WhatsApp-Facebook Post-Acquisition Scenario: Is Telegram the next big thing in mobile messaging app?

WhatsApp, the leading messaging app with more than 465 million active users, is trying to justify its multi billion dollars acquisition by the social-media giant Facebook and promises to add free voice-call services by the start of second quarter this year.

Telegram emerging as WhatsApp's biggest competitor

“We are going to introduce voice on WhatsApp in the second quarter of this year,” WhatsApp founder Jan Koum said on the opening day of the four-day World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The 29-year-old billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, was the star speaker on the opening day of the industry fair, announced a stock and cash purchase of WhatsApp on Wednesday.

But very few know right now that the other competitors of the WhatsApp have been witnessing a sizeable increase of active users since the jaw-dropping $19-billion deal last week. Other competing messaging apps like Telegram, TigerText and Confide have been reported to have millions of new users during the WhatsApp downtime.

Telegram, a messaging app with a focus on speed and security, alone saw 8 million downloads after Facebook tookover WhatsApp, reported by Tech Crunch. The fact ultimately pointing towards the unsatisfactory attitude of users towards Facebook’s own mobile messaging apps, which are specifically ranked lower than Telegram, WhatsApp and even Snapchat in the App Store’s score chart.

Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, has claimed that app’s growth rate has increased three times since the WhatsApp acquisition. It has gone to touch one million downloads per day from average of 300,000-400,000 downloads/day before the multi-billion dollars deal.

Now question is that in the wake of tough competition ahead whether WhatsApp will prove itself a profitable deal for Facebook or this deal was just to defeat rivals like Microsoft and Google.

On Monday, the star speaker of the event Mark Zuckerberg defended the price paid for a messaging service with negligible revenue. He maintained that rival services such as South Korea's KakaoTalk and Naver's LINE are already "monetizing" at a rate of $2 to $3 in revenue per user per year, despite being in the early stages of growth.

On the other hand, WhatsApp chief executive Jan Koum revealed the plans saying that the WhatsApp voice product would "focus on simplicity" as it has with its text-based messaging service. Tech gurus are expecting WhatsApp revenue jumping 5 times in 2014 if succeeded to maintain the growth rate they saw in 2013. Media reports suggest WhatsApp's revenue at about $20 million in 2013. 

Browser Market Share Battle: Another Victory for Google Chrome Over Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8

“Every rise has a downfall”, it’s an old saying but fits very much for recent victory of Google Chrome over Internet Explorer in terms of market share.

 Google Chrome overtakes Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, which was considered as the undoubted king of browsing and once the holder of ‘world’s most-used browser’ tag, has lost its supremacy in browsing field to its toughest rival Google Chrome.

According to statistics and figures by StatCounter, a Web Analytic firm, Internet Explorer 8, after been trailed slightly by Google chrome in last week of November, has lost significant share of market until now.

The statistics shows that in last week of November, Internet Explorer 8 was capturing 23.5% of browser market share as compared to 23.6% of Google Chrome leaving a gap of just 0.1%; but the latest stats have shown that the gap has widened to 3% with browser market share of 22% and 25% for Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome respectively.

Chief Executive Officer of StatCounter said on this occasion that “It looks as if people favor Google Chrome on weekends at home, but office commercial use has now caught up.”

Nevertheless, one shouldn’t forget the fact that Internet Explorer 8 shows just one version of wide range of browsers under Internet Explorer. The same report of StatCounter reveals that a growing number of people (10% by StatCounter’s Analysis) are using the latest and stylish version which is Internet Explorer 9; while some habitual internet users still love Internet Explorer 7 as well as Internet Explorer 6 working, which was introduced 10 year back in 2001.

Therefore, collectively Internet Explorer still leads the race with a 38.5% share of the global browser market followed and checked closely by Google Chrome in second while Mozilla Firefox placed third at the moment.

Though Google Chrome’s super-fast growth and its striking redesigns are alarming for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the Google’s browser looks to have fought back forcefully in 2011, after a decade-long break, as search rivalry between arch rivals Google and Microsoft heated up lately to another stage.

Another worth-mentioning fact is that searches made in Internet Explorer default to Bing of Microsoft, while on the other hand Google Chrome and Firefox are both tied in with Google’s search engine. In a continuous effort to beat each other, the browser makers have been adding a bunch of advance tools and features such as extensions, synchronization, privacy, HTML5 support, and hardware acceleration etc.

Google’s hunger to lead the market in browser world could be smelled from the fact that a newer version has been released by them every 6-week time; but Google has to be very cautious in not frustrating the end-user much with updates every now and then.