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Showing posts with label zuckerberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zuckerberg. Show all posts

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Forbes' Youngest Billionaires 2014: 31 Under 40

No. 1: Perenna Kei & family
Age: 24
Net Worth: $1.3 billion
The world's youngest billionaire title goes to Perenna Kei, who owns an 85% stake in Logan Property Holdings through different companies and a family trust. Logan’s chairman and CEO, Ji Haipeng, is her father. Previously known by the name “Ji Peili," Kei is a non-executive director at the company, and holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance from the University of London.
No. 2: Dustin Moskovitz
Age: 29
Net Worth: $6.8 billion
No longer the world's youngest billionaire, Dustin Moskovitz will turn 30 this year. Mark Zuckerberg's former roommate, Moskovitz helped kick start the social network from a Harvard dorm, dropping out of school after two years to work on the venture full-time as Facebook's third employee. He left Facebook in 2008 to start Asana, a software company that aims to improve how people work with project collaboration tools. He got married in the past year to longtime girlfriend Cari Tuna.
No. 3: Mark Zuckerberg
Age: 29
Net Worth: $28.5 billion
Facebook turned 10 this year and no one was celebrating harder than CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After seeing his company past the growing pains of a disappointing May 2012 IPO, Zuckerberg has the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company flying high. Facebook's shares are up more than 130% over the past year as of mid-February. That's caused Zuck's net worth to more than double over the same period, even after he gave away 18 million shares in late December. He sold more than 41 million shares and exercised 60 million options around that time as well.
No. 4: Anton Kathrein, Jr
Age: 29
Net Worth: $1.35 billion
Anton Kathrein, Jr. is the third generation to lead his family's Kathrein-Werke AG--"the oldest and largest antenna manufacturer in the world," according to the company's website. A pioneer in automotive antennas, it also makes radio and TV broadcast antennas, satellite and terrestrial reception systems, equipment for high-speed multimedia transmission by cable TV operators and antenna systems and electronic components that allow cell phone signals to bounce across the world. The company--with 18 production sites worldwide, over 6,800 employees and $1.8 billion in revenue in 2012--was founded by Kathrein's grandfather in 1919. Anton Sr. ran the company from 1972 until his unexpected death in 2012.
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No. 5: Drew Houston
Age: 30
Net Worth: $1.2 billion
Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston is Silicon Valley's newest boy-wonder billionaire. Barely out of his 20s, he joins the 10-figure fortune club this year after his San Francisco-based tech company raised a new round of funding in January at a valuation just under $10 billion.  Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) cofounded Dropbox, a cloud-based file-sharing service, with Arash Ferdowsi in 2007. Houston started tinkering with computers at age 5 and has been involved in startups since high school.
No. 6: Albert von Thurn und Taxis
Age: 30
Net Worth: $3.8 billion
Although he first appeared on Forbes' billionaire list as an 8-year-old, Albert von Thurn und Taxis, the 12th prince in his family line, officially inherited his fortune in 2001, on his 18th birthday. His assets include real estate, art and 36,000 hectares of woodland in Germany, one of the largest forest holdings in Europe. An eligible bachelor, he lives in the family castle in Bavaria, Schloss Emmeram, and drives race cars.
No. 7: Scott Duncan
Age: 31
Net Worth: $6.3 billion
Scott Duncan is one of Texas' most eligible bachelors and one of four heirs to a massive energy-pipeline fortune built by their late father, Dan Duncan. He is $1.2 billion richer than a year ago thanks to a rise in the stock price of Enterprise Products Partners and a generous dividend plan. His father, formerly the richest man in Houston, died in 2010 at age 77. At the time of his death, there was a one-year lapse on estate taxes, allowing the siblings to inherite the fortune tax-free. Had Duncan died at another time, their fortune would have been subject to a federal tax of at least 45%.
No. 8: Eduardo Saverin
Age: 31
Net Worth: $4.1 billion
Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin, who was born in Brazil, has been living in Singapore since renouncing his United States citizenship in 2012. He rarely makes media appearances and now spends his time as an angel investor. "My life is not about creating another Facebook," he said at a Wall Street Journal conference in Singapore last year.
