Who created Whatsapp?
WhatsApp
The client was created by WhatsApp Inc., based in Mountain View, California, which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19.3 billion. By February 2018, WhatsApp had a user base of over one and a half billion, making it the most popular messaging application at the time. WhatsApp has grown in multiple countries, including Brazil, India, and large parts of Europe, including the United Kingdom and France.
Abdelrahman Wreikat
Abdelrahman Wreikat started working as a website administrator while he was doing his BA at university. He worked with Arabgt.com, then he founded Arabfeed.com. He writes regularly for Al Jazeera and HuffPost Arabi blogs. Abdelrahman did a study on digital illiteracy and digital myths that are popular between people on social media especially Facebook and WhatsApp. He also conducted research on the change of dialogue tone between Arabs on social media platforms after the Arab Spring. He also conducted a first of its kind study on people's comments on news pages on Facebook and how it sometimes affects public opinion and misleading it.
WhatsApp
WhatsApp was officially made available for PCs through a web client, under the name WhatsApp Web, in late January 2015 through an announcement made by Koum on his Facebook page: "Our web client is simply an extension of your phone: the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device—this means all of your messages still live on your phone". The WhatsApp user's handset must still be connected to the Internet for the browser application to function. All major desktop browsers are supported except for Internet Explorer. WhatsApp Web's user interface is based on the default Android one.
WhatsApp
On January 21, 2015, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Web, a web client which can be used through a web browser by syncing with the mobile device's connection.
Zhang Xiaolong
Zhang Xiaolong (), also known as Allen Zhang, is a Chinese Programmer known for creating WeChat and Foxmail. He is a senior executive vice president and president of Weixin Group at Tencent Holdings Limited. Zhang received B.S. and M.S degrees in telecommunication engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology respectively in 1991 and 1994.
Moxie Marlinspike
Matthew Rosenfield, known as Moxie Marlinspike, is an American computer security researcher, cryptographer and entrepreneur. He is a co-author of the Signal Protocol encryption used by Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Allo, responsible for the largest deployment of consumer end-to-end encryption. Marlinspike is the former head of the security team at Twitter and founder of Open Whisper Systems. He is the author of a proposed SSL authentication system replacement called Convergence. He ran a cloud-based WPA cracking service and managed a targeted anonymity service called GoogleSharing.
WhatsApp
On February 26, 2016, WhatsApp announced they would cease support for BlackBerry (including BlackBerry 10), Series 40, and Symbian S60, as well as older versions of Android (2.2), Windows Phone (7.0), and iOS (6), by the end of 2016. BlackBerry, Series 40, and Symbian support was since then extended further to June 30, 2017. In June 2017, support for BlackBerry and Series 40 was once again extended until the end of 2017, while Symbian was dropped.
History of Gmail
Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit, who had already explored the idea of web-based email in the 1990s, before the launch of Hotmail, while working on a personal email software project as a college student. Buchheit began his work on Gmail in August 2001. At Google, Buchheit had first worked on Google Groups and when asked "to build some type of email or personalization product", he created the first version of Gmail in one day, reusing the code from Google Groups. The project was known by the code name "Caribou", a reference to a Dilbert comic strip about Project Caribou.
Axel Neff
David "Axel" Neff (born 10 October 1984) an American businessman, best known for his role as the former Assistant Director of International Operations of the Russian social network Vkontakte and as a co-founder of mobile messaging platform Digital Fortress, used to create the instant messaging application Telegram. Neff was a co-founder of the US based Telegram LLC, which was responsible for the creation of Telegram Messenger. He served as the head of subsidiaries for both companies, Durov LLC and Digital Fortress LLC respectively. Neff was also the director of Pictograph LLC and Telegram LLC.
Silicon Valley Community Foundation
In 2014, Jan Koum, founder of WhatsApp donated close to $556 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to set up a donor-advised fund.
Bob Wallace
Bob Wallace (May 29, 1949 – September 20, 2002) was an American software developer, programmer and the ninth Microsoft employee. He was the first popular user of the term shareware, creator of the word processing program PC-Write, founder of the software company Quicksoft and an "online drug guru" who devoted much time and money into the research of psychedelic drugs. Bob ended his Usenet posts with the phrase, "Bob Wallace (just my opinion)."
Ossama Youssef
Ossama Youssef (born 24 September 1979) is an Egyptian entrepreneur with a track record of successful media start-ups. He is the founder and CEO of DiwanVideos, a leading international multi-channel network based in Cairo and Dubai. Through DiwanVideos, Youssef revolutionized the perception of digital media in Egypt and the MENA region by helping content creators such as Sono Cairo, a subsidiary of Egypt’s state-owned television, and advertisers understand its importance as a medium, rather than their traditional focus on television. He has also contributed to online copyright protection by educating and training the first group of YouTube Partners in Egypt.
Snapchat
Snapchat is a multimedia messaging app used globally, created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, former students at Stanford University, and developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc.
