BlackBerry® Global Creative Director, Alicia Keys, who was also the The BlackBerry Scholars program head is set to leave her position at Blackberry on January 31.
The major reason for her leaving has not been made public but the artist got into trouble last year when she tweeted using her iPhone that a BB10 and major US tech blogs ran with the story. The firm has also bean suffering major exits of co-founders and other executives.
Recently, co-founder Michael Lazaridis sold his 3.5 million shares after the firm reported a $4.4 billion loss in Q3 2013. In October, Lazaridis and his other co-founder Douglas Fregin mulled a bid to buy the company but by November the firm was out of the deal. Chances are that the job was taking up the artists time or with her 2 million plus following on Instagram, a popular photo and short video sharing service, BB10 was standing in her way to reach more fans, with its issues.
Blackberry has signed a five-year deal with Taiwanese device manufacturer, Foxconn which also manuctures devices for Apple to run its devices arm while it shits it focuses to enterprise software. BBM, a messenger app from BlackBerry has also been made available for Android and iOS.
Keys is not the first artist to enter into the corporate foray as Lady Gaga holds the same position at Polaroid, 50 Cent had such a deal at the now Coca-Cola-owned Glaceau’s Vitamin Water, Will.i.am holds the same position at Intel and U2 had such a deal with Apple.