work/life balance. I wouldn’t call it an addiction.
67% - My smartphone never leaves my side. At work, rest, play, vacation, you name itmy best electronic friend is with me.
7% - IMHO That’s NOYB. BB4N. EOM. (In my humble opinion, that’s none of your business. Bye bye for now. End of message.)

Where do you stand?

Research In Motion held an event to celebrate the opening of a new plant in Sydney, Australia. At the event, they had a nice panel showing the history of BlackBerry devices dating back to the RIM 950 Wireless Handheld (bottom left) released in 1998, followed by the 957 model in 2000 (top left). RIM unveiled the data and voice BlackBerry 5810 (bottom right) in 2002.

See the full set of photos from the RIM display here.

This weekend we were having issues with the wireless network at home. I think maybe the issue is the lack-of-strength reception from the airport card in the iBook but regardless we had a need to get the machine online while sitting at the dining room table.

Every Windows laptop I’ve had I’ve been able to tether my Pearl to it to use as a modem for the machine. But I hadn’t tried it with a Mac notebook.

I quickly searched (not Googled, Yahoo!’d) for “tether BlackBerry Pearl to iBook” and found Dave Taylor’s article titled “How do I use my Blackberry Pearl as a bluetooth modem with a Mac?” Perfect!

Thanks to Dave, I had the iBook online via the Pearl inside of 4 minutes. No issues. No problems following his instructions. No performance malfunctions through T-mobile. The iBook is online now when I need it.

Thanks RIM. As if this needed to be said, I fell in love with you all over again. BlackBerry is the perfect user device for any smartphone person.