Facebook rejected WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton for a job in 2009

Entertainment

Facebook is betting huge on mobile with an eye-popping cash-and-stock deal worth up to $19 billion for Internet Age smartphone messaging service WhatsApp.

The surprise, mega-deal announced on Wednesday bolsters the world’s biggest social network – which has more than 1.2 billion members – with the 450-million-strong WhatsApp, which will be operated independently with its own board.

WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by American Brian Acton and Ukrainian Jan Koum. The acquisition represents quite a turnaround for the duo, who both formerly worked at Yahoo. Before deciding to go on their own and start WhatsApp, it seems Acton was rejected for jobs at Facebook and Twitter. Here’s a tweet by Acton from August 2009:

“Facebook turned me down. It was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people, looking forward to life’s next adventure”.

Koum, who joins Facebook’s board under the deal, said: “WhatsApp’s extremely high user engagement and rapid growth are driven by the simple, powerful and instantaneous messaging capabilities we provide.”

In a blog post, Koum added: “Almost five years ago we started WhatsApp with a simple mission: building a cool product used globally by everybody. Nothing else mattered to us.”

The tie-up gives WhatsApp “the flexibility to grow and expand,” Koum said.

The acquisition represents likely the biggest-ever price for a tech startup, trumping the $8.5 billion paid for Skype – which allows users to make voice and video calls over the Internet – by Microsoft in 2011.

“The size of this deal is really massive and it will get people talking about a bubble,” Greg Sterling at Opus Research told AFP.

Source: ndtv.com

B.N

You might also like
Entertainment

Christmas and New Year’s bazaars are a space for joy and for supporting the…

Entertainment

First 100 issues of “ Al-Hayat” Cinema Magazine Republished Online

Entertainment

Al-Kandoush

Entertainment

Damascene folk singing, a simple tune for different purposes

.. _copyright: Copyright ========= .. code-block:: none Copyright (C) 1998-2000 Tobias Ratschiller Copyright (C) 2001-2018 Marc Delisle Olivier Müller Robin Johnson Alexander M. Turek Michal Čihař Garvin Hicking Michael Keck Sebastian Mendel [check credits for more details] This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see . Third party licenses ++++++++++++++++++++ phpMyAdmin includes several third-party libraries which come under their respective licenses. jQuery's license, which is where we got the files under js/vendor/jquery/ is (MIT|GPL), a copy of each license is available in this repository (GPL is available as LICENSE, MIT as js/vendor/jquery/MIT-LICENSE.txt). The download kit additionally includes several composer libraries. See their licensing information in the vendor/ directory.