Today Jan Koum, the CEO of WhatsApp — acquired by Facebook last week for $19 billion — announced that the messaging giant is finally moving into voice — a move announced at MWC, the conference for mobile carriers that apps like WhatsApp are squarely disrupting.
“We use the least amount of bandwidth and we use the hell out of it,” he said. “We will focus on simplicity.” Android and iOS first and then following on some Nokia and BlackBerry phones.
Koum today said that WhatsApp to date has 465 million monthly active users and 330 million daily users — an increase of 15 million on the number released just last week when news of the Facebook sale broke. “We couldn’t be more humbled by our growth,” he said. Interestingly, today is the company’s birthday. It was founded on February 24 in 2009.
While WhatsApp, as an OTT service, may appear like one of the companies that is attacking carriers, it is also working with them. The first partnership will be with e-plus to offer special tariffs to access the app, Koum said today.
But he also reiterated a key point for how WhatsApp will develop: “There are no planned changes and we will continue to do what we set out to do, even after the acquisition closes,” Koum said. “Still no marketing.”
So what is Facebook getting? Anytime you can get a billion people on one platform, you have something important, Koum said. In other words, he dodged the question.
More to come.
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