Globally most popular Whatsapp reaches one billion users
WhatsApp, a proprietary cross-platform instant messaging client for smartphones reached one billion users which is nearly one in seven people on Earth use the App each month to share vital information including text messages, images, video, user location and audio messages, during natural disasters, health emergencies, dating, growing a small business.
WhatsApp began as a simple idea ensuring that anyone could stay in touch with family and friends anywhere on the planet free of cost. The reason for its success is the reliability, security and simplicity. WhataApp Inc. founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum both former employees of Yahoo!, based in Mountain View, California, was acquired by Facebook Inc advised by Allen & Co, on 19th February 2014 for £13.5 billion ( US $19.3billion $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares and $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp’s founders advised by Morgan Stanley ). Ironically the founders applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected. In October 2009, Acton persuaded five ex-Yahoo! Employees to invest $250,000 seed funding. In November 2009 the app was eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App store for the iPhone. By 2011, WhatsApp was in the top 20 of all apps in Apple’s US App store. In April 2011, Sequoia Venture Capital invested $7 million as the app was much more popular in other countries than in the US and by Feb 2013 Sequoia invested another $50 million valuing Whatsapp at $1.5 billion.
In May 2011, a security hitch was reported which left WhatsApp user accounts open for session hijacking and packet analysis as the communications were not encrypted and data was sent and received in plain text, meaning messages could be read if packet traces were available. On Dec 1, 2014, 17 year old teenagers Indrajeet Bhuyan and Saurav Kar demonstrated the vulnerability of WhatsApp Message handler which allows anyone to remotely crash WhatsApp just by sending a specially crafted message of 2kb in size. To overcome the problem, the user who receives the message has to delete his/her entire conversation and start a fresh chat.
A major privacy and security problem has been subject of joint Canadian-Dutch government investigation, as WhatsApp required users to upload their entire mobile phone’s address book to WhatsApp servers so that WhatsApp could discover who among the users’ contact is available via WhatsApp. On March 31, 2013, the Saudi Arabian Communications and Information Technology (CITC) issued a statement regarding possible measures against WhatsApp unless the service providers took serious steps to comply with monitoring and privacy regulations.