How Much Paying for Your Mobile Messaging Services? WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat

Inside The Facebook-WhatsApp Megadeal: The Courtship, The Secret Meetings, The $19 Billion Poker Game

So began the most lucrative two-year courtship in technology history, one in which admiration led to friendship and then, in a last-minute hurry, to an unprecedented transfer of wealth, all signed and sealed on the door of the welfare office Koum, 38, once haunted. Last month Facebook bought WhatsApp for $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in stock (8.5% of the company) plus $3 billion in restricted shares.

The deal cements Zuckerberg as tech’s new billionaire-maker. Koum, a shy but brilliant engineer who moved from Ukraine to the U.S. with nothing, will join the Facebook board and, after taxes, pocket $6.8 billion.

WhatsApp’s speed and deceptively simple interface could see it permanently trump its peers in the same way Facebook beat out rivals MySpace and Orkut, but its old-fashioned business model is unusual. Though other messaging apps like China’s WeChat, South Korea’s KakaoTalk and Canada’s Kik significantly trail WhatsApp in active users, they’re free and they sell ads, games and digital stickers that have seen them book heftier revenues.

WeChat, owned by state-backed Tencent and billionaire Ma Huateng, is letting some of its 270 million active users buy snacks in vending machines in the Beijing subway as an e-payments experiment. Analysts at Barclays estimate it to be worth $30 billion. Kakao is forecasting $200 million in revenue for 2013, deriving half of that from games. LINE, widely expected to IPO this year at a reported $8 billion valuation, brought in $336 million in 2013 revenue from a mix of selling digital stickers, in-app games and special accounts for advertisers.

Such extras are “junk,” says Acton. He fears stickers would draw WhatsApp into the content business; LINE’s series of bunny and bear sticker characters have already made appearances on TV shows in Japan. The unsexy mission of WhatsApp is reliability.

For now Koum is staying focused on the two priorities: keeping WhatsApp running and keeping users from going away. He can do so without the burden of building out the financial and legal infrastructure of a wholly independent company. “Fundamentally what we care about is building a product and great user experience,” he says. “[Mark] understands the network effect and he always talked about making the world more open and connected. Connected is where we come in.”

Facebook’s WhatsApp Acquisition Leaves Snapchat Hanging

With Facebook’s massive $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp earlier today, any possible marriage between Facebook and Snapchat appears to be dead.

How To Succeed? Get More Sleep Says Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington, co-founder of Huffington Post, urges us to shut our eyes and see the big picture instead of bragging about sleep deficit.

Arianna Huffington went to Cambridge and married oil millionaire, congressman Michael Huffington (they divorced later). She’s author of 13 books.

Her parents were divorced when she was 11. Her second book was rejected 36 times. Then there’s her abysmal showing as an independent in California’s 2003 gubernatorial race: Although Huffington withdrew a week before the election, her name stayed on the ballot and she finished fifth with 0.55 percent of the vote.

On May 9, 2005, The Huffington Post was born. “The launch was greeted by a cacophony of ill-wishers,” Huffington writes in Fearless. Nikki Finke’s article in the LA Weekly—headlined “Why Arianna’s Blog Blows”—said Huffington has “made an online ass of herself…. This website venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable.”

Huffington cheerily reported that a year later, Finke had described The Huffington Post as “an asset to the Internet dialogue” that contains stories missing from mainstream news sites. Huffington says Finke even “e-mails us her stories to post on the site, which we are happy to do.”

“My mother instilled in me that failure was not something to be afraid of, that it was not the opposite of success. It was a steppingstone to success. So I had no fear of failure. Perseverance is everything. I don’t give up. Everybody has failures, but successful people keep on going…. She was my life mentor.”

While the multitasking increases efficiency, Huffington does not equate busyness or influence with success. “Increasingly I feel that life is not about being effective. It’s about finding joy and purpose in your life…. Success is experienced as joy.”

WhatsApp, Chobani, Immigrants

America is a nation of immigrants. If you are not a native American, either you or someone in your family earlier moved to the country from somewhere else. Putting aside the issue where the line must be drawn: legal, illegal or various technicalities, we know immigration is one of the key things that have made America unique.

Immigrants have created jobs and brought in revenues from overseas markets. Chobani, Greek-yogurt maker, founder Hamdi Ulukaya moved from Turkey to the US at age 22 and started the company by acquiring a closed down factory by Kraft, which laid off 55 employees then. Chobani has over 1,200 employees today.

WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum moved from Ukraine to the US at age 16. WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook at $19 billion in February with 450 million users worldwide while its Chinese competitor, WeChat had 300 million. Unlike Chobani, the mobile messaging company had 55 employees.

While America is not perfect and needs to solve multiple serious issues such as widening income inequality, obesity, health care cost and budget deficit, it is unheard that immigrants have been such a success story in any other countries. And some of them have really created jobs.