Items tagged with instant messaging
Worried about those secret recipes, sultry photos, or other confidential messages you have been sending on your Android phone? Well, good news. Google feels it has sufficiently tested its end-to-end encryption feature that arrived in beta last year, and is now rolling it out to the masses. However, there are some...
Read more...
Facebook does not exactly have a squeaky clean record when it comes user privacy (remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal?), so naturally an ambiguous update to its WhatsApp privacy policy concerned many people. Millions of them, actually, who have decided to leave WhatsApp behind and seek out alternative services...
Read more...
Back when I was in high school, beepers (or pagers, i you prefer) were all the rage. I'd venture a guess that relatively few of my classmates went on to become doctors, but in an era before smartphones, beepers were an easy way to ping friends and family members. Fast forward what feels like 100 years and an app...
Read more...
It is not always to easy to discern bogus news stories from legitimate ones, partly because this is a crazy world we live in. Regardless of the reason, the advent of 'fake news' presents a problem for social media sites and other service. Helping to do its part, WhatsApp recently imposed a limit on message forwards...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
Microsoft's theme for the year might as well be "Out with the old and in with the new." That philosophy accurately describes the launch of Windows 8, which dispenses with the old way of doing things (like with a dedicated Start menu, for example) in favor of a touch-friendly future, and it also applies to Microsoft's instant messaging strategy....
Read more...
If you're having trouble using Google Talk, don't waste time messing around with your network and/or router settings. Chances are the problem has nothing to do with you, Joe User, with the culprit being something on Google's end. The sultan of search began investigating "reports of an issue with Google Talk" early...
Read more...
It's never pretty watching two nerds duke it out, and as is often the case, a would-be battle turns into a lot of awkward posturing. That's currently what's going on between Fring, who last week released an updated iPhone app allowing iPhone 4 owners to make 2-way video calling over Wi-Fi or 3G, and Skype, who may rank as Fring's least biggest...
Read more...
The results of a recently published study of workers' instant messaging (IM) use shows that IM can actually improve workplace productivity. This contradicts a widely held belief that IM in the workplace is a hindrance to productivity. IM is often perceived as an interruption, and as such, "it can significantly hinder productivity by disrupting...
Read more...
