Facebook buys WhatsApp

Social network giant Facebook grows by acquiring Whats App, a messaging service for smartphones with 450 million users. The purchase price is set to $19 billion. Approximately $4 billion paid in cash, the rest is to be paid in Facebook shares.

WhatsApps founder Jan Koum will thus become a major shareholder in Facebook. He will also take place in the social network's board of directors.

Facebook have likely made the acquisition because they lack an operating system of its own, such as Google's Android or Apple's iOS. With its own operating system, Facebook can now pre-install apps, and programs and by doing so bring up the use of its own products.

Facebooks previous attempts to market it 's own user OS Home, which could be installed to Android, fell flat and become a flop. Facebook is now seemingly trying to redeem this venture.

After the announcement Facebook 's stock fell 4.4 percent, signaling that the market apparently doesn't share Zuckerberg's interest in WhatsApp. 

9 years and counting!

Last week, on Valentines Day, YouTube celebrated its 9th birthday. Launched on February 14th, 2005, YouTube has skyrocketed to be the biggest, most popular video sharing site in the world. With parent company Google, YouTube is a massive part of many people’s daily lives. Before YouTube, in order for something to go viral it probably meant a flu epidemic, now it can be a cat video or a drugged up kid fresh from the dentist. I can’t imagine a time before YouTube, it has become such a phenom, so happy birthday YouTube.

In order to celebrate this occasion I collected some interesting YouTube facts. Enjoy!

• 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.
• Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day
• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube is localized in 39 countries and across 54 languages
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views
• In 2011 there were almost 140 views for every person on Earth
• Created in 2007, the YouTube partner program now has 30,000+ partners from 27 countries around the world
• YouTube pays out millions of dollars a year to partners
• Hundreds of partners are making six figures a year
• Partner revenue has more than doubled for four years in a row
• YouTube is monetizing over 3 billion video views per week globally
• 98 of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers have run campaigns on YouTube and the Google Display Network
• Hundreds of advertisers are using TrueView in-stream and 60% of our in-stream ads are now skippable
• YouTube has more HD content than any other online video site
• There are thousands of full-length movies on YouTube
• 10% of YouTube’s videos are available in HD
• YouTube mobile gets over 600 million views a day
• Traffic from mobile devices tripled in 2011
• The YouTube player is embedded across tens of millions of websites

Giant Phone Replica Celebrates 100 Years

A giant, fully-functional replica of an old L.M. Ericsson table top phone celebrates 100 years this week. It was built as a marketing ploy, and reinvented several times during its lifetime.

In 1923 the replica was the centerpiece of the company’s stand at the Gothenburg Exhibition. As described in Ericsson Review, it was “an attraction towards which visitors could not help turning their eyes.”

The telephone housed a complete, fully automatic Ericsson system for 500 lines, to which a few telephones were actually connected. Visitors could experiment, make calls and watch the switching process through the plate-glass windows. The Ericsson Review reports that the demonstrations attracted long lines of visitors every day.

Crash Imminent?

MarketWatch recently reported on a particularly alarming correlation between the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the period 1928-1929 and 2013-2014. Curves is hauntingly similar, and if there was any correlation the New York Stock Exchange is set to crash any minute now.

Now there is by all means a lot of skepticism and more positive experts think that this connection does not exist at all, and that the market situation is completely different.

Tom McClellan, the man behind the McClellan Market Report, notes to the site:

"....there is no guarantee that the market has to continue following through with every step of the 1929 pattern. But between now and May 2014, there is plenty of reason for caution."

The picture isn’t pretty. And it’s not as easy as one might think to wriggle out from underneath the bearish significance of this chart.

One of the market gurus responsible for widely publicizing this chart is hedge-fund manager Doug Kass, of Seabreeze Partners and CNBC fame. In an email earlier this week, Kass wrote of the parallels with 1928-29: “While investment history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does rhyme.” And, based on a number of indicators rather than just this chart drawing the 1928-29 parallel, he believes that “the correction might have just started.”

You may still be inclined to dismiss this. But there were many more were laughing last November when this scary chart began circulating. Not as many are laughing now.