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Waterloo's RIM sets its sights on 10 million

WATERLOO—Research In Motion Ltd. says it now has more than 3 million subscribers to its BlackBerry wireless email device, a third of those added in less than six months.

"It's an exciting time as BlackBerry continues to enjoy enormous success and rapid growth around the world," co-chief executive officer Jim Balsillie said in a release yesterday.

"With over 50,000 retail points of presence, accelerated geographic expansion and the anticipated addition of 100 new carriers in 2005, we are scaling our operations for the 5 million and 10 million subscriber milestones."

RIM is also teaming up with Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Ltd. to bolster BlackBerry services.

Plans include extending instant messaging and presence to subscribers through Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 and working with IBM to allow Lotus instant messaging on the devices.

In April, the Waterloo-based company announced it was working to sell the BlackBerry device in Romania as part of plans for global growth.

The company says it reached 1 million subscribers in February 2004, then 2 million last November.

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