Facebook to acquire WhatsApp for $19 Billion!!

Facebook Inc will buy fast-growing mobile-messaging startup WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock. That's $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in shares, and $3 billion in restricted stock for the founders and employees that'll divest over the next 4 years.

"Our mission is to make the world more open and connected," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post. "We do this by building services that help people share any type of content with any group of people they want. WhatsApp will help us do this by continuing to develop a service that people around the world love to use every day."

(Credits : Facebook)

Facebook, of course, has their own popular IM app, Facebook Messenger, just like they had their own photos platform before they bought Instagram. WhatsApp has 450 million monthly active users, more than 70 percent of whom are active on a daily basis, Facebook said in a press release. The service is also adding 1 million new registered users per day. Like Instagram, WhatsApp will remain its own app, and be run independently from Facebook.

(Credits : Facebook)

The astronomical price tag demonstrates just how eager the social network is to subsume one of its largest challengers -- at least in terms of audiences. Though largely focused on member-to-member messaging, 5-year-old WhatsApp is grown to be greater than one-third the size of Facebook and offers a more insular social networking experience beloved by youngsters and foreigners.

(Credits : Facebook)

"You can continue to use WhatsApp no matter where in the world you are, or what smartphone you're using," Koum said. "And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product."

Facebook develops 'sympathise' button!

Facebook has reportedly been working on a ‘sympathise’ button to save users the embarrassment of hitting ‘Like’ even for sad statuses, solely because they lack any option.

An engineer for the social networking giant, Dan Muriello, said that the button had been created as part of an internal project but there were no plans to launch the button at the moment, the BBC reports.

It would not work for every post, he said. But if a user selected an emoticon such as sad or depressed in their status update the 'like' button would automatically change to 'sympathise'.

"A lot of people were very excited," Muriello said. "But we made a decision that it was not exactly the right time to launch that product. Yet."

Instagram Is Finally On Windows Phone!

Instagram officially lands on Windows Phone devices later today along with another popular app already on Android and iPhone called Waze. (Waze is a mapping application that's now owned by Google). It'll be available in the Windows Phone app store later this afternoon.

The Instagram app available through the Windows Phone Marketplace claims to be a beta of the app so it is likely that the Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform will issue updates to the app soon.

"While our global market share is around 4%, it's still the fastest growing," said Todd Brix, the general manager of the Windows app store.

Nokia, the biggest maker of Windows Phones, continues to report increasing shipments of its Windows Phones quarter over quarter. Microsoft's next challenge isn't necessarily to get the current library of hot apps on Windows Phone, it's to make sure developers think of making stuff for Windows Phone.

Snapchat rejects $3bn Facebook buyout!

Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s 23-year-old co-founder and chief executive, is reportedly waiting until early next year before considering any offers. Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

Snapchat, the fast-growing messaging system, has reportedly rejected a $3bn buyout offer from Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal, citing sources close to the negotiations, said the all-cash offer came as other investors were valuing the loss making two-year-old company at over $4bn. At $3bn Snapchat would be the most expensive acquisition Facebook has ever made.

The company is believed to have over 5 million active daily users and, according to Pew research, has been downloaded by 9% of US mobile users. The service allows people to send messages and photos with an expiration date so that they are deleted from the recipient’s mobile device shortly after they are received. In September Snapchat said it was handling over 350m messages a day.

According to the Journal, Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s 23-year-old co-founder and chief executive, is waiting until early next year before considering any offers in the hope that Snapchat’s numbers will grow enough to justify an even larger valuation.

The company’s valuation has been growing as fast as its user base. In June Snapchat raised $60m from investors that valued the company at $800m. Facebook reportedly offered $1bn for Snapchat earlier this year. Last month top tech blog All Things D reported that the company was in negotiations with China’s Tencent over an investment that would value the firm at over $3.6bn.

That news followed an announcement last month from Pinterest, the social scrapbooking company, that it had raised $225m in new funds at a price that valued the firm at $3.8bn.

Snapbook’s valuation, and those of its social media peers, will likely have soared after Twitter’s initial public offering this month, which has valued the loss making short message system at over $23bn.

The spectacular growth in the company’s valuation echoes that of Groupon, the online discount company that rejected a $6bn offer from Google before filing for an IPO. In late 2011 when the company started trading it was valued at over $16bn but soon crashed to as low as $3.7bn. It has since recovered and is now worth $6.8bn.

Source : http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/13/snapchat-facebook-buyout-offer-rejected

Twitter Attracting Huge Demand, all set to make the most anticipated stock market debut!

Credit : Reuters

The New York Stock Exchange ran a test of Twitter’s (NYSE:TWTR) eagerly awaited market debut on Saturday with an IPO simulation.

