Facebook announced the purchase of the mobile messaging service WhatsApp on Wednesday, in a $19bn deal that represents the social media company's biggest acquisition yet.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, described five-year-old WhatsApp as an "incredibly valuable" service that was well on its way to connecting 1 billion people around the world.
WhatsApp has more than 400m users around the world and claims it is adding more than 1 million new registered users a day.
Last year Facebook made an unsuccessful $3bn bid for SnapChat, a service that sends messages that erase themselves after a short period.
Facebook faltered after its share sale in May 2012 as analysts worried the company was losing out as its users moved to mobile.
"Doctors in India are using WhatsApp to instantly send electrocardiogram pictures of patients who've suffered heart attacks, saving valuable time and potentially lives," Koum wrote on the company blog last year.
No comments:
Post a Comment