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Facebook bought Whatsapp for a few billion dollars, less than a week after Rakuten bought Viber, another phone messaging app. What I find interesting, beside the timing, is that Whatsapp is entirely centred around mobile devices: there is no version for desktop or laptop computers.
In both cases, the goal is probably to get access to users that typically don’t use social networking or online shopping, but who have a smartphone and a data-plan. This is were the growth potential is. Many computer geeks tend to have a blind spot towards mobile phones: there were 6.8 billions worldwide in 2013, five times more than Facebook users.