Korean messaging firm Kakao merges with web portal Daum to fight Line
The reverse takeover saves Kakao, a challenger to the likes of Line and WhatsApp, the trouble of going through a tiresome stock market flotation.
Major Asian messaging firm in talks to buy Viber, report claims
Israel’s Calcalist says bootstrapped Viber is negotiating a sale worth somewhere between $300 and 400 million — but who’s the mystery suitor?
WhatsApp is growing like crazy — 300 million monthly users and counting
WhatsApp, which has just added push-to-talk voice messaging to its slowly growing feature list, is itself growing at an impressive pace.
What role did Google’s Play Store play in Viber’s Saudi Arabian blockage?
The blocking of Skype and WhatsApp rival Viber in Saudi Arabia may or may not be a matter of censorship, but CEO Talmon Marco is pointing a finger at Google for making the process too easy.
What do we mean when we talk about “messaging” services?
It’s fun to compare the different ways of sending a digital message, but is there a point to doing so? According to one irate analyst, the debate – as currently framed – is futile.
Viber morphs into full-blown Skype rival by releasing desktop app
Until now, Viber has been a mobile-only play that sits somewhere in between Skype and WhatsApp. Now it’s on the desktop too, and the different platform versions are very tightly integrated indeed.
Viber for BlackBerry finally finds its voice
The beta release of Viber for BlackBerry 2.4 is the first to include Skype-rivalling VoIP functionality. However, this only applies to older versions of the BlackBerry platform, not the freshly-launched BB10.
The perfect murder: How Facebook will kill the phone as we know it
Facebook jumped into an already crowded VoIP market with the update of its Messenger app last week. Robert Gaal, of Karma, says the company’s scale ultimately will allow it to kill off the phone.
How Orange hopes to benefit from a future of free calls and messaging
The France-based operator group is the latest to deploy an app that competes directly with the likes of Skype and WhatsApp, but also potentially steals away its own paying customers. Apart from evolving because it has to, what does it hope to gain?
With 90M users, Viber adds group messaging
Viber, the hot VoIP and messaging app, has just hit 90 million users, adding 20 million of them in the last two months. Now, it’s adding group messaging and an HD Voice engine, which should just encourage users to send more messages and make more calls.