Why Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp is Meaningful for Bitcoin
Nick Tomaino is currently on the business development team at Coinbase, and is also a first-year business school student at the Yale School of Management. Prior to that, he worked in venture capital, most recently for Softbank Capital. With Facebook's $19bn acquisition making headlines yesterday, WhatsApp has become the first truly successful consumer technology company to avoid advertising as a business model. Instagram and a few other early stage companies have been acquired advert-free (and thus without revenue), however, WhatsApp generates millions of dollars directly from its users....
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The hugely popular messenger application, WhatsApp, has changed its privacy policy in order to share more user data with its parent company Facebook. WhatsApp Changes Privacy Policy. This move has some WhatsApp customers feeling betrayed as it seems to directly contradict previous statements made by the company. It is also the first time the firm has changed its privacy policy since it was bought by Facebook in 2014. Regarding the data sharing, WhatsApp said that it will ultimately benefit its users by helping to stop spam and other abuses. Additionally, it would also offer people “better....
Messaging apps are everywhere – over 3.1 billion people around the world use them, sending more than 140 billion messages every day. Their ubiquity, size, and the value they deliver to their users have often converted into stratospheric market valuations: Whatsapp was acquired for an unprecedented $19 billion in 2014, after being launched only 5 years earlier. At the time of acquisition, Facebook paid $42 per WhatsApp user. Telegram, launched in 2013 by Pavel Durov, has over 500 million users today and recently rejected an investment offer valuing it at $30 billion. Skype, one of the....
As WhatsApp goes down once again, there are a number of alternative platforms that are popular alternatives in the cryptocurrency space. Some two billion WhatsApp users were left without service on Oct. 25 as the biggest messaging application worldwide went offline. Meta, the owner of Facebook and WhatsApp, is yet to clarify what led to the outage.Users took to social media platforms like Twitter to share hilarious memes about the outage, with many flocking to alternative social media platforms to find out if they were alone in their lack of service. A similar situation took place in....
Messaging apps are ubiquitous – more than 3.6 billion people worldwide use them, with the average person sending up to 72 messages every 24 hours. Every day WhatsApp alone channels over 100 billion messages, while WeChat transmits 205 million video messages. With this popularity has come a darker side: that of hacked personal data, cyber theft, and government violations of privacy. The way messaging apps are designed, work, and are managed exposes them by default to many risks: Most messaging apps require the user to input sensitive personal data, including name, phone number, and....
Novi, the remittance and payments initiative of Meta (formerly Facebook), has launched a Whatsapp pilot test for customers in the U.S. This means that a small number of Whatsapp users will be able to send and receive payments, as well as purchase digital dollars directly from the interface of the messaging service. This is an extension of the pilot program started six weeks ago focusing on remittances.
Novi Extends Pilot Program With Whatsapp Integration
Novi, the wallet service of Meta, has launched an extension of its pilot program that started six weeks ago. This new phase....