Apache Wave
Google Wave was a new Internet communications platform. It was written in Java using OpenJDK and its web interface used the Google Web Toolkit. Google Wave worked like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, message documents (referred to as "waves") that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) were perpetually stored on a central server. Waves were shared with collaborators who could be added or removed from the wave at any point during a wave's existence.
Open Whisper Systems
On November 18, 2014, Open Whisper Systems announced a partnership with WhatsApp to provide end-to-end encryption by incorporating the Signal Protocol into each WhatsApp client platform. Open Whisper Systems said that they had already incorporated the protocol into the latest WhatsApp client for Android and that support for other clients, group/media messages, and key verification would be coming soon after. WhatsApp confirmed the partnership to reporters, but there was no announcement or documentation about the encryption feature on the official website, and further requests for comment were declined. On April 5, 2016, WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems announced that they had finished adding end-to-end encryption to "every form of communication" on WhatsApp, and that users could now verify each other's keys. In September 2016, Google launched a new messaging app called Allo, which features an optional "incognito mode" that uses the Signal Protocol for end-to-end encryption. In October 2016, Facebook deployed an optional mode called "secret conversations" in Facebook Messenger which provides end-to-end encryption using an implementation of the Signal Protocol.
Ravi Shankar Prasad
He has adopted the village of Alawalpur under Fatuha block of Patna district as a model village to be developed under the Pradhan Mantri Adarsh Gram Yojana
Ravi Shankar Prasad is spearheading the Digital India program as Minister for Electronics and Information Technology since May 2014. Recently UK based think tank Apolitical adjudged him as one of the top twenty leaders in the list of 100 most influential people in Digital Government 2018. He is the only Indian to be featured in the top twenty. He was one of the first leaders in the world who had openly supported the cause of net-neutrality and as a Minister in charge of digital affairs in India declined Facebook the permission to operate Free Basics in India. This literally saved Internet in India from getting robbed of its neutrality in India. He is also known to have taken a tough stand against misuse of social media for destabilising democracy and fomenting violence in society. He had exposed the unholy nexus between leading opposition political Party of India and unethical data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica that had stolen the Facebook data of Indian users for profiling voters and influencing them by sending misleading political information and fake news. Led by Ravi Shankar Prasad, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology sent legal notices to both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Unsatisfied with their responses, he ordered the criminal investigation in this data theft episode by India's apex crime investigation body the Central Bureau of Investigation. When incidents of mob violence were reported in few parts of India by viral circulation of fake messages on Whatsapp, he took a firm stand against Whatsapp and demanded technological solutions to curb the menace of fake messages leading to violence. While responding to a debate in the Indian Parliament he openly supported the role of social media in giving a means of expression to ordinary people that they are happily using to question the politicians and media editors, he warned the social media platforms against any misuse of the platform for fomenting violence and terror. Responding to the legal notice served by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Whatsapp took several steps such as mentioning the word forwarded on every message that was forwarded by an user. Whatsapp has also restricted the number of forwarded messages to a maximum of five. Besides these stern regulatory measures that were taken under the leadership of Ravi Shankar Prasad, he is also known for promoting digital development in the rural areas of India by creating a network of 300,000 village level digital entrepreneurs who are operating digital service delivery kiosks known as the Common Service Centers across India. This has not only ensured the availability of digital services in rural areas but has also created job opportunities for 1.2 million rural youth.
SimplyTweet
SimplyTweet was developed by Yar Hwee Boon, who said that the initial inspiration was his desire for an app that would be able to follow conversations – tweets that reply to an interesting tweet, or tweets that prompted interesting replies. As additional functionality compared to other Twitter clients, he cited photo search, push notifications and conversation threading.
WhatsApp
In 2017, security researchers reported to "The New York Times" that the WhatsApp service had been completely blocked in China. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, whose main social media service has been blocked in China since 2009.
Taghreedat
On January 13, 2013, Taghreedat launched a collaboration with WhatsApp to improve the localization of its applicants on various mobile devices. The project attracted over 2,600 Arab volunteers who joined the WhatsApp Translation Center to suggest variations and add votes to the Arabic strings localized at the Translation Center. The project was followed by a collaboration between Taghreedat and WhatsApp to carry out the translation and localization of WhatsApp on Windows Phone 8.
Sean Vanaman
Sean Vanaman (born June 16, 1984) is an IrishAmerican video game designer, writer, and podcaster. He was the co-project leader and lead writer of "The Walking Dead", and "Puzzle Agent 2". He also wrote the third episode of "Tales of Monkey Island", and was the designer of "Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures", and the writer of the third episode, "Muzzled". He was one of the regular hosts of the Idle Thumbs podcast and is one of the co-founders of Campo Santo, the company that produced "Firewatch".
Discussion group
Whatsapp group:
Whatsapp, is a mobile SMS and messaging app, it features the function of group discussion as well. Users set group chats to boost the convenience of a proper group discussion. With shared characteristics to Facebook group, the instructions are comparatively similar. Common actions for administrators include: creating group, renaming title, blocking members, deleting irrelevant information through the management.
