571–580 of 831 posts
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The biggest shareholder hero of dotcom 1.0 was Steve Case buying a real company (Time Warner) with bubble shares. But is whatsapp Time Warner? $1/user/year even with a huge user base is still not that much revenue.
My dotbomb stock hero was always Cuban.
To everyone calling this symptomatic of a "bubble", remember that WhatsApp was not hyped like SnapChat or Instagram. It wasn't associated with "sexting" or plugged by Celebrities. A few years ago, my cousin arrived from India to start undergrad here .. when picking out her new smartphone, here was only one requirement: it had to run WhatsApp. She didn't care whether it was an iPhone, android or blackberry (back when…
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Proprietary messaging apps have a huge advantage in cutting down spam. Solve that and your open standard might just take off.
That's just security through obscurity. Seems to work for iMessage though, I've heard it's obfuscation is something incredible.
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I'll shake my first and one day see people using open standards protocols rather than this morass of proprietary dribble. Until then, I'm marginally lonely on my xmpp clients, though the facebook integration really helps.
Also XMPP is non-performant and verbose - these things matter as far a protocols go.
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Facebook's only job is staying alive. That's the very minimum they can do, and is all they're trying to do.
But they are trying only with tricks and short term solutions just to keep their stock prices high. Acquiring everything isn't a planned strategy for growth but rather a fear of the next facebook strategy, which obviously is not and couldn't be WhatsApp. Instagram maybe but still...
My uncle in India runs a construction company, and literally every single aspect of company communication is done over WhatsApp. Each construction site has to constantly post pictures on WhatsApp, and basically all management and payroll decisions are made through WhatsApp discussions. Apparently this is not an uncommon practice, as businesses that were once administered by pen and paper are now using WhatsApp to imp…
Damn, Zuck is far more paranoid than I thought. He's going to have to come up with a better strategy than buying every company that presents a potential existential threat though. Especially at these prices! I actually think it wasn't such a bad idea to buy Instagram. He paid 1% for something that really could have killed him. But paying $16 billion here is pretty much surrender as far as I'm concerned.
Nah, WhatsApp clearly was growing at an astronomical rate. They would have been neck and neck with FB in the near future. WhatsApp is I mean was a serious threat.
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I'll admit to a distinct feeling, that I've started to lose touch with pop technology. I've never heard of WhatsApp. Though I had most definitely heard of Hotmail in 1998.
It's not really "pop" technology. Surprisingly, it's not used much in the United States, but in India it's basically a replacement for text messaging. Everyone from a 13 year old child to my grand mom uses it to keep in touch with friends and family members across the globe. IMHO, they were able to get to such widespread everyday usage because they such awesome and reliable technology. Much better than what Google ha…
I had to join WhatsApp because most of relatives on Facebook moved on to WhatsApp and there are atleast like 6-7 groups on my WhatsApp. Friends, Office colleagues, cousins and other people.
I'm rarely seeing FB updates from my friends these days. Most of it happens on WhatsApp channels.
So its not a surprise FB bought them. Because if they don't they risk losing all users to WhatsApp, at least that's how it is here in India.