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February 20, 2014, 1:35 AM
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| Facebook: |
Facebook to acquire WhatsApp for $4B cash, $12B in Facebook shares, and $3B in restricted stock units, CEO Koum to join Facebook's Board — Facebook to Acquire WhatsApp — Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp, a rapidly growing cross …
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| Jim Goetz / Sequoia Capital: |
WhatsApp in numbers: 450M active users, 32 engineers, $0 in marketing, and only $1/year to use — Four Numbers That Explain Why Facebook Acquired WhatsApp — WhatsApp Co-Founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton — Earlier today, Facebook announced its acquisition of WhatsApp for $16 billion.
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Tweets: @lucaslain, @jason, @benedictevans, @sriramk, @mikeisaac, @panzer, @sequoia_capital and @om
| Jan Koum / WhatsApp Blog: |
WhatsApp says it will remain autonomous and nothing will change for users — Facebook — Almost five years ago we started WhatsApp with a simple mission: building a cool product used globally by everybody. Nothing else mattered to us. — Today we are announcing a partnership …
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CNET, The Verge, AmongTech, PC Magazine, Gigaom, TechCrunch, Inc.com and Cult of Mac
Tweets: @caseynewton, @ronp, @anildash, @martinvars, @fmanjoo, @tim, @me1000 and @benedictevans
| Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook: |
WhatsApp and Messenger serve different uses, Facebook will continue investing in both — I'm excited to announce that we've agreed to acquire WhatsApp and that their entire team will be joining us at Facebook. — Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.
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BetaNews, social media, Digits, Mashable, MacRumors, Financial Post, Techly and Boing Boing
Tweets: @nickbilton, @7im and @tedr
| TechCrunch: |
Why Facebook Dropped $19B On Whatsapp: Reach Into Europe, Emerging Markets — With 450 million monthly users and a million more signing up each day, WhatsApp was just too far ahead in the international mobile messaging race for Facebook Messenger to catch up as you can see in the 2013 chart above.| Parmy Olson / Forbes: |
Jan Koum's rag-to-riches tale, which ended with him signing the WhatsApp deal on the door of his former welfare office — How Jan Koum Built WhatsApp Into Facebook's New $19 Billion Baby — Jan Koum picked a meaningful spot to sign the $19 billion deal to sell his company WhatsApp to Facebook earlier today.Thanks:@rmac18
| David Rowan / Wired.co.uk: |
WhatsApp: The inside story — When he was living on welfare, Jan Koum's family collected food stamps a couple of blocks from the unmarked Mountain View office that now houses his messaging company, WhatsApp. An émigré at 16 from Communist Ukraine — where phones were routinely tapped …
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CNET, Forbes and Business Insider
Tweets: @klustout, @madlid, @paulballen, @jyarow, @me1000, @irowan, @davechensky, @irowan, @blakehounshell and @gallagherbilly
| Amir Efrati / The Information: |
Google offered to pay WhatsApp to notify them of any acquisition talks, but was rebuffed — Google's Unusual Offer to WhatsApp — More than six months ago, Google approached WhatsApp with an odd offer: It would pay the mobile messaging startup in exchange for the right to be notified …
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AndroidOS.in
| Sarah Lacy / PandoDaily: |
WhatsApp processes 500M images/day compared to Snapchat's 400M, Facebooks's 350M, and Instagram's 55M — Follow the photos: The real reason Facebook just paid almost 10% of its market cap for WhatsApp — So you thought $1 billion for Instagram was crazy. — And then you thought $3 billion for Snapchat was insane.| Benedict Evans: |
WhatsApp's acquisition illustrates most of the key trends in consumer tech today — Whatsapp and $19bn — Facebook just bought WhatsApp, paying $16bn in cash and stock and $3bn in RSUs. WhatsApp has 450m active users, of which 72% are active every day. It has just 32 engineers.
