Torrin Leonard
· 4 min read

BlackBerry's Maker Sued Its Own Co-op Student's Startup

In 2010, Research In Motion sued Kik, a Waterloo startup run by a former RIM co-op student. Three years later, BlackBerry put BBM on the iPhone.

I made a short about this. This is the longer version, with the dates and the sources.

I've been reading through the old Communitech News archive for Builderloo. Communitech published thousands of stories about Waterloo tech between 2011 and 2025. Most of them are still online, but the old links are dead and the dates are gone. This one stuck with me.

The co-op student

Ted Livingston studied at the University of Waterloo. On co-op terms at Research In Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry, he worked on BlackBerry Messenger.

In 2009 he and a group of UW students started Kik Interactive. On October 19, 2010 they launched Kik Messenger: one chat app that worked on BlackBerry, iPhone and Android, with the same "sent" and "read" receipts BBM had. BBM itself only worked between BlackBerrys.

It took off. Kik got its first million users in 15 days, and the second million a week after that. It was adding 40,000 people a day.

"It was literally the fastest-growing thing in known human history up to that point in time," Livingston said on stage at UW in 2015. "Disease had not spread faster."

Then RIM cut it off

Livingston says RIM started switching off Kik's push notifications on BlackBerry, then switching them back on, and told Kik it was growing too fast. Messages sent from a BlackBerry stopped arriving.

On November 12, 2010, RIM removed Kik from BlackBerry App World. RIM said Kik had breached its agreements, and ended them.

On November 30, RIM filed a statement of claim in the Federal Court (file T-1996-10) and served it on Kik the same day. It claimed Kik infringed three patents, and that Livingston had used what he learned on the BBM team to build Kik.

Livingston remembers it like this: "A package shows up by courier: a big stack of papers with a gold seal on top. It says 'Plaintiff: Research In Motion, Defendant: Kik Interactive'."

Sign-ups fell from 40,000 a day to 4,000 a week.

"We went from the top of the world, like, everyone flying in to Waterloo to meet with us, to no one caring," he said.

How it ended

Kik raised money from investors who stuck with it, including Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, and kept going.

On September 4, 2013, the court dismissed the action and Kik's counterclaim, on the consent of both sides, without costs. The settlement was announced on October 8. Kik had about 90 million users by then.

Two weeks later, on October 21, 2013, BlackBerry launched BBM on iPhone and Android. TechCrunch's headline: "BBM Finally Launches For Android And iOS, Years Too Late." That was three years, almost to the day, after a co-op student shipped a chat app that did the same thing.

In 2015 Tencent invested $50 million in Kik, at a valuation of around a billion dollars. Kik stayed in Waterloo, and Livingston said why: "I'm a huge believer in the University of Waterloo, mainly because of their co-op program."

Sources

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