Keep your eye on this beast. With 465 Million Users and Facebook investing 18 BILLION acquiring it, you know he is reaching for the same demographic the music industry, heck the world is!
Today Jan Koum, the CEO of WhatsApp — acquired by Facebook last week for $19 billion — delivered another news bomb on top of last week’s milestone: he announced that the messaging giant is finally moving into voice — a move announced at MWC, the conference for mobile carriers that apps like WhatsApp are squarely disrupting.
The move will put WhatsApp — and by default Facebook — more squarely in competition against the likes of KakaoTalk, Line, BBM and other messaging apps that also offer voice services. Today, the co-CEO of KakaoTalk, Sirgoo Lee, noted that in countries like Korea his regional giant is wiping the floor with Facebook: The company has 130 million users in total, with 55 million of them in Korea, surpassing Facebook as the default mobile SMS platform, he noted. But as Koum noted today, it wants to grow its users everywhere, and use voice to do that, “including in Korea.”
“We use the least amount of bandwidth and we use the hell out of it,” he said. “We will focus on simplicity.” Voice will come to Android and iOS first and then following on some Nokia and BlackBerry phones, he added.
Koum today said that WhatsApp to date has 465 million monthly active users and 330 million daily users — an increase of 15 million on the number released just last week when news of the Facebook sale broke. “We couldn’t be more humbled by our growth,” he said. Interestingly, today is the company’s birthday. It was founded on February 24 in 2009. Read More at Techcrunch.com