Shazam (application)
The company was founded in 1999 by Barton and Inghelbrecht, who were students at University of California, Berkeley and Mukherjee, who worked at a London-based internet consulting firm called Viant. In need of a digital signal processing specialist, the founding team then hired Wang, who had received his PhD from Stanford University. , Wang is the only member of the original team to remain in the company, and serves as Shazam's Chief Scientist.
Rich Riley, who claims to have "accidentally invented the toolbar" in 1998/99, joined Shazam as CEO in April 2013 to increase the company's growth, after over 13 years at Yahoo! and with more than 17 years of experience as an entrepreneur and internet executive. "I look forward to extending our dominance in media engagement, from our roots in music to our leadership position in second-screen TV and want to ensure that Shazam is the company that helps people recognize and engage with the world around them", Riley said at the time. Riley replaced Andrew Fisher, who was hired from Infospace into the CEO role in 2005 to strengthen industry partnerships and grow the userbase. Fisher is now executive chairman.
John McAfee
Soon after joining MGT, McAfee claimed that he and his team had exploited a flaw in the Android operating system that allowed him to read encrypted messages from WhatsApp. Gizmodo investigated these claims and reported that McAfee had sent reporters malware-infected phones to make this hack work. McAfee responded to these accusations, writing, "Of course the phones had malware on them. How that malware got there is the story, which we will release after speaking with Google. It involves a serious flaw in the Android architecture."
Circles.Life
Circles.Life has several ongoing partnerships. They have partnered up with WhatsApp to offer unlimited Whatsapp calls and messages, and with financial institutions and banks such as OCBC, DBS and UOB.
Tobin Wolf
Theodore Walter "Tobin" Wolf, also known as Ted Wolf (July 21, 1922 – June 21, 1999), was an American writer who was responsible for creating the animated television series "ThunderCats". He was also an inventor with several patents to his name. Wolf was born in 1922 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and died in 1999, in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Followap
The mobile Messenger which Followap pioneered evolved into extremely popular services following the introduction of the iPhone and App stores for wide-market distribution. These include Whatsapp, Line, QQ, WeChat and KakaoTalk.
Janese Swanson
Janese Swanson (born 1958) is an American inventor and software developer. Swanson co-developed the first of the "Carmen Sandiego" educational games, and founded the company Girl Tech, which creates products aimed at making technology more interesting for girls. She has developed award-winning curricula, electronic toys, and books that encourage girls to explore technology and inventions. Her toy inventions include the Snoop Stopper Keepsake Box, Me-Mail Message Center, Zap N’ Lock Journal, and Swap-It Locket. Her publications include "Tech Girl's Internet Adventures", "Tech Girl's Activity Book", and "Girlzine: A Magazine for the Global Girl".
Voxer
Founded by Tom Katis and Matt Ranney, Voxer Walkie Talkie is both a live "push-to-talk" system and a voice messaging system. Messages on Voxer are delivered live as they’re being recorded and then delivered as a voice message as well. The app works on Android, Windows Phone and the iOS operating systems. In April 2012, the company raised $30 million in venture financing from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Intel Capital and other angel investors.
Wattpad
On February 21, 2017, Wattpad launched a chat stories app called "Tap". "Tap" offers stories in the form of text messages as if reading a private conversation on someone else's phone. The app was an early success, with over 240 million taps in the first few weeks after the launch. On July 28, 2017, Tap launched 'Tap Originals', a series of original stories produced by its top-tier writers every single week, with some of those series working on an episode-by-episode basis. Some of Tap's most successful original series include "HIDE", "The Babysitter" and "Charlie, Charlie".
WhatsApp
As of January 21, 2015, the desktop version was only available to Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone users. Later on, it also added support for iOS, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia S60 (Symbian).
Istanbul 10
Journalist Mustafa Hoş created a flood on Twitter that the Whatsapp group was formed in order to gather in solidarity for the lawsuit of Cumhuriyet newspaper, and that he will “continue to tell the truth.”
Caroline Hyde
From December 2016 until May 2017 she anchored Bloomberg Technology in San Francisco while regular host Emily Chang was on maternity leave. She continues as the European Technology and Media presenter on Bloomberg Television. Hyde has interviewed technology leaders including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, Airbnb Founder Nathan Blecharczyk, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, founder of the internet Tim Berners-Lee and Whatsapp CEO Jan Koum.
Ma Huateng
Mimicking Bill Gates’ Microsoft, Ma Huateng created two competing teams of engineers in 2010 and charged them with creating a new product. After two months, one team presented an app for text messaging and group chat – Weixin – which launched in January 2011. In 2015, Weixin (or WeChat in English), is the largest instant messaging platform in the world, used by 48% of all Internet users.
Charlie Jackson (software)
Charlie Jackson is an American computer software entrepreneur who founded Silicon Beach Software in 1984 and co-founded FutureWave Software in 1993. FutureWave created the first version of what is now Adobe Flash. He was an early investor in Wired magazine, Outpost.com, Streamload and Angelic Pictures. Jackson is currently in startup mode again, developing application software for Windows 10.
