Silicon Valley is as much about creating legends as it is about changing reality. Where else could a guy get turned down for a job and then, five years later, sell his company to the people that turned him down for US$19bn? I’m talking, of course, about
Browsing: WhatsApp
Nineteen billion dollars. Two hundred and ten billion rand. Nearly R500/user. That’s how much Facebook has agreed to pony up for WhatsApp, the fast-growing but still very much loss-making cross-platform mobile instant messaging platform. It’s a daring – perhaps insane – bet by Facebook’s
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Facebook is stumping up US$19bn in cash and shares to buy popular instant messaging platform WhatsApp, which has 450m active monthly users and which is adding a million new users a month. The deal could have been driven, at least in part, by a “potentially massive threat from the
Stellenbosch-based mobile messaging platform and social network Mxit is taking aim at the vast Indian market, launching the service in the south Asian powerhouse this week in the hope of dramatically expanding its reach. The South African team
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
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
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
Users of home-grown mobile messaging platform Mxit remain highly loyal to the platform, despite the fact that the service was recently supplanted by Facebook as the country’s biggest social network, according to what World Wide Worx and Fuseware are calling a “final analysis” of their “SA Social Media