New Blackberry Fund

Research In Motion, the RBC and Thomson Reuters have invested in an $150 million venture investment fund, called the BlackBerry Partners Fund, to support developers of applications running primarily on the Blackberry.

The fund comes on the heels of the iFund, a similar $100 million fund announced by Kleiner Perkins, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, to support the RIM Blackberry competitor, the iPhone.

The fund will be used to invest in both applications and services for the BlackBerry platform, but it won’t be exclusively to support the Blackberry. Companies that support other mobile platforms in addition to the Blackberry can also apply for monies for the fund. According to our source, the fund isn’t designed to be competitive with the iFund, because it will be free to invest in applications serving that platform too.

VentureBeat

Interesting, although a lot of the Blackberry applications I’ve seen have been free, maybe this will change some things.