Hi!
The following article appeared in this morning's Age Green Guide
Livewire section.
Unfortunately "ve had to scan the paper as I couldn't find a
direct link to the article, will post a link if I do happen to
find it.
Headline, Fast-growing WhatsApp aims to be computing platform,
by James Titcomb.
When Facebook spent $27 billion buying WhatsApp two years ago, the price
tag raised more than a few eyebrows. The smartphone messaging service
was wildly popular, with some 450 million users around the world, but
the mathematics of the deal were hard to stack up at the time.
Users paid 99 cents a year for the app, which allowed them to send text
messages, photos and videos over the internet. About 300 million had
downloaded it before a subscription fee was introduced. So to get to $2
billion in revenue, the app would need 2.3 billion users - a third of
the world's population. Even assuming an enormous profit margin, the
purchase still seemed a stretch.
Since the deal, WhatsApp has grown tremendously. It now has almost a
billion users and shows no sign of slowing down. At its current rate it
will have two billion users at the end of the decade. The number of
WhatsApp messages sent around the world outnumbers texts by around two
to one.
But last month, almost two years since Facebook bought it, WhatsApp's
founder, Jan Koum, announced that the company would ditch the 99-cent
fee. Many of the people now signing up don't have credit cards or online
banking, Koum said. WhatsApp risked losing these people to free, if less
popular, competitors.
Instead, WhatsApp will rely on something else for revenue: charging
businesses to use the app to talk to customers. Where now we have call
centres and hold music, we will soon be able to express our indignation
over a messaging app.
"That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent
transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight,"
Koum said, announcing that the new service will be introduced later this
year.
But while the move could revolutionise customer service, it is
potentially only the start of one of the biggest untapped opportunities
in technology: turning massively popular messaging apps into portals for
doing a lot more besides.
WhatsApp and Facebook's own chat service, Messenger, both have hundreds
of millions of users who employ them actively, but have not evolved much
beyond the original selling point of "text people for free". What if
they could use that scale of attention to do more - let you do your
shopping, play games or do your banking - through the apps?
In industry parlance, this is known as moving from a service to a
"platform"; becoming a base on which software developers can build their
own services. The worldwide web is a platform, as is the iPhone -
websites and apps are built on top of them. And this can be incredibly
lucrative. Apple has made billions from the 30 per cent cut it takes on
app purchases.
In aiming to become platforms, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have been
inspired by the success of WeChat, a Chinese app owned by internet giant
Tencent. While China's citizens use WeChat to talk to family and
friends, they also use it to pay bills, make appointments and check traffic.
WeChat has millions of apps living inside it, and has been able to
charge for many of them: the money it makes from selling games and
processing payments means that the app's average revenue per user is
around $10.
In offering accounts to businesses, WhatsApp is taking the first steps
in the road to becoming more like WeChat. Facebook Messenger has already
started - it recently introduced an option to book Uber car journeys
through its own app, and has a "Businesses for Messenger" program that
lets online retailers keep their customers up to date about a recent
purchase.
What has worked in China may not necessarily translate: recent trends
suggest Western consumers want their apps to do less, not more, a
phenomenon known as "unbundling".
Because it takes just two taps to switch between apps on a smartphone,
putting everything into one piece of software is barely more convenient
than into two.
If messaging apps can become the next computing platform, Zuckerberg's
faith in WhatsApp will have been repaid, but it's unclear whether
consumers will sign up to the idea.
The Daily Telegraph
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Those of a positive and enquiring frame of mind will leave the rest of
the halfwits in this world behind.