Items tagged with instant messaging
Google and Samsung are partnering to make text messaging on Android a similar experience to Apple's iMessages on iPhone devices, the company's announced. The two tech giants will do this by embracing RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging, which enables advanced features like the ability to chat over Wi-Fi. "By furthering our robust partnership with Google, we will bring a richer messaging experience to our customers, letting them seamlessly chat with their friends and family across messaging platforms. This collaboration will help further the industry’s momentum toward advanced messaging and global RCS coverage," said Patrick Chomet, EVP and Head of Product & Services Innovation...
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You can easily tell if someone is ore has recently been active in Messenger, just look for the little dot underneath your contacts. Now Facebook is adding a similar feature to Instagram. The standalone photo-sharing app announced in a blog post that it is adding status indicators to contacts, which appear next a user's profile picture. "DMing friends and connecting over the content you love is more fun when you know your friends are there to see it. This update gives you the ability to have more of those realtime conversations while giving you the control to hide your status altogether," Instagram states. Whenever one of your contacts is active on Instagram, you will see a green dot next to their...
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Soon it will be illegal to fire off a text message or look down at your phone while crossing the street in Honolulu, the largest city in Hawaii. The ban will take effect towards the end of October, at which point Honolulu will become the first major city in the United States to effectively ban distracted walking, a growing problem as pedestrians become consumed by their mobile devices.Image Source: Flickr (Alan Levine) Laws against distracted driving are on the books all over the place, though distracted walking has largely been ignored when it comes to legislation. Honolulu is leading the charge as more cities consider ways to protect so-called "smartphone zombies" from themselves. It sounds...
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It seemed like a crazy when a little over years ago Facebook announced it was purchasing WhatsApp for $19 billion. But the reason Facebook was wiling to pony up such an obscene sum is partly because of how wildly popular WhatsApp was at the time. It's only grown since then, and according to its developers WhatsApp users make over 100 million calls per day. "Today, more than 100 million voice calls are made every day on WhatsApp - that's over 1,100 calls a second! We're humbled that so many people have found this feature useful, and we're committed to making it even better in the months to come," WhatsApp stated in a blog post announcing the 100 million calls per day milestone. WhatsApp is primarily...
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Do you want to know why Facebook will avoid the same fate as MySpace? It's because Mark Zuckerberg and company have an uncanny ability to recognize big things in the making. This is underscored today by WhatsApp CEO and co-founder Jan Koum announcing on Facebook (where else?) that his instant messaging app now boasts 900 million users.That's up from around 450 million users when Facebook acquired the service last year for a whopping $19 billion, including $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and another $3 billion in restricted stock units doled out to WhatsApp's staff members.It seemed like a crazy sum at the time, and there are those who will still argue that Facebook overpaid....
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You can't win them all, and in the ultra competitive mobile app segment, Samsung has decided its ChatON application doesn't have what it takes to win out against a plethora of more popular programs. As such, Samsung is turning off its ChatON service for good in all markets in the first quarter of 2015 so that it can instead focus on "health, mobile commerce, and other platforms."The shutoff date has been set for February 1, 2015, so if you're a fan of ChatON, you have until then to get your fix, save for U.S. users -- Samsung will shutter the service domestically by the end of March, thus ending a three-year run.Samsung had big plans for ChatON, announcing the app in August 2011. One thing that...
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A million dollars isn't cool, do you know what's cool? A billion dollars. Or so we were told by Justin Timberlake's portrayal of Sean Parker in the movie The Social Network, a docu-drama about Facebook. Ironically enough, Facebook reportedly offered $1 billion to acquire Snapchat, and then $3 billion after its initial bid was rebuked. It was pretty gutsy of Snapchat to turn down both offers without having any real revenue stream to speak of, along with a $4 billion offer from Google, though the lack of revenue is about to change with the introduction of ads. Beginning this weekend, Snapchat will place an advertisement in "Recent Updates" for users who live in the U.S. In an effort to make sure...
