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."
(Score: 1) by akinliat on Sunday February 23 2014, @06:31PM
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, @10:57PM
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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