No. 9: Yang Huiyan
Age: 32
Net Worth: $6.9 billion
China's richest woman Yang Huiyan is vice chairman of real estate developer Country Garden. She was given her father's stake in Country Garden before the company's initial public offering in 2007, the same year that she topped Forbes' list of China's richest with a net worth of $16 billion.
No. 10: Fahd Hariri
Age: 33
Net Worth: $1.2 billion
Fahd Hariri is the youngest son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He graduated from the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture de Paris in 2004. While he reportedly hasn't set foot in Beirut since his father's assassination in 2005, he develops residential buildings there and credits his father for his love of real estate development.
No. 11: Marie Besnier Beauvalot 
Age: 33
Net Worth: $2.7 billion
Marie, 33, along with siblings Emmanuel, 43, and Jean-Michel, 46, inherited French dairy giant Lactalis, producers of popular Président brie among hundreds of other cheese, milk and yogurt brands. Between them, they own 100% of the company their grandfather founded in the 1930s.
No. 12: Sean Parker
Age: 34
Net Worth: $2.4 billion
In June, Napster founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker wed singer Alexandra Lenas in a lavish ceremony in the forest in Big Sur, California with guests wearing outfits created by Hollywood costume designer Ngila Dickson. The $4.5 million wedding generated headlines for its Lord of the Rings-inspired outfits and Parker's settlement with the California Coastal Commission for alleged environmental damage--Parker paid a $1 million fee on behalf of the Ventana Inn (owner of the venue) for lacking proper permits, and threw in an additional $1.5 million donation to the Coastal Commission. Parker insists not a single tree was harmed.
No. 13: Julia Oetker
Age: 35
Net Worth: $1.65 billion
The Oetker fortune--of which Julia Oetker is the youngest of eight billionaire beneficiaries--was built on baking and pudding powder. Now broadly diversified, Dr August Oetker KG--a holding company whose subsidiaries employ some 26,000 people and generate around $15 billion in annual revenue--traces its roots 1891, when August Oetker, a pharmacist, started selling non-perishable baking powder. Today, each of his heirs and their families own 12.5% percent of Bielefeld-based Dr. August Oetker KG.
No. 14: Robert Pera
Age: 35
Net Worth: $2.7 billion
Robert Pera returns to the list after a one-year hiatus thanks to stellar performance from his Ubiquiti Networks.  He started out as a hardware engineer with Apple in 2003, but after just two years he left the company to start his own, later saying, "Apple is a great company, but I realized I wanted to have more success faster."
No. 15: Ayman Hariri
Age: 35
Net Worth: $1.2 billion
Ayman Hariri is the son of slain Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He's involved in running Saudi Oger, one of Saudi Arabia's biggest construction companies and the source of the Hariri family fortune. Oger was part of a venture that won a $653 million contract in January 2013 to build a local branch of the Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi.
No. 16: Naruatsu Baba
Age: 36
Net Worth: $2.2 billion
Naruatsu Baba joins the ranks of Forbes billionaires as his smartphone game maker Colopl storms the market. Baba, founded the company in 2008 as a developer; today he owns 59% of the growing company after selling of a 10% stake last summer.
No. 17: Yvonne Bauer & family
Age: 36
Net Worth: $3.5 billion
Yvonne Bauer is the fifth generation of her family to run Bauer Media Group, which publishes some 600 magazines in 37 countries worldwide (U.S. titles include First for Women, Woman's World and In Touch). The group continues to expand through acquisitions and product launches focused on radio and print.
No. 18: Lawrence Ho
Age: 37
Net Worth: $3 billion
Lawrence Ho is son of Macau gambling-industry legend Stanley Ho. Their Melco Crown Entertainment, a venture with Australian James Packer, boasts casino projects in Macau and Manila.
No. 19: Yoshikazu Tanaka
Age: 37
Net Worth: $1.6 billion
Yoshikazu Tanaka, founder and CEO of social networking gaming company, Gree, is trying to get the firm back on track after declining sales for conventional mobile phones and stiff competition--he is up against Apple's App Store and Google Play. The company's share price has slumped 22% over the past year.
No. 20: Alejandro Santo Domingo Davila & family
Age: 37
Net Worth: $11.1 billion
Colombian beer king Julio Mario Santo Domingo Pumarejo died in October 2011, leaving his inheritance spread among Colombia's richest family. Julio Mario had owned Bavaria brewery but traded it in 2005 for 15% of SABMiller, the second-largest brewer on the planet. Julio Mario had three sons, including Alejandro, the new face of the family and a managing director at New York investment firm Quadrant Capital Advisors.