Dubsmash
Dubsmash is a video messaging application for iOS and Android created by Jonas Drüppel, Roland Grenke and Daniel Taschik. Using the application, users can choose an audio recording or soundbite from movies, shows, music, and internet trends and record a video of themselves dubbing over that piece of audio.
Eva (social network)
eva is a mobile app and social networking service that was launched by Forbidden Technologies plc - creator of cloud-based video editing software FORscene - in summer 2015. Its co-founders include Stephen B. Streater (founder of Eidos Interactive), Aziz Musa (CEO of Forbidden Technologies plc) and Jens Wikholm (award-winning celebrity and portrait photographer). After holding the beta launch in London in July 2015 - and a subsequent regional launch in Melbourne - eva launched globally in Los Angeles on 1 October 2015. It is available on iOS and can be downloaded from the App Store.
WhatsApp
The oldest device that was capable of running WhatsApp was the Symbian-based Nokia N95 released in March 2007 (which is no longer functioning as of June 2017).
Bongi Ndaba
In 2017, Bongi Ndaba wrote a South African first WhatsApp drama series titled "Uk'shona Kwelanga", it was produced by Sanlam. Ukshona Kwelanga was 
a ground breaking insurance advertising drama series, targeted at South African WhatsApp users, as the largest medium of communication. In 2017, "Bongi Ndaba" won a WRITING CRAFT GOLD from the Loeries for her stellar writing in "Uk'Shona Kwelanga". Loeries are the most prestigious creative industry and brand communication awards for Africa & the Middle East.
Telegram (service)
Telegram has public APIs with which developers can access the same functionality as Telegram's official apps to build their own messaging applications. In February 2015, creators of the unofficial Whatsapp+ client released the Telegram Plus app, later renamed to Plus Messenger, after their original project got a cease-and-desist order from WhatsApp. In September 2015, Samsung released a messaging application based on these APIs.
History of Wikipedia
Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to create content more rapidly. The idea of a wiki-based complement originated from a conversation between Larry M. Sanger and Ben Kovitz. Ben Kovitz was a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's revolutionary wiki "the WikiWikiWeb". He explained to Sanger what wikis were, at that time a difficult concept to understand, over a dinner on Tuesday 2 January 2001. Wales first stated, in October 2001, that "Larry had the idea to use Wiki software", though he later stated in December 2005 that Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced him to the concept. Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed on the Nupedia mailing list that a wiki based upon UseModWiki (then v. 0.90) be set up as a "feeder" project for Nupedia. Under the subject "Let's make a wiki", he wrote:
Wales set one up and put it online on Wednesday 10 January 2001.
Timeline of WhatsApp
The following is a timeline of WhatsApp, a proprietary cross-platform, encrypted, instant messaging client for smartphones.
Social media marketing
Snapchat is a popular messaging and picture exchanging application that was created in 2011 by three students at Stanford University named Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown. The application was first developed to allow users to message back and forth and to also send photographs that are only available from 1–10 seconds until they are no longer available. The app was an instant hit with social media members and today there are up to 158 million people using snapchat every single day. It is also estimated that Snapchat users are opening the application approximately 18 times per day, which means users are on the app for about 25–30 minutes per day.
WhatsApp
In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested approximately $8 million for more than 15 percent of the company, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.
WhatsApp
WhatsApp, one of the most activated messaging apps along with other social media networks such as Facebook and Instagram were temporarily blocked, banned and had been unavailable for about two days (7–8 March 2018) in certain parts of the country to eradicate communal violence, especially the anti-Muslim riots. This was probably the first such instance where social media platforms had been banned in Sri Lanka. The ban was finally lifted on the 14th of March, 2018 around midnight time in Sri Lanka.
Kapsules
Kapsules was inspired by Arlo Rose and Perry Clarke's Konfabulator (which has recently been purchased by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Widgets). Both are widget engines with very similar functionality. Konfabulator was originally written for Mac OS X and later ported to the Windows environment, while Kapsules was designed to use integral components of Windows. By using a managed framework, Kapsules lets designers choose from one of several scripting languages, while Konfabulator widgets are written exclusively in JavaScript. Also, Kapsules can be installed on a Windows guest account, whereas Konfabulator requires Administrator privileges.
OpenFrameworks
openFrameworks is an open source toolkit designed for "creative coding" founded by Zachary Lieberman, Theo Watson and Arturo Castro. OpenFrameworks is written in C++ and built on top of OpenGL. It runs on Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and Emscripten. It is maintained by Zachary Lieberman, Theo Watson and Arturo Castro with contributions by other members of the openFrameworks community.
Brian Acton
In 1998, Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer shortly after he met Acton while working at Ernst & Young as a security tester. Over the next nine years, they worked at Yahoo. Acton invested in the dotcom boom and lost millions in the dot-com bubble of 2000. In September 2007 Koum and Acton left Yahoo and took a year off, traveling around South America and playing ultimate frisbee. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook. In January 2009, Koum bought an iPhone and realized that the then seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited his friend Alex Fishman and talked about developing an app. Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like “what’s up”, and a week later on his birthday, Feb. 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California.
