After WhatsApp: An Insider’s View On What’s Next In Messaging

I was driving to a meeting in San Francisco when I got the message: "Facebook to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion." I pulled over and watched as messages started to stream in. Everyone had the same question: Is Facebook crazy? As the CEO of the only smartphone messenger more popular than WhatsApp in the U.S., I gave them all the same answer: "No." In fact, we had expected something like this for quite some time. And as we've now seen with Tango's $280 million round, led by China's Alibaba Group, interest in this space clearly isn't going away anytime soon.

Messaging is a complex topic. It's also one of the most misunderstood sectors in tech today. What's the difference between WhatsApp and GChat? Why not just use SMS? Why did Facebook need to buy another messaging app just three years after it had bought Beluga? At the same time, however, messaging promises to be one of the highest-stakes battles in mobile, similar to what search was to the web or what productivity software was to the PC.

So what does messaging mean to mobile?

It's a question we at Kik have been
After WhatsApp: An Insider's View On What's Next In Messaging [shared from Weave for Windows Phone]

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