As of now, Twitter is planning to offer 70 million shares at $17 to $20 each, according to regulatory filings. Shares will likely price Wednesday with public trading starting the following day. CEO Dick Costolo is touring the country, making stops in major U.S. cities to ignite interest in the stock. His road show is largely ceremonial given the outsized interest in what will be the hottest IPO since Facebook.

The company will trade under the "TWTR" symbol on the New York Stock Exchange, breaking from the Nasdaq market used by a large number of tech companies.

Critics believe that Twitter is playing it too safe. Current valuations imply a multiple of 9.5 times 2014 sales compared to Facebook’s current 12.9 multiple. That puts Twitter at a 27 discount to its biggest rival. It’s also priced at a 29 percent discount to LinkedIn (NASDAQ: LNKD) that trades at 13.4 times 2014 earnings.

here is considerable excitement about the IPO because Twitter is "a unique product that no one can replicate," said Michael Pachter, head of equity research at Wedbush Securities.

Pachter and his colleagues said in a research report that they expect high demand.

"We believe that the market is likely to generate appetite for more than $1 billion in stock," they said.

That is a relatively small chunk of Twitter's capital, and implies a market value between USD 9.3 billion and USD 11.1 billion -- a conservative figure compared with some of the private market trades in Twitter so far.

"The simple rules of supply and demand suggest that by limiting the supply of shares offered to the public in its IPO, Twitter will be unable to satisfy demand."

And Twitter appears to have learned a lesson from Facebook's debacle in May 2012, marked by trading glitches, accusations about secret information and a plunge in the share value for months after the IPO.

"The Facebook situation last year was a perfect storm of an overheated private market, a fully priced offering, a massive amount of shares brought to market, all compounded by an historical technical glitch," said Lou Kerner, founder of the Social Internet Fund.

Daily Revenue Estimates $858,389 of Insanely Addictive Game Candy Crush Saga!

The game, which still sits stubbornly at number-one in the Apple app store, asks users to match sets of colorful candies into groups of three or more in order to clear the board. It’s become so popular that the game’s creator, King, makes about $650,000 a day from users spending money on premium features like unlocking new levels. Though the Mail says women ages 25 to 55 are the game’s “most loyal” demographic, New Zoo reports that about 40 percent of the game’s users are men, so they’re playing it, too.

However, "70% of the people on the last level haven't paid anything. It's designed so you can complete the game," says Tommy Palm, whose official job title is "Games Guru" at King, although his role is more akin to a head of global studios for the social and mobile games publisher.

Why, then, has Candy Crush Saga become so big? Palm doesn't have a big secret to reveal, perhaps unsurprisingly. "The theme is very good, everybody can relate to the candy pieces: it's very positive and makes for very colourful and nice shapes," he says.

"Then of course there is the accessibility of the entire game: it's a cross-platform game you can play on computer then continue from your smartphone and you tablet. The game is free to play, of course, and there is the social aspect of seeing how your friends are doing."

You could say the same about a growing number of mobile games, but none of them are as big as Candy Crush Saga, so there's clearly something else going on here – even if it's just a perfect storm of luck and fortuitous timing akin to the one that fuelled Angry Birds' sharp rise in early 2010.

Candy Crush Saga is currently being played 700 million times a day on mobile devices alone. Palm declines to give an active-users figure, but analytics site AppData claims that the game currently has 132.4 million unique monthly players across web and mobile – a figure that only includes people who've connected the game to Facebook.

Facebook launches Internet.org Initiative To Connect The Unconnected World

To make the worldwide web available to two-thirds of the planet still not connected to the Internet Facebook announced the launch of Internet.org -- a global partnership with six other technology giants, namely Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung.

According to Facebook, only 2.7 billion people — just over a third of the world’s population — around the world currently have access to the Internet. And, the goal of Internet.org is to connect the remaining five billion people and provide the same opportunities enjoyed by those in the connected third of the world.

On the launch of Internet.org, Zuckerberg said, "For nine years, we've been on a mission to connect the world. We now connect more than 1 billion people, but to connect the next 5 billion we must solve a much bigger problem: the vast majority of people don't have access to the internet.”



"There are huge barriers in developing countries to connecting and joining the knowledge economy. Internet.org brings together a global partnership that will work to overcome these challenges, including making internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it," he added.

According to Facebook, the partners will focus on developing technologies that make mobile connectivity more affordable and decrease the cost of delivering data to people worldwide. This would also include collaborations to develop lower-cost, higher-quality smartphones. They will also work on ways to use less data by improving the efficiency of the apps built and how they can help businesses drive internet access to get people online.

The Internet.org website is currently live and provides an overview of its mission and goals.

Recently Internet search giant Google announced its ‘Project Loon’, a balloon-mounted Internet access service that is expected to help provide Internet access to rural and remote areas.

Few months earlier Cisco released the infographic below: “What Will The World Look Like When We Connect The Unconnected, Internet Of Everything“.

Credit : Cisco