No. 21: Jack Dorsey
Age: 37
Net Worth: $2.2 billion
Jack Dorsey has founded two billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies and shows no signs of slowing. His first, Twitter, went public in Nov. 2013. Dorsey, who owns nearly 5% of the company's outstanding shares, serves as chairman of the San Francisco-based microblogging service. He owns an even larger stake--nearly 29%--in payments company Square, which had estimated revenues of $220 million in 2012 and is valued at about $3.25 billion as of a funding round announced in Sept. 2012.
No. 22: Jan Koum
Age: 38
Net Worth: $6.8 billion
Jan Koum caused quite the stir when Facebook announced that it was buying his mobile messaging startup WhatsApp for $19 billion in February.Koum created WhatsApp in 2009 as the first smartphone application to let people send text messages between different phones and countries for free, using only their cell phone numbers. It is now the biggest mobile messaging service in the world with 430 million active users, bigger than Skype and Snapchat combined. Born and raised in a village on the outskirts of Kiev, Koum immigrated to Mountain View, Calif. when he was 16 and soon discovered a passion for computer hacking and networking.
No. 23: Nicholas Woodman
Age: 38
Net Worth: $1.3 billion
Another year, another milestone for GoPro creator and CEO Nicholas Woodman. After debuting on the billionaires list last year, he plans to take his company public this year after filing IPO papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company is keeping it under wraps, however, after filing their documents confidentially--an exception for companies with less than $1 billion in revenue under the JOBS act.
No. 24: Chase Coleman, III
Age: 38
Net Worth: $1.6 billion
Coleman is running one of the most dynamic new alternative money management businesses, Tiger Global Management, which oversees some $13 billion. His $6.3 billion Tiger Global hedge fund has cooled off a bit after trouncing the U.S. stock market in 2011 and 2012. But Tiger Global still returned some 14% net of fees in 2013.
No. 25: Yusaku Maezawa
Age: 38
Net Worth: $1.25 billion
Yusaku Maezawa founded online fashion mall Zozotown, a wildly popular website with some 1,600 brands, which are mostly Japanese, and 4 million members. The website is structured like actual mall where stores are set up; sells on consignment.
No. 26: Rahel Blocher
Age: 38
Net Worth: $2.9 billion
Rahel Blocher, along with sister Magdalena, is the largest shareholder of Ems-Chemie, the gigantic Swiss polymer and chemical manufacturer that her family has run for decades. When father Christoph Blocher departed the company in 2004 after 35 years to serve in the Swiss government, he sold his stock evenly to his four children. Rahel, the youngest sibling, isn't actively involved in company operations, unlike Magdalena, who is CEO.
No. 27: John Arnold
Age: 39
Net Worth: $2.9 billion
John Arnold shocked the hedge fund world in May 2012 when he announced that he was calling it quits at age 38. He got his start at Enron in 1995 and is said to have made $750 million for the company in 2001 alone, the year that the company collapsed. After Enron he started his own fund, Centaurus Advisors, and became a billionaire posting triple-digit returns several years.
No. 28: Jon Oringer
Age: 39
Net Worth: $1.35 billion
Jon Oringer became New York's first tech billionaire in 2013 thanks to the soaring value of Shutterstock, the stock photo service he founded 10 years earlier and took public in 2012.  A serial entrepreneur, Oringer had come up with one of the world's first pop-up blockers as a computer science graduate student at Columbia. The site now has over 30 million photos, 40,000 contributors and 2012 revenues of $170 million.
No. 29: Liu Qiangdong
Age: 39
Net Worth: $2.7 billion
Liu Qiangdong is founder and CEO of JD.com of Beijing, formerly called 360Jindong. The company boasts about 500,000 orders a day.
No. 30: Ryan Kavanaugh
Age: 39
Net Worth: $1 billion
Ryan Kavanaugh's Relativity Media is backed by fellow billionaire Ron Burkle. Relativity now also has a TV division, sports management and a music department.
No. 31: Miriam Blocher
Age: 39
Net Worth: $1.1 billion
Miriam Blocher is a major shareholder of Ems-Chemie, the gigantic Swiss polymer and chemical manufacturer that her family has run for decades. When father Christoph Blocher departed the company in 2004 after 35 years to serve in the Swiss government, he sold his stock evenly to his four children. Miriam and brother Markus have sold shares to sisters Magdalena and Rahel over the years to run their own companies. Miriam purchased Läckerli-Huus, a Swiss confectionary and baked goods company, in 2007 and still manages the company.



Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Samsung Unveils Water-resistant Galaxy S5 to launch in April '14

Samsung on Tuesday announced the Galaxy S5, its new flagship Android smartphone with an Apple iPhone 5S-like biometric sensor button. The phone is dust and water-resistant, sports a faster camera and offers fitness-related features.

The Galaxy S5, which was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, will be available in 150 countries, including India, on April 11. However, the company did not announce the price of the new smartphone.

It sports a slightly larger 5.1-inch Super AMOLED (1080 X 1920p) display which looks similar to that of the Galaxy S4.

Powered by a 2.5GHz quad-core processor and 2GB RAM, the 
Galaxy S5 will come in 16GB and 32GB internal storage variants which will be expandable up to 64GB through microSD card.
"With the Galaxy S5, Samsung is going back to basics to focus on delivering the capabilities that matter most to our consumers," said JK Shin, president and head of IT & mobile communications division at Samsung. "Galaxy S5 represents an iconic design with essential and useful features to focus on delivering the ultimate smartphone in the market today through people inspired innovation."

While acknowledging the market murmur about lesser-than-expected sales of Galaxy S4, Shin revealed that Samsung had so far sold over 200 million Galaxy phones. Galaxy S4 was launched in the summer of 2013. It has faced tough competition from the likes of Apple iPhone 5 and 5S, LG G2, HTC One and Sony Xperia Z1.

Usually, Samsung launches flagship Galaxy phone every year after World Mobile Congress (MWC). But, this year, the company announced Galaxy S5 at the MWC because it wants to replace Galaxy S4 as soon as possible.

In Galaxy S5, Samsung has introduced several unique features aimed at fitness conscious users in a bid to steal Apple's thunder. It is widely rumoured that the iPhone maker will launch the successor of iPhone 5S with a clutch of health and fitness-related features.

"With the enhanced S Health 3.0, the Galaxy S5 offers more tools to help people stay fit and well. It provides a comprehensive personal fitness tracker to help users monitor and manage their behaviour, along with additional tools, including a pedometer, diet and exercise records, and a new, built-in heart rate monitor," said a Samsung spokesperson.

"Galaxy S5 users can further customize their experience with an enriched third party app ecosystem and the ability to pair with next-generation Gear products for real-time fitness coaching,"

Another highlight of the phone is a new iPhone-like fingerprint sensor integrated with the phone's home button. The finger scanner will offer a biometric screen-locking feature and mobile payment experience to consumers.

The Galaxy S5 sports a 16MP rear camera and a 2.1MP front-facing camera. The rear camera is capable of capturing 4K video at 30 frames per second. Samsung claimed the Galaxy S5 offers the world's fastest auto-focus speed up to 0.3 seconds.

The smartphone runs on Android 4.4.2 KitKat, the latest version of Google's mobile operating system. It is IP67 certified dust and water-resistant. The back panel of the phone sports a dimpled soft-touch cover, similar to the Nexus 7(2012) tablet.

Monday, February 24, 2014

WhatsApp founder apologizes for 'longest and biggest outage in years'

WhatsApp, which has more than 450 million monthly users, said it was having "server issues".
The company suffered the outage just days after it was snapped up by Facebook for $19bn (£11.4bn).
The messaging service tweeted at 8.16pm UK time on Saturday: "We hope to be back up and recovered shortly."
Users reacted angrily, saying their chat conversations were only showing a loading asterisk and the alert "Connecting..."
Taylor ITWT16 said on Twitter: "As Soon As Facebook Buys Whatsapp, Whatsapp Starts Malfunctioning."
Jazzy tweeted: "Its been like 4 hours, you would have thought they could sort whatsapp out by now."
By 10.30pm the service appeared to be working again.
The firm tweeted: "WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the downtime."
Facebook announced last Thursday that it would pay $4bn (£2.4bn) in cash and $15bn (£9bn) in Facebook shares as part of the deal to buy the real-time messaging service.
The app's founders and employees will get $3bn (£1.8bn) of the shares as restricted stock that will vest over four years after the deal closes.
The purchase marks the largest single acquisition in Facebook's 10-year history.
WhatsApp will "continue to operate independently and retain its brand" despite the acquisition, Facebook said.
Founded by a Ukrainian immigrant who dropped out of college, Jan Koum, and a Stanford alumnus, Brian Acton, WhatsApp is a Silicon Valley startup fairytale.
The acquisition will also see Mr Koum - a former Yahoo! engineer - join Facebook's board of directors.

