Kik could talk its way into becoming bigger than BlackBerry

There’s a possibility, at least a slim one, that Canadians may one day take pride in Kik Interactive the way we used to take pride in a company formerly known as Research In Motion.

After announcing earlier this week that it had racked up more than 50 million subscribers to its mobile messaging service, Kik has all the hallmarks of another Canadian technology success story. It’s come from the traditional stomping grounds of IT innovation in Waterloo, Ont. It is growing super-fast within a highly-mature, competitive market with players like WhatsApp and WeChat. And just as the BlackBerry devices turned e-mail from a desktop to a mobile activity, Kik has taken basic chat features and amped them up with all kinds of other features for sharing content.

There are, however, a few big differences. RIM (now simply BlackBerry) made its reputation primarily through the creation of stellar hardware, and as such it competed primarily with other handset makers. Kik is working at the software and services level, aiming at young consumers rather than corporations and therefore its main rivals are not just similar mobile messaging services but social media giants like Facebook and Google. When I wrote about Facebook Home last week I mentioned ChatHeads, a feature which could directly target Kik’s loyal users. Google, meanwhile, is reportedly working on a messaging platform called Babble or Babel, even as rumours swirled it was potentially looking at a $1 billion buyout of WhatsApp.

“I think (social media and mobile messaging) are different in their purpose,” said Heather Galt, Kik Interactive’s vice-president of marketing. “I see social media as being very much one-to-many in that if you want to tell lots of people something, you’ll go to Facebook. If I want to communicate with one person or a small group of people, I go to Kik. I suspect that that behavior is true across a large percentage of our user base.”

Perhaps, but if mobile computing becomes the primary way we access information electronically, anyone operating in this sector will inevitably want to own as much of the user’s experience as possible. No one is going to want to juggle multiple services, and the consolidation of these tools feels like it’s just around the corner.

“What we’re seeing is socialization coming into play in just about every area of mobile, be it games, gambling, be it messaging,” says Dr. Windsor Holden, who studies the mobile messaging market at Jupiter Research in the U.K. “You have a number of players with what you might term as one-stop-shop rounded offerings.”

The challenge, then, will be for Kik, WhatsApp and others to continue encroaching on the turf of traditional web and social software companies in order to differentiate themselves.

My advice: think about the office. One of the reasons RIM survived on its own was its commitment to the business market. As the tide turned towards consumers, it struggled. Kik could move in opposite direction, building on its strength in the consumer space by offering richer features within its messaging platform to handle corporate data security alongside the fun services.

Galt said she couldn’t comment on anything in the works. “What we know right now suggests (our service) skews towards a younger audience.”

That may be true, but those kids will have to grow up eventually. If it wants to fend off a takeover and become the next BlackBerry, so might Kik.