The BlackBerry may have been developed in Ontario as the brainchild of a Greek-Canadian, but the ubiquitous communications device really made its name in New York.

Mike Lazaridis was studying engineering at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, when he landed a contract with General Motors to develop an industrial technology. Three months before graduation, he interrupted his studies and turned businessman. He founded Research In Motion Limited (RIM) in 1984, choosing the name when he saw a television program called Poetry in Motion on the graceful movement of football players.

At first, RIM focused on contract engineering, and developed DigiSync, a technology for film editing used in Hollywood that won an Academy Award, Mark Guibert, RIM’s vice president, Corporate Marketing, told The New York Sun.

In 1987, still with just a dozen employees, RIM turned to wireless technology. It collaborated with the Canadian carrier known today as Rogers and with BellSouth – two of the first companies to deploy wireless data networks – and was the first company in North America to develop a wireless modem for these networks, and then for laptops and handheld devices.

Next came an interactive pager. Quite large by pager standards, it included an e-mail address and was, thus, the world’s smallest e-mail terminal. The concept was quite revolutionary. Paging, until then unidirectional, now could transmit information. A two-way modem pinpointed the device, sent the message and received acknowledgement. This dramatically improved functionality, and set the stage for the BlackBerry.

BlackBerry was launched in January 1999 in Canada and the U.S.

“We had a lot of proving to do,” said Mr. Guibert. The original strategy was to place the devices in important market segments. The first and most obvious was Wall Street.

“We found that the quickest to take up the technology were people on Wall Street who had a strong need for immediate information and could decide on return-on-investment instantly,” said Mr. Guibert. So, in 1998, RIM strategically placed a few hundred devices with Wall Streeters, and the informal ‘seeding’ soon began to bear fruit.

RIM hired a small army of young graduates, called them “Wireless Email Evangelists,” and sent them out to tout the merits of wireless e-mail. They had to win over two important constituencies, the actual end-users that RIM was counting on to generate demand, and the technology people who had to be convinced that integrating wireless e-mail into the corporate system would be secure and manageable.

Focus groups did not think much of wireless e-mail because they did not use e-mail for time-sensitive communication – they used a telephone or pager instead. But that was only because they didn’t have a method of immediately receiving such information. Inevitably, once the method was created, the landscape changed.

It took RIM five years after the official BlackBerry launch in January 1999 to reach 1 million subscribers in January 2004; the 2-million mark came a mere 10 months later.

RIM’s emphasis on the security element in the system architecture has helped win over users in sensitive fields. The legal profession quickly adopted BlackBerrys, carrying them into courtrooms where cell phones were banned. Probably everyone on Capitol Hill and in the White House uses them. And applications like wireless prescriptions are in the works for the medical community.

In 2002, BlackBerry integrated cell phone capability. RIM switched its device operating system to Java, an open standard that allows for more applications. This opened up the market, and the company now has about 80 carrier partnerships around the world, with 100 more expected in the next year.

As the originator of a unique platform, RIM has a competitive advantage. Who is nipping at its heels?

“No one stands out at the moment in our direct area,” said Mr. Guibert, “Some 40,000 organizations have deployed our server product behind their firewall, and we’re working with all the leading handset manufacturers to support their handsets.”

Today, RIM has nearly 4,000 employees. Devices are still manufactured at its Waterloo facility, but there’s also an outsourcing arrangement with a company in Hungary.

BlackBerrys are no longer given away. “Everybody’s a customer these days,” says Mr. Guibert, an avid user himself. He has not deleted from his device the signature announcing that the message was, “Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld.” Nor have most people, it seems. The signature itself has become part of the message.

RIM trades on the Nasdaq Stock Market (Nasdaq: RIMM. Friday’s close: $73.78) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM).