Whatsapp!! The timeline!

Whatsapp!! The timeline!

Hi

Today morning I woke up with the beeping sound of my phone.! A new message received through Whatsapp. Suddenly I thought how our life has been linked with Whatsapp. And I found it interesting to find out how Whatsapp become this famous and how it was founded. And here how it did!

Who and When: Whatsapp Inc. was founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both ex-employees of Yahoo!. After leaving Yahoo! in 2007, Brian Acton applied for a job in Facebook and he got rejected. Twitter also let him down but he took it positively.( Yeah..!! A setback for a wonderful comeback which changed the world, pretty awesome ,isn’t it?!!)

In  January 2009 Koum and his friend Alex Fishman discussed on having a status next to individual’s name. And they developed it with the help of Igor Solomennikov, a developer in Russia. Koum suggested the name Whatsapp as it sounds like ‘whats up?’. On 24 February 2009, he incorporated Whatsapp Inc. in California. Initially it crashed a lot and they got stuck at some point.

Turning point: In June 2009, Apple launched push notification and whatsapp get updated. Now every time a user changed their status,it would notify everyone in the user’s network. And a few days later Whatsapp 2.0 was released with messaging component and no. of users boomed to 250,000. Acton joined the company at this point of time.In October Acton persuaded five ex-Yahoo friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and as a result was granted co-founder status and a stake. He officially joined on November 1. After months on beta stage , the application launched in App store for Iphone in November 2009. Chriss Peiffer, an old friend of Koum, joined the company and developed a version for blackberry which arrived couple of moths later.

Whatsapp then switched from free service to paid service as the cost of sending verification texts to users increased.( Yeah,I know, none of us paid for that ever!)

Amazing stats: In 2011, Whatsapp was one among the top 20 apps list of Apple’s US App Store. In January 2013, Whatsapp have 200 million active users. And no. of staffs is 50!! And the no. of users increased day by day. By December 2013,400 million active users.  By January 2015, no. boomed to 700 million active users,with over 30 billion messages being sent every day. And in April Whatsapp have 800 million users.

Facebook’s entry: On 19 February 2014, Facebook announced it was acquiring Whatsapp for US$19, largest acquisition till date. But it is a fact that they lost some business because of anger in social media against acquisition. And this made a little help for other apps like Telegram, Line etc.Also Iran banned whatsapp as its owner is an American.

Web and Call: Whatsapp was made available in web for the first time in January 2015 and it is a simple extension of phone. Also whatsapp introduced Whatsapp calling facility which offers voice call over Internet protocol.Now we enjoy both facilities

 

After knowing what Whatsapp is, I had a thought. What if Facebook didn’t rejected him? People says true, failures are stepping stones to success. Hope you find your goal and take the chance!

All the best 🙂

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