Facebook to acquire WhatsApp mobile chat app

By JOHN Peterson
December 04' 2012

It is speculated that social giant Facebook is to take over WhatsApp, a well known cross-platform mobile chat programme. The original source of this news comes from TechCrunch.

However, the site has no information about the acquisition price range and at what level the talks have been reached so far.

The WhatsApp app was launched in 2009 by California-based firm Santa Clara. The app is compatible with Android, Windows Phone, iOS, BlackBerry and Symbian platforms. It delivers text messages, as well as photos, video and audio contents.

The ad-free version of the app gets 100 million users every day and is available in 250 countries across the world, claims Santa Clara.

Last year in October the company revealed its chat app serves 1 billion text messages per day, which is around 41,666,667 text messages per hour, 694,444 per minute and 11,574 per second.

In a blog post then the company stated, "it was a small step closer towards our goal: providing a great mobile messaging system for a global market, regardless of your handset."

The WhatsApp Messenger app has also received amount of criticism very recently from security and mobile researchers. It is alleged the authentication process of the app is a bit risky in terms of security. Several bloggers have also called the process as a "security nightmare".

A recent research file says local data base storage encryption could be decoded.

Have you used WhatsApp? Do share your experience with it and whether you felt any security threat.

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December 04, 2012 | 0 comments

BlackBerry Not In Motion In U.S. Smartphone Market

By BOB Goswami
December 17, 2011

PERSPECTIVE - Seems BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) has bad news in the U.S. market. If not, simply ask Joh Donahoe, Chief Executive of eBay, world's biggest online auction site.

A few months ago there were hundred engineers at eBay to develop new iterations of its shopping app for iPhone of Apple Inc. About another hundred are working in developing apps for Android mobile platform of Google. More to this, about other fifty engineers were busy developing Microsoft's Windows phones apps.

What about RIM's BalckBerry?

According to Mr Donahoe, there are only "one or two" its people developing apps for BlackBerry.

At an event this year in June at Stanford University when RIM's subject came up, he told to a group of chief technology officers, "I still use the BlackBerry, but it's not the most developer-friendly platform."

In early November it was seen that he wasn't using BB much any more. Meeting press people then to talk about the holiday shopping season plans he whipped out his iPhone and showed eBay's apps running on it.

More similar stories are common these days among the once-loyal corporate customers of RIM.

On Thursday RIM posted quarterly profit sharply lower than before. The holiday season's BlackBerry shipments were offered a dismal forecast, and also the arrival of new phones has been delayed.

Isn't it frustrating that all the BlackBerry customers haven't also heard anything good from RIM in a long time? If the company doesn’t come up with something new soon then would they become the next palm?

On Friday the price of RIM stock fell on Nasdaq by 11 percent. It was lowest in about eight years.

According to the forecast of Strategy Analytics, the shares of RIM in U.S. smartphone market to go down to 12 percent this year, which is a sharp drop from 2007. Apple is expected to take a 24 percent share this year in the U.S. smartphone market.

RIM had 44 percent share in U.S. smartphone market in 2007. Then Apple had just started selling smartphones.

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December 17, 2011 | 0 comments

RIM Explains BlackBerry Outage, Not Service Resuming Time

By STAFF Writer
October 13, 2011

Updated: RIM claims full BlackBerry services restored.

TECHNOLOGY NEWS - RIM did gave an explanation for the outage of its BlackBerry, but even after 4 days it has still not come up with the time frame when the email and messaging services will resume functioning, which has affected customers throughout the world, even for BlackBerry owners in United States and Canada.

The BlackBerry outage started on Monday in Middle East, Europe and Africa with no email and BlackBerry messaging services in the region. By yesterday, the device owners in Asia, United States and Canada have also started finding problems in the services.

The BlackBerry network architecture is the strength of RIM, and it can also be considered as its biggest weakness. In this technology all the e-mails and messaging traffics are routed by RIM's BlackBerry central server. This mean an additional encryption and security is added, which attracts many potential customers who are security concerned with their mails and messagings.

The negativity of this architecture is its single point failure throughout the network. The entire regions service can be disrupted if there is a major infrastructure problem.

Google's Android and Apple's iPhone do not suffer such a large outage as the two don't offer centralized architecture.

Analyst with Forrester Research, Charles Golvin said, "When RIM's architecture works, it's a huge competitive advantage... But when it fails, it's a millstone around RIM's neck."

So far, millions of BlackBerry owners across the world are suffering due to RIM's network problems. Many have threatened through social networking site Twitter of ditching BlackBerry for competing products such as Apple's iPhone.

There are yet some words to be received by the company whether affected customers will be compensated.

RIM Office

RIM Data Center

RIM's claim in Twitter

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October 13, 2011 | 0 comments