Stephen Worth
John Kricfalusi met Worth through the internet, and they became friends. Worth was the first to show Kricfalusi the "world wide web" and encouraged him to get involved in the then-new medium. Together, they created an online animation website called "Spumco's Wonderful World of Cartoons". Worth produced "Weekend Pussy Hunt" and "The Goddamn George Liquor Program", the first Adobe Flash animated web cartoons, as well as an Annie Award winning rock music video for Björk's single "I Miss You".
WhatsApp
In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, allowing users to be pinged when they were not using an app. Koum changed WhatsApp so that when a user's status is changed, everyone in the user's network would be notified. WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,000. Acton was still unemployed and managing another startup, and he decided to join the company. In October 2009, Acton persuaded five former friends in Yahoo! to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and Acton became a co-founder and was given a stake. He officially joined on November 1. After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. Koum then hired a friend who lived in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to develop the BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later.
Veeker
Veeker was founded in September 2005, and was an early innovator in the evolution of mobile communication from audio and text to video. Veeker was headquartered in San Francisco, CA, . Veeker was co-founded by Rodger Raderman (a founder of iFilm, a user-video upload site long preceding YouTube, now CEO of NukoToys), Alex Kelly, Marcus Yoder, Raj Singh (founder of ToneThis, one of the earliest ringtone creation software as of 2004). The original prototype was built for Veeker by Bogex, an engineering team headed by Arthur Sulit (co-founder of Snip n' Send, one of the earliest ringtone creation and distribution softwares and the first to work in-browser as of 2004, and original chief developer behind EasyRingtoneMaker) and Clint Mario Cleetus (founder or Bogex). Subsequent versions were built by a team of engineers headed by Daniel Reynaud (founder of ThumbJive, which initially explored mobile phone games, who worked later on at Google).
Peach (social network)
Peach is a mobile application-based social network created by Dom Hoffman. Peach is available as an Android and iOS application. Hoffman is a co-founder of Vine. It was introduced at the January 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
WhatsApp
In August 2014, WhatsApp released an update to its Android app, adding support for Android Wear smartwatches.
WhatsApp
WhatsApp software automatically compares all the phone numbers from the device's address book with its central database of WhatsApp users to automatically add contacts to the user's WhatsApp contact list. Previously the Android and Nokia Series 40 versions used an MD5-hashed, reversed-version of the phone's IMEI as password, while the iOS version used the phone's Wi-Fi MAC address instead of IMEI. A 2012 update now generates a random password on the server side.
Ben Silbermann
Prior to Pinterest (which launched in March 2010), Silbermann worked at Google in the online advertising group. However, after a short time with the company he left and started designing his own iPhone apps with a college friend, Paul Sciarra. After their initial application, Tote, failed to gain significant traction, the cofounders teamed up with Evan Sharp to create a pinboard product that would eventually be named Pinterest. Silbermann says that the genesis of Pinterest really came from his love of collecting as a kid. “Collecting tells a lot about who you are,” he said, and when they looked at the web “there wasn’t a place to share that side of who you were.”
WeeWorld
The avatars were created in 2001 by the Co-Founders of Saw-You.com, Mike Kinsella and John McGuire in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2003, Microsoft began offering the avatars for use to their Hotmail customers via the MSN chat service. The new service attracted 150,000 users during the first day of the avatars being launched, with the WeeMee website attracting 1.5 million hits daily. In 2004 the UK's largest social network, Friendsreunited.com, also introduced the WeeMee to their user base. In December 2008 the virtual technology firm DA agreed to develop a 3-D version of the avatar.
Moxie Marlinspike
On February 21, 2018, Marlinspike and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton announced the formation of the Signal Foundation.
Snapchat
On May 8, 2012, Reggie Brown sent an email to Evan Spiegel during their senior year at Stanford, in which he offered to re-negotiate his equitable share regarding ownership of the company. Lawyers for Snapchat responded by insisting that he had never had any creative connection to the product. The attorneys also accused Brown of committing fraud against Spiegel and Murphy by falsely claiming to be a product inventor. On behalf of their clients, the law firm concluded that Reggie Brown had made no contributions of value or worth, and was therefore entitled to a share of nothing. In September 2014, Brown settled with Spiegel and Murphy for $157.5 million and was credited as one of the original authors of Snapchat.
History of Microsoft Word
The first version of Microsoft Word was developed by Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie, former Xerox programmers hired by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1981. Both programmers worked on Xerox Bravo, the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processor. The first Word version, Word 1.0, was released in October 1983 for Xenix and MS-DOS; it was followed by four very similar versions that were not very successful. The first Windows version was released in 1989, with a slightly improved interface. When Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, Word became a huge commercial success. Word for Windows 1.0 was followed by Word 2.0 in 1991 and Word 6.0 in 1993. Then it was renamed to Word 95 and Word 97, Word 2000 and Word for Office XP (to follow Windows commercial names). With the release of Word 2003, the numbering was again year-based. Since then, Word 2007, Word 2010, Word 2013, and most recently, Word 2016 have been released for Windows.
