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Facebook to Buy WhatsApp for 16 Billion

posted by Dopefish on Thursday February 20 2014, @09:00AM   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: 3, Informative) by tomtomtom on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:32AM

    by tomtomtom (340) on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:32AM (#3357)

    There was an interesting discussion [ycombinator.com] a while back on HN about Telegram. I'm not sure I'd trust it so much. TextSecure [whispersystems.org] seems better, is fully open source (including the server) and e.g. seems to care about issues like "how do I make sure that the TextSecure server doesn't need to know ALL my contacts". No iOS app just yet though.

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  • (Score: 1) by omoc on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:56PM

    by omoc (39) on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:56PM (#3396)

    IIRC whispersystems was acquired by twitter? I haven't followed them after that

    • (Score: 1) by song-of-the-pogo on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:57PM

      by song-of-the-pogo (1315) on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:57PM (#3600) Homepage Journal

      Yes, apparently they were acquired by Twitter on Nov. 28, 2011. It would appear that they open-sourced their software not long after their Twitter acquisition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_Systems [wikipedia.org]

      Regarding WhatsApp: I tried it quite some time ago, but never made regular use of it and haven't touched it in a couple of years. Even though I don't use it I am disappointed about the Facebook purchase. I'm tired of seeing service after service get absorbed, amoeba-fashion, by large players like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Furthermore, as I have no interest in ever joining Facebook and, in fact, would like to stay as far away from it as I reasonably can, I'm a little worried about my old, dangling WhatsApp account and am wondering what Facebook will glean from it. I suppose I should've made a more conscientious effort to clean up after myself.

      --
      "We have met the enemy and he is us."