A) Where does the money come from to buy those short shares?
B) Nanthealth... depends on what BlackBerry got for their $100 Million Investment. Did they get some ownership? Yes if the have some ownership that $100 Million could easily be worth $1 Billion on it's own. Or did they get the honor to provide the network solution and using Nanthealth as something to "give" investors? Maybe their deal was designed so their return would be to collect licensing revenues... once they have a product in place. Unless you know what the "deal" was it's hard to say when BlackBerry would see a return or what value that investment adds to the the company. It is a big question mark.... one that should eventual provide a nice return either way.
C) Cisco deal was made long ago, they wanted the patents from Nortel that the Rockstar Consortium bought. Don't know what BlackBerry's share of that $4.5 Billion was, don't know how much of the $900 million sale of 2/3 of the patents they got. Not sure what their share of the other 1/3 was. But Cisco had long been interested in buying or licensing a number of those more valuable patents... some of which BlackBerry must have gotten as their "share".
But speaking of which has any of that ever shown up on an ER? Or would you count that as an "investment" which would be part of their Cash holdings?
The thing is no one really know what BlackBerry is truly worth.... not untill you hire someone to dig into the company to see what is really there. I'm just saying that from an investment point of view... there is less there than there was 18 months ago. Not counting the "potential" that BlackBerry has... as that would be even harder to calculate without more information about what is going on.