WhatsApp
In February 2015, WhatsApp introduced a voice calling feature; this helped WhatsApp to attract a completely different segment of the user population. On November 14, 2016, Whatsapp added video calling feature for users across Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone devices.
Internet.org
On February 24, 2014, shortly before a keynote presentation by Zuckerberg at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 24, 2014, Internet.org unveiled several new projects: an education partnership called SocialEDU with Nokia and local carrier AirTel, edX, and the government in Rwanda; a project with Unilever in India; and a new Internet.org Innovation Lab with Ericsson in its Menlo Park HQ. In the presentation, Zuckerberg says that Facebook's recent acquisition of mobile messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion was closely related to the Internet.org vision.
Nikil Viswanathan
Down To Lunch is a social iPhone application created by Viswanathan and his cofounder Joseph Lau. After moving San Francisco, they said they missed their friends because they were working all the time. After finding it difficult to discover which of their friends was available when they wanted to hangout, they conceived the idea of being able to press a button to send a hangout request to all of their friends. One a Sunday afternoon in a "One Direction" fueled coding session, they created the app. Within 48 hours, people around the world were using the app, even though it was only available as a link from Viswanathan's Facebook. Down To Lunch rapidly started being used by students at colleges around the country, sometimes growing to be used by more than 15% of a college campus within 24 hours without any marketing. The app rose to be the #1 app in the App Store social category and #2 overall. The New York Times featured a front page cover story about Down To Lunch in their business section on April 20, 2016.
Yossi Ghinsberg
Ghinsberg is a co-founder and currently the CEO at Blinq.me, a Silicon Valley-based tech-startup financed by 500 Startups's acceleration program. In 2015, Ghinsberg launched the mobile application Blinq, which adds a layer of contextual information to mobile messaging applications and is derived from Headbox. Once installed, Blinq appears as a small white dot that pops up inside mobile messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS, alerting the user to new information about the person they are communicating with. This additional information is pulled from a variety of other networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Open Whisper Systems
On February 21, 2018, Moxie Marlinspike and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton announced the formation of the Signal Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is "to support, accelerate, and broaden Signal’s mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous." The foundation was started with an initial $50 million in funding from Acton, who had left WhatsApp's parent company Facebook in September 2017. According to the announcement, Acton is the foundation's Executive Chairman and Marlinspike continues as CEO. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has agreed to continue accepting donations on behalf of Open Whisper Systems while the Signal Foundation's non-profit status is pending.
WhatsApp
By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion.
Lulu (app)
Lulu was created by Alexandra Chong, a Chinese-Jamaican/Canadian from Ocho Rios and former Jamaican tennis Olympian who studied at Appalachian State University and received her LLB from the London School of Economics. She has stated as her inspiration a "really funny" Valentine's Day date she went on in 2009, after which she wanted to be able to discuss details with her female friends without sharing information on Facebook. In December 2011, after stints at Upstream and The Corporate Executive Board Company, she launched Luluvise.com, which was succeeded in January 2013 by Lulu, then as a private, invitation-only app for female users at Florida State University and the University of Florida. In February 2013 the app was released nationally in the US.
By April 2013 the app had 200,000 men listed and rated. In November 2013, the app was covered by "The New York Times", at which point the company claimed more than a million users. "New York" magazine reported in November 2013 that the average rating for male users on the app's 10-point numerical scale was 7.5 points.
Conversational commerce
Enterprise solutions for Whatsapp have been available since 2015 from a variety of third party vendors, and though unofficial, they have been used by major companies and Governments including the Governments of Colombia and Costa Rica.
Whisper (app)
Whisper is a proprietary iOS and Android mobile app available without charge. It is a form of anonymous social media, allowing users to post and share photo and video messages anonymously, although this claim has been challenged with privacy concerns over Whisper's handling of user data. The postings, called "whispers", consist of text superimposed over an image, and the background imagery is either automatically retrieved from Whisper's own search engine or uploaded by the user. The app, launched in March 2012, is the main product of the media company WhisperText LLC, which was co-founded by CEO Michael Heyward, the son of the entertainment executive Andy Heyward, and Brad Brooks, who is the CEO of mobile messaging service TigerText. Since 2015, the service has sought to become more of a brand advertising platform, with promotional partnerships with Netflix, NBCUniversal, Disney, HBO, and MTV. According to "TechCrunch", as of March 2017, Whisper has a total of 17 billion monthly pageviews on its mobile and desktop websites, social channels and publisher network, with 250 million monthly users across 187 countries.
Reception and criticism of WhatsApp security and privacy features
On May 20, 2011, an unconfirmed security researcher from the Netherlands under the pseudonym "WhatsappHack" published, to the Dutch websites Tweakers.net and GeenStijl, a method by which WhatsApp accounts could be hijacked. The researcher noticed a flaw in the authentication process, which allowed the researcher to hijack an account by trying to login with another phone number and intercepting the verification SMS text message that, under specific conditions, remained in the outbox of the Symbian phone after the WhatsApp client would attempt to send it to itself. On Android, the verification message could be obtained through reading the "radio" with a tool named "logcat". The researcher would then copy and send the intercepted verification message to the real number of the phone, using an SMS gateway to spoof the "sender" phone number to the number the researcher tried to maliciously login with. This method worked, and WhatsApp issued a patch within one day after publication of the articles, to both the Android and Symbian clients. WhatsApp did have a security mechanism, by design, which would disable the account on the phone of the original owner of the phone number, when they had a WhatsApp account.
