Lenovo's Bid To Buy BlackBerry Has Been Rejected By The Canadian Government

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BlackBerry Will Not Be Purchased By Lenovo (Globe And Mail)
A flurry of news surrounding embattled Canadian handset maker BlackBerry surfaced on Monday:

• Fairfax Financial Holdings, the company set to takeover BlackBerry with a $4.7 billion bid, failed to raise enough funding to complete the deal.
• Instead, Fairfax will invest about $1 billion into the company with a group of investors, with Fairfax taking a $250 million stake.
• As part of the investment agreement, BlackBerry will replace CEO Thorsten Heins with former Sybase CEO John Chen.

Over the weekend, the China Daily newspaper reported that Lenovo was actively pursuing a takeover of BlackBerry. The China Daily is widely regarded as the mouthpiece of the nations' government, meaning the Chinese government was pushing hard for a Lenovo-BlackBerry tie-up.

For Lenovo, the top PC maker in the world, a BlackBerry takeover would have been beneficial for a number of reasons. Clearly, desktop sales are falling worldwide, and Lenovo wants to expand its mobile business while phasing out PCs as its core product. BlackBerry would have given Lenovo a well-known mobile platform that carries valuable patents as well as established sales channel partnerships in important countries like the United States.

For China, a Lenovo-BlackBerry tie-up would have helped bring another Western brand into China, creating a bridge to bring a Chinese tech enterprise onto the global stage, with a particularly strong opportunity to expand in the U.S. and in Europe. In 2005, Lenovo famously purchased and resurrected IBM's PC business. Read >

In other news...

New BlackBerry CEO John Chen claims the company has no plans to shut down its handset business. (All Things Digital)

Lenovo has been using mobile search as both a shopping platform and a research platform for consumers in order to boost sales of its devices. Interestingly, Lenovo's sales have been growing rapidly this year despite not having any bricks-and-mortar retail stores. (Mobile Commerce Daily)

Irish mobile adtech company Velti will be selling off its businesses in the U.S., U.K., and India, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the remaining units of its U.S. business. (Reuters)

Twitter is testing a new ad product that will promote or recommend apps for users, similar to Facebook's mobile app install ads. (Business Insider)

Mobile payments platform Square has begun selling its point-of-sale system terminal Stand in about 1,000 Staples store locations. With Stand, a cash register emulation, Square will look to attract larger bricks-and-mortar outlets that have yet to utilize its original mobile device attachment, Reader. (GigaOm)

Apple's iPad Air adoption rate through its first weekend sales is three-times larger than the first weekend adoption rates for the iPad Mini last year, and five-times larger than that of the iPad 4. (Fiksu)

Windows Phone continues to gain market share in Europe's largest markets, according to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. (The Next Web)

Nokia is leveraging Microsoft's scale and business partnerships to essentially coerce developers into creating apps for the Windows app store by threatening to cut off Microsoft business. (Bloomberg Businessweek)

An executive from retail clothing giant Nordstrom claims the company's mobile app sees higher engagement than its mobile website. (Mobile Marketer)