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After Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion back in February of this year, the popular messaging service has gone on to surpass 600 million monthly active users, company founder and Chief Executive Officer Jan Koum announced in a Twitter post today. At the time of acquisition, WhatsApp was nearing half a billion active users. By April, WhatsApp had crossed over the 500 million mark along with a new daily record of 64 billion messages handed in 24 hours, 20 billion of which were sent (inbound) and 44 billion received (outbound) by users. What that boils down to is an additional 100 million members in the course of four months. Now serving 600,000,000 monthly active users. Yes, active and...
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Facebook isn't afraid to make a splash, hence the decision back in February of this year to scoop up WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock options. It remains Facebook's largest transaction to date, though it could prove a brilliant move in the long run, especially as WhatsApp keeps attracting more users. As of right now, WhatsApp is home to 500 million active users. "Thanks to all of you, half a billion people around the world are now regular, active WhatsApp users. In the last few months, we've grown fastest in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia, and our users are also sharing more than 700 million photos and 100 million videos every single day," WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum...
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WhatsApp just refuses to work with pedestrian numbers. Take for example its sale price to Facebook, which is snatching up the instant messaging service for $19 billion. That's a pretty big number, though not as high as the new record the service set in daily messages sent and received, which totaled 64 billion messages combined. "New daily record: 20 billion messages (inbound) and 44 billion messages received (outbound) by our users equals 64 billion messages handled in just 24 hours," WhatsApp announced in a Twitter post. Image Source: Flickr (Sam Azgor) To be clear, WhatsApp had to play with the numbers a bit to come to that figure. WhatsApp counts single messages sent to a group as separate...
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Facebook surprised a lot of people when Mark Zuckerberg announced his social network was acquiring WhatsApp, an instant messaging application for smartphones, for $19 billion, representing the company's biggest acquisition to date. When asked about the valuation, BlackBerry's CEO, John Chen, said he would take $19 billion for his company's messaging service in a heartbeat. "I work for the shareholder. Standard answer. If somebody comes to me with $19 billion, I would definitely sell it. I would recommend to the board to take it," Chen told CNBC. Chen also said he doesn't view BlackBerry Messenger in the same way. He says he knows there's significant value in the messaging business, and the way...
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Security researchers at Gibson Security handed Snapchat what amounts to a lump of a coal on Christmas morning by exposing a security flaw that, when exploited, would grant hackers access to users' phone numbers without their permission. It's essentially a how-to guide for hackers with detailed instructions, and the reason Gibson Security made the information public is because the company claims Snapchat has known about the flaw for several months and has done nothing about it. Gibson Security says it first made Snapchat aware of the issue in August, nothing that none of the exploits revealed have been addressed in past four months. "Seeing that nothing had been really been improved upon (although,...
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Budding entrepreneurs take note, word of mouth advertising still plays a significant role in growth, provided you build solid product or offer a stellar service. Just have a look at WhatsApp, a cross-platform instant messaging service that allows users to send free texts, videos, photos, and audio messages to one another with ZERO ads to distract from the experience. The caveat is that it costs $0.99 per year (after a 1-year free trial), but that nominal charge hasn't stopped WhatsApp from becoming the largest cross-platform messaging service around. WhatsApp has seen a sudden surge of interest in the past few months. The company announced in a blog post that it now has 400 million monthly active...
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Want to get rich relatively quick? Develop an app around a simple concept and wait for the ridiculous valuations to come rolling in, and then sell to the highest bidder. It's a formula that worked for Instagram, a photo (and now video, too) sharing app that Facebook purchased for $1 billion, and it appears Snapchat is headed in the same direction. Word all over the web is that Snapchat raised $60 million during its latest round of funding, and did so at an $800 million pre-money valuation. Like Instagram, Snapchat is well on its way to becoming a billion dollar company, which is a little mind boggling for an app that doesn't yet generate any revenue. The potential to make big money is there,...
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