WhatsApp
Another application called "GB Whatsapp" is considered malicious by cybersecurity firm Symantec because it usually performs some unauthorized operations on end-user devices.
Reception and criticism of WhatsApp security and privacy features
On January 13, 2017, "The Guardian" reported that security researcher Tobias Boelter had found that WhatsApp's policy of forcing re-encryption of initially undelivered messages, without informing the recipient, constituted a serious loophole whereby WhatsApp could disclose, or be compelled to disclose, the content of these messages. WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems officials disagreed with this assessment. A follow-up article by Boelter himself explained in greater detail what he considered to be the specific vulnerability. This article has since been removed by The Guardian due to the inaccuracies in Boelter's representation of the facts. After complaints from 73 renowned security researchers, The Guardian was forced to substantially revise and correct their own articles as well. Therefore, in June 2017, "The Guardian" readers’ editor Paul Chadwick wrote that "The Guardian was wrong to report in January that the popular messaging service WhatsApp had a security flaw so serious that it was a huge threat to freedom of speech."
WhatsApp
At a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp was closely related to the Internet.org vision. According to a "TechCrunch" article, Zuckerberg's vision for Internet.org was as follows:The idea, he said, is to develop a group of basic internet services that would be free of charge to use – 'a 911 for the internet.' These could be a social networking service like Facebook, a messaging service, maybe search and other things like weather. Providing a bundle of these free of charge to users will work like a gateway drug of sorts – users who may be able to afford data services and phones these days just don’t see the point of why they would pay for those data services. This would give them some context for why they are important, and that will lead them to paying for more services like this – or so the hope goes.
Jan Koum
In January 2009, Koum bought an iPhone and realized that the then seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps. He visited his friend Alex Fishman and the two talked for hours about Koum's idea for an app over tea at Fishman's kitchen counter. Koum almost immediately chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like "what's up", and a week later on his birthday, February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California.
History of Facebook
On February 19, 2014 Facebook announced its acquisition of WhatsApp Inc., a smartphone instant messaging application for $19 billion in a mix of stock and cash. The acquisition is the most ever paid for a venture-capital backed startup.
Secret (app)
Secret was an iOS and Android app service that allowed people to share messages anonymously within their circle of friends, friends of friends, and publicly. It differs from other anonymous sharing apps such as PostSecret, Whisper, and Yik Yak in that it was intended for sharing primarily with friends, potentially making it more interesting and addictive for people reading the updates. It was founded by David Byttow, the former lead for Square Wallet, and Chrys Bader-Wechseler, a former Google product manager at Google+, Photovine and YouTube. Bader-Wechseler left the company in January 2015, with the stated reason that the company's shift away from beautiful design and towards more minimalistic design meant that he felt he was no longer the best person to be at the helm of the company. Byttow announced the shutdown of the app and the company on April 29, 2015.
Rachel Whetstone
Rachel Marjorie Joan Whetstone (born 22 February 1968) is a public relations executive. Whetstone joined Facebook as VP of communications of its WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger products in September 2017. She was senior vice-president of communications and public policy for Uber until April 2017. She was in a similar position at Google until June 2015.
Will Harvey
Will Harvey (born Ernst Czerasny, Poland, 1967) is a software developer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He wrote "Music Construction Set" (1984) for the Apple II, the first commercial sheet music processor for home computers. "Music Construction Set" was ported to other systems by its publisher, Electronic Arts. He wrote two games for the Apple IIGS: "Zany Golf" (1988) and "The Immortal" (1990). Harvey founded two consumer virtual world Internet companies: IMVU, an instant messaging company, and There, Inc., an MMOG company.
Karelia Software
Karelia Software, or Karelia is a software company with a headquarters in Alameda, California that claims to pioneer the desktop Web application market. It was founded by Dan Wood and later joined by Terrence Talbot. The company derives its name from the Karelia Suite of classical music by Jean Sibelius. The name can also refer to Karelia, a historical province in eastern Finland.
The original Karelia logo was inspired by events that occurred shortly after Dan Wood created Watson. The application was designed as a complement to Apple's existing Sherlock 2 application, providing users various plug-ins to view specific internet content. Watson was released in November 2001, and the popularity of the program grew quickly.
Tenor (website)
On September 7, 2017, Tenor announced SDK for Unity and Apple's ARKit. It allows developers to integrate GIFs into augmented reality apps and games.
On November 6, 2017, in response to users having utilized Tenor and similar services to distribute GIFs with content that is illegal under local laws, the Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Informatics threatened to block WhatsApp. The regulator acknowledged that despite being from third-party providers, WhatsApp was wholly responsible for allowing the content to be disseminated to users, because the feature was part of their platform. The next day, Tenor was blocked in the country. The threats were later dropped.
