There’s an online land grab of the sort not seen since the dot-com bubble taking place in the global instant messaging (IM) market. WhatsApp Messenger, WeChat (partly owned by South Africa’s Naspers), Hangouts, Skype and BlackBerry Messenger, along with several smaller
Browsing: WeChat
Despite the growing popularity of smartphone-based instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp and WeChat, the traditional text message, based on SMS, is far from dead, a new research report claims. In fact, mobile operators are expected to enjoy increasing revenues
MWeb plans to tackle the incumbents in the public Wi-Fi hotspot market in South Africa with an aggressively priced offering of its own. The Internet service provider, which is owned by media group Naspers, plans to launch the product this weekend at Canal Walk, a large shopping mall near Cape
As consumers increasingly turn to WhatsApp, WeChat, BlackBerry Messenger and other free applications for instant messaging, South African operators may finally be gearing up to fight back over SMS volumes they have lost to IM players
BlackBerry appears to have scored a hit among Android and iPhone users with its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) application. According to the company, the long-delayed app has been downloaded more than 10m times in just 24 hours after release on the two platforms
Naspers is within a whisker of smashing through R1 000/share for the first time and reaching a market capitalisation of R400bn thanks to an 80%-plus surge in its share price in the past 12 months. The growth in its value in recent years has been nothing short of
The market capitalisation of Tencent has rocketed through US$100bn for the first time, helping lift the share price of South Africa’s Naspers, which holds a one-third stake in the fast-growing Chinese Internet company, nearer to the R1 000/share level. In trading in Hong Kong on Tuesday
Media and technology group Naspers’s share price touched fresh record highs on Wednesday after China’s largest Internet company, Tencent, in which it holds a 34% stake, beat analysts’ expectations in the first quarter. According to Bloomberg, net income of just over 4 billion
What’s up with Apple’s share price? That’s the question we ask in the third TalkCentral podcast of 2013. Your hosts, Duncan McLeod and Craig Wilson, bring you another packed episode of news and app picks as well as winners and losers. On the agenda this week, we speculate about Apple’s
China’s Tencent, in which JSE-listed Internet and media group Naspers holds a 35% stake, appears to have designs on the African market and is preparing to ramp up focus on South Africa and Africa more broadly with its WeChat platform. Tencent, well known in China for its QQ