Facebook is known to make bold moves to thwart competitors - it famously bought Instagram for $1bn after a weekend of negotiations.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

How to get a Job at Google

MOUNTAIN VIEW: Last June, in an interview with Adam Bryant of The New York Times, Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google — i.e, the guy in charge of hiring for one of the world's most successful companies — noted that Google had determined that "GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don't predict anything."

He also noted that the "proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time" — now as high as 14% on some teams. At a time when many people are asking, "How's my kid gonna get a job?" I thought it would be useful to visit Google and hear how Bock would answer.
Don't get him wrong, Bock begins, "Good grades certainly don't hurt." Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more.
"There are five hiring attributes we have across the company," explained Bock. "If it's a technical role, we assess your coding ability, and half the roles in the company are technical roles. For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. It's learning ability. It's the ability to process on the fly. It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they're predictive."
The second, he added, "is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don't care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what's critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power."
What else? Humility and ownership.
"It's feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in," he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. "Your end goal," explained Bock, "is what can we do together to problem-solve. I've contributed my piece, and then I step back."
And it is not just humility in creating space for others to contribute, says Bock, it's "intellectual humility. Without humility, you are unable to learn." It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. "Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure," Bock said.
"They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it's because I'm a genius. If something bad happens, it's because someone's an idiot or I didn't get the resources or the market moved. ... What we've seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.'" You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.
The least important attribute they look for is "expertise." Said Bock: "If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an HR person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who's been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: 'I've seen this 100 times before; here's what you do.'" Most of the time the non-expert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, "because most of the time it's not that hard." Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.
To sum up Bock's approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one - besides brand-name colleges. Because "when you look at people who don't go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people." Too many colleges, he added, "don't deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don't learn the most useful things for your life. It's [just] an extended adolescence."
Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like GPA. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn't care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.


Friday, February 21, 2014

Here's Why Facebook Acquired Messaging App WhatsApp For $19 Billion

Facebook announced that it is acquiring mobile messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion, making it Facebook's largest acquisition to date.
In a statement, WhatsApp said that it will continue to operate independently and autonomously and will stick to its policy of not taking ads.
WhatsApp is the largest and fastest-growing mobile messaging app competing for revenue in the $100 billion-plus mobile messaging market, which was once dominated by mobile carriers and their SMS text services. Here's why it was an attractive target, even considering the big price-tag:
·         WhatsApp has more than 450 million monthly active users as of today, which is approximately 37% the size of Facebook's monthly active audience
      WhatsApp's closest competitor, WeChat, has approximately 320 million monthly active users as of Jan. 20, who are located primarily in China. WhatsApp has a much broader user base geographically.

·         In fact, it's extremely popular virtually everywhere: As recently as April 19 2013, it ranked as the number one top-selling paid iPhone app in 54 countries, and was in the number two spot in the United States, according to AppAnnie. It has shown persistence on the leader-boards. Today, it's number one in thirteen countries.

·         It boasts huge usage numbers, meaning it could be a valuable source of data for Facebook: WhatsApp users were sending 16 billion messages and 500 million images each day in December 2013. For comparison, Facebook users were sharing approximately 350 million images each day.

·         Facebook already has a messaging app with Facebook Messenger, but WhatsApp will bring a much larger footprint to the social network. For example, WhatsApp is used by 41% of Android smartphone users globally while Messenger is used by 16%. Moreover, Android smartphone users average 195 minutes each month using WhatsApp, while Messenger users average 21 minutes. That's roughly nine times more time-spend. It's evidence that WhatsApp oft-praised clean and fast user interface is very effective in keeping users glued to the app.
The acquisition of WhatsApp will also bolster Facebook's growing portfolio of stand-alone mobile apps that focus on different activities. Instagram is for photo and video-sharing, Paper is for consuming news, and WhatsApp is for messaging.
An interesting storyline that will emerge from this acquisition is how Facebook plans to make money from WhatsApp. Currently, WhatsApp is free to use for the first year and costs $0.99 each year thereafter. WhatsApp's founders have been extremely vocal about never showing ads on the app and even published a manifesto of sorts explaining why.
As we mentioned, WhatsApp CEO and co-founder Jan Koum said in announcing the deal that WhatsApp will not change that no-ads policy, and that "nothing" will change for users. Koum will have a seat on Facebook's board of directors, so there is evidence that he will have real clout.

