WhatsApp Messenger is a proprietary cross-platform
instant messaging client for smartphones. It uses the
Internet to send text messages, images, video, user location
and audio media messages [8][9] to other users using
standard cellular mobile numbers.
As of February 2016, WhatsApp had a user base of up to
one billion, [10] making it the most globally popular
messaging application . [11]
WhatsApp Inc., based in Mountain View, California, was
acquired by Facebook Inc. on February 19, 2014, for
approximately US$ 19.3 billion. [12][13]
History
WhatsApp Inc., was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and
Jan Koum, both former employees of Yahoo! . After Koum
and Acton left Yahoo! in September 2007, the duo travelled
to South America as a break from work. [14] At one point
they applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected. [14]
For the rest of the following years Koum relied on his
$400, 000 savings from Yahoo! . In January 2009, after
purchasing an iPhone and realizing that the seven-month-
old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of
apps, he started visiting his friend Alex Fishman in West
San Jose where the three would discuss .having statuses
next to individual names of the people, but this was not
possible without an iPhone developer, so Fishman
introduced Koum to Igor Solomennikov, a developer in
Russia that he had found on RentACoder.com. Koum almost
immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it
sounded like what’s up, and a week later on his
birthday, on February 24, 2009, he incorporated
WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, early WhatsApp
kept crashing or getting stuck and at a particular point,
Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon
which Acton encouraged him to wait for a few more
months. [14]
In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, letting
developers ping users when they were not using an app.
Koum updated WhatsApp so that each time the user
changed their statuses, it would ping everyone in the user’s
network. [14] WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a
messaging component and the active users suddenly swelled
to 250, 000. Koum visited Acton, who was still unemployed
while managing another unsuccessful startup and decided
to join the company. [14] In October Acton persuaded five
ex-Yahoo! friends to invest$250, 000 in seed funding, and
as a result was granted co-founder status and a stake. He
officially joined on November 1. [14] After months at beta
stage, the application eventually launched in November
2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone . Koum
then hired an old friend who lived in Los Angeles, Chris
Peiffer, to make the BlackBerry version, which arrived two
months later. [14]
WhatsApp was switched from a free to paid service to
avoid growing too fast, mainly because the primary cost
was sending verification texts to users. In December 2009
WhatsApp for the iPhone was updated to send photos. By
early 2011, WhatsApp was in the top 20 of all apps in
Apple’s U.S. App Store. [14]
In April 2011, the founders agreed to take$7 million from
Sequoia Capital on top of their$250, 000 seed funding,
after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim
Goetz . [14] According to Goetz, the venture capital firm
originally discovered WhatsApp through an App store
tracking system they developed called’early bird’, at a time
when the app was much more popular in other countries
than in the US. However, it took months for the VC firm
to track down Koum and Acton, given that the company
didn’t have a publicly available address nor signage at the
time. All Goetz knew was that they were located in
Mountain View, and Sequoia partners literally walked the
streets of Mountain View to see if [they] could intersect
with [Koum and Acton]. [15]
By February 2013, WhatsApp’s user base had swollen to
about 200 million active users and its staff to 50. Sequoia
invested another$50 million, valuing WhatsApp at$1.5
billion. [14]
In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400
million active users use the service each month. [16] As of
April 22, 2014, WhatsApp had over 500 million monthly
active users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos are
shared each day, and the messaging system handles more
than 10 billion messages each day. [17] On August 24,
2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that
WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide.
WhatsApp added about 25 million new users every month
or 833, 000 active users per day. [18][19] With 65 million
active users, about 10% of the total worldwide users, India
is the largest single country in terms of number of users.
[20]