Background of Whatsapp

Background of Whatsapp Inc.

Whatsapp Inc was first founded in 2009 by two ex-Yahoo staff, an Ukranian, Jan Koum, age of 37 and an American, Brian Acton age of 41. both presently handle more than 10billion messages per day at Yahoo! Inc. before starting Whatsapp Inc and have worked with Yahoo! Inc. for a combined of 20 years.

The headquarters is located at the Mountain View, California. There is not a sign at the building entrance or on the door of its office. It is indeed a spacious open room at around 100 square meters, with graffiti on the walls. Tables, cables and computers could be seen in the middle and no offices are spotted for the boss. 30 full-time employees and five part-timers work along with the boss and mostly are under customer service, since technical development is carried out in Russia by engineers.

Senior employee, Koum came out with the idea of ​​creating an app that will broadcast when a person's status could not be reached for some reason and Acton was invited to work with Koum. Both then created a start-up technology company called WhatsApp Inc. that is located in Santa Clara, California. When they first started, the status of broadcast applications only attracts a few people but eventually Whatsapp bloomed after a messaging function is added towards the end of year 2009.

It is now the most popular cross-platform messenger on hundreds of millions of smartphones, and has surpassed some other widely-used communication tools such as Facebook with the base of 200 million monthly users and 18 billion messages are sent a day from different platforms. WhatsApp offers a year of free subscription and at a cost of $0.99 cents beginning with the second year of use.

Whatsapp has no intention to sell the company off to Facebook or Google. Koum stated that "Our goal is to build a sustainable, independent company," (Newton, 2013). On the other hand, Kim (2011) reported that Koum shows no interest in selling and doesn’t talk about those options and...