However, Facebook generates revenues largely through advertising, and so it wasn't a surprise when it introduced ads to Instagram shortly after that acquisition. If WhatsApp really is to rely solely on subscription revenue, there might be pressure for WhatsApp to at least share user data with its data-hungry parent social network. In any case, it will be an interesting test case to watch in the context of mobile monetization.

Another Winner in Facebook-WhatsApp deal: Your wallet

Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp for at least $16 billion has minted dozens of new millionaires and billionaires this week, but there was another big winner in the deal: Parents and their teenage children, who have most likely saved hundreds or even thousands of dollars in texting fees thanks to the hugely popular messaging app, and will continue to do so after the deal.

Before WhatsApp -- and Line, Viber, WeChat and a few other messaging apps now being hungrily adopted by young people and adults across the globe -- the main way to send a message from one phone to another was through SMS, a technology that routed the text through the same infrastructure that mobile carriers used to handle voice calls.

To the carriers, these texts are essentially free to provide. Each text occupies a minuscule amount of bandwidth on their airwaves, and it rides across the infrastructure that they have set up to provide voice calls.

But because there is little competition in SMS -- after you sign up for a carrier, you cannot send your SMS messages through any other provider -- carriers once charged exorbitant rates for texts, minting huge profits.

In the United States, until recently, Verizon charged 20 cents a text to customers who did not sign up for a messaging plan. Those who did -- at $5-$20 a month per phone -- could bring their costs down to as low as half a cent a message, although that was only if 5,000 messages were sent a month. AT&T's rates were similar, and so were those of many carriers around the world.

These prices proved enormously lucrative for carriers. Analysts' estimates put global SMS revenue at around $100 billion a year annually -- money that was essentially all profit for carriers.

WhatsApp did not start out as a messaging app. Its earliest version, introduced in 2009, was more of a mobile status-updating app - something closer to Twitter than SMS. But as Forbes reported in a detailed profile of the company, its founders quickly noticed that people began using the app for back-and-forth communication, a way to send texts without incurring SMS fees.

Technically, this was not totally free to users, but it was very close to free. WhatsApp routes its messages over the internet, so people had to have a mobile data plan to use it. They also had to have a smartphone. (SMS could work on more basic phones.) But after that cost, each message over WhatsApp required such a tiny slice of mobile bandwidth that it was basically free. If you paid AT&T $25 for a 2-gigabytes-a-month data plan, each WhatsApp message might cost about two ten-thousandths of a cent, according to Gizmodo's math.

This means that someone who sent 5,000 messages over WhatsApp, a not unreasonable number for some overactive teenagers, would pay about a penny in data fees. If 5,000 SMS texts were sent at AT&T's nonplan rate of 20 cents a message, the sender would be out $1,000, which is 100,000 times WhatsApp's price.

But internet texting was not just cheaper, it was also better. In WhatsApp's early days, it was one of hundreds of apps trying to offer a replacement for SMS, so it was forced to create a better service to stand out. Among other features, it eschewed ads, while some competitors' apps were glutted with them, and per-message fees.

The company also focused on the service's functionality, making sure messages flew across the globe extremely quickly and efficiently, and that the app itself was well designed and easy to use.

Its founders were also determined to make the app work everywhere: They started on the iPhone, but quickly created versions for Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Phone. This gave WhatsApp a leg up over proprietary messaging systems like BlackBerry's BBM and Apple's iMessage, which worked only for messages between similar devices.

It is still unclear whether WhatsApp can make a lot of money providing very cheap texts. Today, it charges $1 for the app, and then, after one year of use, $1 per user per year. With 450 million users and growing, that could add up to a lot of money, but it is not obvious that the company is worth as much as $19 billion.


That is especially true when you consider that the service does not collect a lot of data about its users - data that the company's new owner might use for ad targeting - and that it has pledged to remain ad-free after the acquisition.

But to users, WhatsApp's fortunes are almost irrelevant now. In response to the rise of WhatsApp and other app-based messaging services, carriers have had to reduce their SMS prices. Both AT&T and Verizon now offer unlimited texting with their basic smartphone plans. Around the world, carriers' SMS revenues are now falling by tens of billions of dollars a year.

And even if 
Facebook fails to turn WhatsApp into a viable business, we are never going to return to the old pay-per-text days. Messaging is now on a one-way path toward its natural price, which is free.

