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Facebook to Buy WhatsApp for 16 Billion

posted by Dopefish on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the when-will-this-darn-bubble-pop-already? dept.

lubricus writes "Facebook announced plans to acquire WhatsApp for four billion cash, plus 12 billion in Facebook shares.

Additionally, WhatsApp employees and founders will receive three billion in restricted stock which will vest in four years. Facebook also agreed to a one billion dollar break up fee.

WhatsApp says they have message volume which approaches the global SMS volume, and hope to have one billion users. Even at those figures, Facebook is paying $16 per user.

I'm guessing WhatsApp will send Snapchat developers a cake."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by akinliat on Thursday February 20 2014, @03:43PM

    by akinliat (1898) <akinliatNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday February 20 2014, @03:43PM (#3656)

    First, kudos for an elegant messaging solution. More people should use screen.

    Doesn't this lose the push functionality, though?

    I always thought that this was a central feature for messaging apps like BBM or WhatsApp (or even SMS). Heck, even though I've no general need for push messaging myself, the one thing I do use it for (server fault monitoring), I use because I want the alert to get to me ASAP.

  • (Score: 1) by FatPhil on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:11PM

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:11PM (#3776) Homepage Journal

    As I've never has push functionality, I don't miss it. But sirc and irssi are scriptable, so you can bounce selected messages to other distribution networks if you want. (Assuming they can be scripted, but things like SMSs can trivially.)

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    • (Score: 1) by akinliat on Saturday February 22 2014, @12:37AM

      by akinliat (1898) <akinliatNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday February 22 2014, @12:37AM (#4688)

      Huh, interesting. I suppose I just got used to having push.

      My first smartphone was a Blackberry, and I stayed with them until I was sure that RIM was circling the drain. The two best things about the handset were the great, big, real keyboard, and the efficient push technology.

      When I finally made the switch to Android, I was shocked at the amount of battery and bandwidth it took to accomplish the things that even that first handset did with ease.

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday February 22 2014, @08:47AM

        by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Saturday February 22 2014, @08:47AM (#4801) Homepage Journal

        If you're in the US, then SMS's were made utterly useless and unwanted by the carriers right from the start - charging the *recipient* for them too - sheesh, that's braindead (what could possibly go wrong...)!??!.
        If you're in a civilised part of the world, SMS's became practically free, and the push mechanism of choice, decades ago.

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        • (Score: 1) by akinliat on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:31PM

          by akinliat (1898) <akinliatNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:31PM (#5256)

          I am in the US, and I do pay for incoming texts, but it's all of $3 for the first 100, and an extra $2 for the next 900, so that is not my problem with SMS.

          I've just never liked it.

          At first it was the annoyance of using a phone keyboard to type 160-character messages -- annoying all around. Then, once smartphones ameliorated that chore, it was the inelegance of an entirely separate data channel coming to my phone. A phone that already had a TCP/IP stack. The only way that SMS wasn't totally inferior was the push capability.

          Ever since phones all started having internet capability, I've wondered why they don't just scrap SMS and use the channel as a ping to wake up a data connection. You'd get an efficient push capability that you could theoretically use for almost any connection.

          • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday February 24 2014, @06:57PM

            by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Monday February 24 2014, @06:57PM (#6257) Homepage Journal
            OK, without a package, I've heard that it's 20c per message sent or received for most carriers - which is just crazy.

            Europe got SMSs a decade before it got GPRS, so it really was the best thing since sliced bread. US carriers nt adopting GSM, and making SMSs prohibitively expensive when they did means that your perspective will indeed be different. But that's not SMS's fault, that's the US carriers.
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