Tweets: @stevesi and @sfiegerman
| Nicholas Carlson / Business Insider: |
Zuckerberg reached out to Koum in 2012, and proposed the deal at dinner at his home this February — The Inside Story Of How Facebook Bought WhatsApp For $19 Billion — Today Facebook announced that it acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion. — It was a deal two years in the making, according to a source close to the situation.| Zoran Basich / Venture Capital Dispatch: |
Facebook's $19 Billion WhatsApp Acquisition Is Largest Ever for Venture-Backed Company — Facebook's acquisition of mobile-messaging company WhatsApp for about $19 billion is the largest deal ever for a venture-capital-backed startup. … The deal tops US West Media's acquisition …
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TechCrunch, Valleywag, Quartz, USA Today, MoneyBeat, BIA/Kelsey, bizjournals, MediaNama, The Week, TIME and Business Insider
| Dan Primack / Fortune: |
35% of Facebook's cash is being used for the WhatsApp deal; Sequoia to make 3.5B from its $60M investment — Facebook-WhatsApp: The other numbers — Facebook is buying WhatsApp for $19 billion. But that's not the only important number. — FORTUNE — Like many of you … | Greg Kumparak / TechCrunch: |
WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton's tweets show he tried unsuccessfully to work at Facebook and Twitter in 2009 — How Things Change — Four years ago, Brian Acton was looking for a job. — His job at Yahoo, where he'd filled many engineering roles over 11 years, had come to an end.
| Zachary M. Seward / Quartz: |
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Mashable, Business Insider and blog.chron.com
| Juli Clover / MacRumors: |
Tesla CEO Confirms ‘Conversations’ With Apple, Says Any Acquisition ‘Very Unlikely’ — Following a report earlier this week suggesting Apple had considered purchasing Tesla, Tesla CEO Elon Musk today confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg that his company “had conversations” with Apple.| Tom Simonite / MIT Technology Review: |
Yahoo Launches $10 Million Research Effort to Invent a Smarter Siri — Academics at CMU will try to extend Yahoo's services with mobile apps that act like personal assistants. — Yahoo's future mobile apps could come with a dash of intelligence that lets them act like personal assistants.
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Yahoo Labs
| Rich McCormick / The Verge: |
T-Mobile offers $250 to upgrading BlackBerry users after manufacturer and fan outrage — Carrier also offers $200 to upgrade to from BlackBerry to another manufacturer's phone — BlackBerry users on T-Mobile who want to upgrade will now receive $250 towards any BlackBerry phone …
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multimediacapsule …, Los Angeles Times, Re/code, Engadget, TechnoBuffalo, GeekWire, Ubergizmo, CrackBerry.com, CNET, TmoNews, BerryReview and MobileSyrup.com
Tweets: @johnlegere and @applespotlight
| Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica: |
Google Fiber chooses nine metro areas for possible expansion — Google Fiber is ready to expand, as Google has identified nine metro areas scattered around the country as possible sites of deployment, the company said. — “We've invited 34 cities in nine metro areas across the US to work …
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Google Fiber Blog, Kansas City Star, MySanAntonio.com, VentureBeat, Jack Shafer, The Verge, Business Insider, TechCrunch, Mercury News, The Register, ScreenwerkScreenwerk, NYT Bits, DSLreports, Computerworld, Gotta Be Mobile, VatorNews, Android Authority, Digital Trends, TechSpot, dailywireless.org, ReadWrite and BGR
| Nathaniel Popper / DealBook: |
Winklevoss brothers launch new Bitcoin price index called Winkdex as their Bitcoin Trust moves closer to regulatory approval — Winklevoss Brothers Offer an Index to Track Price of Bitcoin — Stock traders have the Standard & Poor's 500. Bitcoin bettors will have the Winkdex.| Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica: |
FCC won't appeal Verizon ruling, will regulate 'Net on “case-by-case basis” — The Federal Communications Commission will not appeal a court ruling that overturned the FCC's anti-blocking and anti-discrimination rules, Chairman Tom Wheeler announced today. Instead of trying to reinstate rules … | Jeff John Roberts / Gigaom: |
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