There is a larger lesson in this story: When telecom companies control specific protocols on their lines -- whether it is texting, voice calls or even cable TV -- customers lose out. And as soon as our devices get access to the open internet, we have a bounty of competitive choices that reduce prices and improve service.

What happened to texts is likely to happen to voice calls, too, in a few years' time. Because of competition from FaceTime Audio, Google Hangouts, Skype and lots and lots of other internet-phone services, few of us will worry about voice minutes anymore; for some, that might even be true today.

And perhaps the SMS story will play out on TV, too. Cable is expensive and inflexible. Internet-based alternatives like Netflix and YouTube are cheap and available everywhere. In the long run, there is only one way that story ends.

Samsung to unveil bendable tablet



South Korean media is abuzz that Samsung, the biggest maker of smartphones in the world, is set to unveil the first-ever bendable tablet. The device will be showcased behind closed doors to a select group at a private exhibition, according to a report by ET News. 

The report says that the tablet, to be showcased at 
Mobile World Congress  next week, will bend at 90-degree angle in the middle. The lower half of the bendable Samsung tablet will feature as a keyboard, while the upper half will be used as the screen and show the apps, quite similar to the setup in a laptop. 

While the technology will be demonstrated at the MWC, it is not to hit the mainstream market until next year at least. At the Samsung Analyst Day conference last year, the company revealed its roadmap, showing that it plans to bring 
bendable displays to the market in 2015. It also said that foldable smartphone displays will be launched in 2016-17. 

Samsung unveiled its first set of 
professional-grade tablets at Consumer Electronics Show last month. These tablets have bigger screens than other similar products in the market and can run four apps simultaneously, making operating them similar to multitasking on laptops. 

The highlight of Samsung's MWC event will be the unveiling of the Galaxy S5 smartphone. The device is said to have a 5.25-inch screen with 2K resolution, 16MP rear camera, eight-core processor option, 3GB RAM and Android 4.4 (operating system). It is widely expected that Samsung will debut the next version of its TouchWiz user interface with this smartphone. 

The company is also expected to launch the Galaxy Gear 2 smartwatch at the same event. 

Facebook-Whatsapp Deal: Little Known Facts

In a landmark deal, Facebook is buying most popular mobile-messaging platform WhatsApp. The WhatsApp deal is worth more than what Facebook raised in its own IPO in 2012.
Here are some little-known facts about one of the largest tech acquisitions.

Facebook's largest acquisition ever

WhatsApp is Facebook's largest-ever acquisition. The social networking giant will pay $4 billion in cash and $12 billion worth of shares for WhatsApp. But the ultimate cost of the deal is $19 billion, with WhatsApp employees and founders receiving an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units of Facebook.

The acquisition dwarfs the $1 billion that Facebook paid for photo-sharing service Instagram. Several analysts had termed Instagram acquisition expensive. But now, Facebook is paying $42 per user with the deal. 

Deal bigger than any Microsoft, Google, Apple deal ever

The WhatsApp acquisition is one of the IT industry's biggest deals. It is larger than any that Google, Microsoft or Apple have ever done. Google's biggest deal was its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility, while Microsoft's biggest acquisition deal was of Skype at $8.5 billion. Apple, on the other hand, has never cut a deal above $1 billion

Informal talks went for over two years

Surprisingly, informal discussions between the two companies had been going for two years. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg first reached out to WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum in 2012. The two reportedly met at a coffee shop in California. However, the deal started shaping up earlier this month when Koum went to Zuckerberg’s house in Palo Alto for dinner.

According to reports, this is when the conversation about a possible deal became serious. Zuckerberg is said to have proposed that the two companies join together and Koum join Facebook's board.

Biggest-ever internet deal

According to Bloomberg data, the WhatsApp acquisition is one of the biggest internet deals since Time Warner's $124 billion merger with AOL in 2001.

Also, as per Dow Jones VentureSource, the deal is the largest acquisition ever of a venture capital-backed startup.

Google’s unusual offer to WhatsApp

Google’s unusual offer to WhatsApp Google’s unusual offer to WhatsApp

WhatsApp also reportedly received an unusual offer from Google that it is said to have turned down. Google reportedly offered to pay WhatsApp in exchange for the right to be notified if the messaging app ever entered into acquisition talks with another company. 

A report in Fortune claims that Google even offered to outrightly purchase WhatsApp for $10 billion. The offer is said to be sans the promise of a seat on Google's board for Koum, unlike the Facebook agreement.