History of Whats App
WhatsApp, was incorporated in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former
employees of Yahoo!. After Koum and Acton left Yahoo! in September 2007, the
duo traveled to South America as a break from work.At one point they applied for
jobs at Facebook but were rejected.For the rest of the following years Koum relied
on his $400,000 savings from Yahoo!. In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone
and realizing that the App Store would soon create an industry of apps, Koum
started visiting his friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose where the three would
discuss "... having statuses next to individual names of the people", but this was not
possible without an iPhone developer. Fishman found a Russian developer on
RentACoder.com, Igor Solomennikov, and introduced him to Koum. Koum named
the app "WhatsApp" to sound like "what's up". On February 24, 2009, he
incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, because early versions of
WhatsApp often crashed or got stuck at a particular point, Koum felt like giving up
and looking for a new job, upon which Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few
more months".

Contd..
• By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50
staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was
valued at $1.5 billion.
• In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active
users use the service each month. As of April 22, 2014, WhatsApp had over
500 million monthly active users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos
were being shared daily, and the messaging system was handling more
than 10 billion messages each day.On August 24, 2014, Koum announced
on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users
worldwide. At that point WhatsApp was adding about 25 million new users
every month, or 833,000 active users per day.With 65 million active users
representing 10% of the total worldwide users, India has the largest
number of consumers.

Whats App Inc.
Type of business Subsidiary
Founded February 24, 2009; 8 years ago
Headquarters Mountain View, California, United States
Founder(s)
•Jan Koum
•Brian Acton
CEO Jan Koum
Employees 50[8]
Parent Facebook
Website whatsapp.com
WhatsApp Inc., based in Mountain View, California, was acquired by Facebook in February 2014
for approximately US$19.3 billion. By February 2016, WhatsApp had a user base of over one
billion,making it the most popular messaging application at the time.

WhatsApp Messenger is a freeware, cross-platform and end-to-end encrypted instant messaging application
for smartphones.[9] It uses the Internet to make voice calls, one to one video calls; send text messages,
images, GIF, videos, documents, user location, audio files, phone contacts and voice notes[10][11] to other users
using standard cellular mobile numbers. It also incorporates a feature called Status, which allows users to
upload photos and videos to a 24-hours-lifetime feed that, by default, are visible to all contacts; similar to
Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram Stories.

Cont..
WhatsApp Web
• WhatsApp was officially made available for PCs through a web client, under the name WhatsApp Web, in
late January 2015 through an announcement made by Koum on his Facebook page: "Our web client is simply
an extension of your phone: the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile
device—this means all of your messages still live on your phone". The WhatsApp user's handset must still be
connected to the Internet for the browser application to function. All major desktop browsers are supported
except for Microsoft Internet Explorer. WhatsApp Web's user interface is based on the default Android one.
• As of January 21, 2015, the desktop version was only available to Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone
users. Later on, it also added support for iOS, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia S60 (Symbian).[
• An unofficial derivative called WhatsAppTime has been developed, which is a standard Win32 application for
PCs and supports notifications through the Windows notification area.There are similar solutions for macOS,
such as the open-source ChitChat[ and multiple wrappers available in the App Store.
Windows and Mac
• On May 10, 2016, the messaging service was introduced for both Windows and macOS operating systems.
Similar to the WhatsApp Web format, the app, which will be synced with a user's mobile device, is available
for download on the website. It supports OS versions of Windows 8 and OS X 10.9 and higher.

Business model
In response to the Facebook acquisition in 2014, Slate columnist Matthew Yglesias questioned whether the
company's business model of charging users $1 a year was viable in the United States in the long term. It had
prospered by exploiting a "loophole" in mobile phone carriers' pricing. "Mobile phone operators aren't really
selling consumers some voice service, some data service, and some SMS service", he explained. "They are selling
access to the network. The different pricing schemes they come up with are just different ways of trying to
maximize the value they extract from consumers." As part of that, carriers sold SMS separately. That made it easy
for WhatsApp to find a way to replicate SMS using data, and then sell that to mobile customers for $1 a year. "But
if WhatsApp gets big enough, then carrier strategy is going to change", he predicted. "You stop selling separate
SMS plans and just have a take-it-or-leave-it overall package. And then suddenly WhatsApp isn't doing
anything."The situation may have been different in countries other than the United States.

Competing with a number of Asian-based messaging services (like
WeChat (468 million active users), Viber (209 million active users) and
LINE (170 million active users)), WhatsApp handled ten billion
messages per day in August 2012, growing from two billion in April
2012, and one billion the previous October. On June 13, 2013,
WhatsApp announced that they had reached their new daily record by
processing 27 billion messages. According to the Financial Times,
WhatsApp "has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to
international calling on landlines."
Competition and shares

WhatsApp-related scams
In May 2016, some WhatsApp users were reported to have been tricked into downloading a
third-party application called WhatsApp Gold.The application was part of a scam that infected
the users' phones with malware.Another appliacation called "GB Whatsapp" is also considered
as a related scam

WhatsApp-related scams

• In April 2014, WhatsApp crossed half-a-billion user mark.
• In May 2014, WhatsApp crossed 50 million monthly active users in India,
which is also its largest country by the number of monthly active users.
• In October 2014, WhatsApp crossed 70 million monthly active users in
India, which is 10% of its total user base (700 MM).
•
In February 2017, WhatsApp crossed 200 million monthly active users in
India.
• As of February 2017, WhatsApp has over 1.2 billion users globally.