Hasta La Gadget!

Billion dollar acquisitions in the tech industry are nothing new, but they rarely catch the attention of people who don’t usually follow industry news. A recent acquisition has got everyone talking though, and it makes sense why, considering Facebook decided to buy WhatsApp for an eye watering $19 billion. Analysts have questioned the value, critics hold the view that Facebook paid too much. However Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, believes that WhatsApp is worth a lot more than $19 billion.

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WhatsApp Worth More Than $19 Billion: Mark Zuckerberg original content from Ubergizmo.

Not even a week has gone buy since Facebook announced the acquisition of WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion and they have already announced plans to add voice calls to the already popular WhatsApp service. Jan Koum, founder of WhatsApp, however has assured the media that no additional changes such as Facebook advertising is planned for the application, which was an immediate concern for many already using the WhatsApp service.

WhatsApp has been much more popular in Europe and other emerging economies and only just recently has been catching on more in the U.S. To put in perspective for those in the U.S., WhatsApp already has about twice is many users as Twitter at 465 million over a month, and costs users $1 after a free year trial.

The Telegraph

One man’s meat is another man’s poison, but if you were to translate this to the modern day context, “one web service’s outage is another service’s membership gain.” Case in point – WhatsApp, the recently acquired entity by Facebook for a whopping $19 billion, endured its biggest outage to date (not the most auspicious of starts, for sure), where even the company’s CEO has issued a formal apology. Well, their most recent outage has seen millions of new users signing up for Telegram, which is a messaging app that places plenty of emphasis on privacy as well as security.

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Telegram Gains Millions Of New Users After WhatsApp Outage original content from Ubergizmo.

Just the other day Facebook announced that they would be acquiring WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion dollars, and then it seems that just a few days later, WhatsApp goes down in what they’re calling their longest and biggest outage. To be specific, WhatsApp had gone down for about a total of four hours. Four hours might not seem too long for regular users but as we can see based on the result of aftermath of the BBM outage back in 2011, interruption in messaging services can sometimes prove to be a very big deal, especially if you’re a business that relies heavily on the service for your communications.

That being said, WhatsApp’s CEO, Jan Koum, has since come forward to issue an apology for the outage, stating that, “It has been our longest and biggest outage in years and affected all of our users.” According to Kuom, the reason behind the outage is apparently due to a faulty network router that caused a cascading failure that affected the WhatsApp servers. Further details about the problem were not elaborated on, but whatever the case it seems to have nothing to do with the publicity that WhatsApp has been gaining over Facebook’s acquisition of the company. Kuom has also promised that the company is now taking additional measures to ensure that this will not happen again.

WhatsApp’s CEO Apologizes For Recent Service Outage original content from Ubergizmo.

We guess everyone has heard by now that Facebook will be acquiring WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging app, for a cool $19 billion. However it seems that Facebook was not alone in their bid for WhatsApp as our previous report had also suggested that Google expressed their interest as well. However it seems that Google’s offer of $10 billion without a seat on the board was not enough for WhatsApp to sell themselves to the company, which led to them selling to Facebook instead. However according to a report from The Information, it seems that Google had made a last-ditch attempt to acquire WhatsApp and was even willing to pay more than $19 billion.

The report goes on to state that Google’s Larry Page was also willing to allow WhatsApp to remain as an independent company, while at the same time providing them access to Google’s resources. This would mean that WhatsApp would not only have the money, but would also be able to compete with Facebook with regards to photo and video sharing, as well as instant messaging. Unfortunately despite the tempting offer, it seems that WhatsApp executives felt that Facebook’s vision was more aligned with theirs compared to Google. In fact it seems that it was also rumored that Google offered WhatsApp millions just to be notified if the company were to enter acquisition talks with another company, possibly so that Google could outbid them instead. Of course none of this can be confirmed, but what do you guys think?

Google Reportedly Offered WhatsApp More Than $19bn In Last-Ditch Effort original content from Ubergizmo.