WhatsApp
WhatsApp competes with a number of Asian-based messaging services (that as of 2014, were services like WeChat (468 million active users), Viber (209 million active users) and LINE (170 million active users), WhatsApp handled ten billion messages per day in August 2012, growing from two billion in April 2012, and one billion the previous October. On June 13, 2013, WhatsApp announced that they had reached their new daily record by processing 27 billion messages. According to the "Financial Times", WhatsApp "has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines."
WhatsApp
In April 2018, WhatsApp's co-founder and CEO Jan Koum announced that he would be leaving the company. Facebook later announced that Koum's replacement as WhatsApp's CEO would be Chris Daniels.
Ward Cunningham
Howard G. "Ward" Cunningham (born May 26, 1949) is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and extreme programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of the software consultancy he started with his wife Karen, Cunningham & Cunningham (commonly known by its domain name, c2.com), on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He has authored a book about wikis, titled "The Wiki Way", and also invented Framework for Integrated Tests. He was a keynote speaker at the first three instances of the WikiSym conference series on wiki research and practice as well as a keynote speaker at the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017.
Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen
Rasmussen invented Google Wave in 2004, while the brothers were in talks with Google about selling Where 2 Technologies to Google. The Rasmussen brothers started working on Google Wave in 2006, and in 2007 Jens moved to Sydney, Australia, where he continued working with Lars and a small team on the Google Wave idea, under the project name Walkabout. Google Wave was an open source code internet application launched in 2009 and discontinued in 2012.
Standard Widget Toolkit
The roots of SWT go back to work that Object Technology International (OTI), did in the 1990s when creating multiplatform, portable, native widget interfaces for Smalltalk, originally for OTI Smalltalk, which became IBM Smalltalk in 1993. IBM Smalltalk's Common Widget layer provided fast, native access to multiple platform widget sets while still providing a common API without suffering the "lowest common denominator" problem typical of other portable graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits. IBM was developing VisualAge, an integrated development environment (IDE) written in Smalltalk. They decided to open-source the project, which led to the development of Eclipse, intended to compete against other IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio. Eclipse is written in Java, and IBM developers, deciding that they needed a toolkit that had "native look and feel" and "native performance", created SWT as a Swing replacement.
XOWA
XOWA is an open-source application written primarily in Java by anonymous developers and is intended for users who wish to run their own copy of Wikipedia, or any other compatible Wiki offline without an internet connection.
XOWA is compatible with Microsoft Windows, OSX, Linux and Android.
Reception and criticism of WhatsApp security and privacy features
On January 6, 2012, an unknown hacker published a website that made it possible to change the status of an arbitrary WhatsApp user, as long as the phone number was known. To make it work, it only required a restart of the app. According to the hacker, it was only one of many security problems in WhatsApp. On January 9, WhatsApp reported that it had resolved the problem, although the only measure actually taken was to block the website's IP address. As a reaction, a Windows tool was made available for download providing the same functionality. This problem has since been resolved in the form of an IP address check on currently logged-in sessions.
Jan Buckner Walker
In 2010 Buckner Walker created UnhappenIt, dubbed "The Apology App," which provides users a quick and easy way to apologize online or via the Android smart phone, offering proposed language, recommended downloadable songs and various gifts to express a message apology. With its integration with Facebook and Twitter, the application also allows members to see and rank the apologies of others and to suggest songs for inclusion in the music database. Since its launch, the term "unhappen" has gained a viral momentum in social media and elsewhere and has been used by various journalists, media personalities and others in reference to one’s desire to go back in time before an unfortunate occurrence.
Swype
Swype was a virtual keyboard for touchscreen smartphones and tablets originally developed by Swype Inc., founded in 2002, where the user enters words by sliding a finger or stylus from the first letter of a word to its last letter, lifting only between words. It uses error-correction algorithms and a language model to guess the intended word. It also includes a predictive text system, handwriting and speech recognition support. Swype was first commercially available on the Samsung Omnia II running Windows Mobile, and was originally pre-loaded on specific devices.
Alibaba Group
In 2004, the Alibaba Group released Aliwangwang, an instant messaging software service for interactions between customer and online sellers. By 2014, there are 50 million Aliwangwang users, making it the second largest instant messaging tool in China. In October 2013, the Alibaba's chairman Jack Ma announced that the Alibaba Group would no longer use Tencent's messaging application WeChat, and would henceforth promote its own messaging application and service, Laiwang. In April 2014, Alibaba Group and UCWeb, a Chinese provider of mobile internet software technology and services, launched Shenma (神马), a mobile-only search engine, as part of a joint venture. Later in June, the Alibaba Group acquired UCWeb, with an international product portfolio that includes a mobile browsing service (UC Browser), app and game distribution platforms (9Apps and 9Game), a mobile traffic platform (UC Union) and UC News that primarily caters to all types of news in the India market (as an aggregator) among others.
.hack (video game series)
"The World" was developed by a German programmer named Harald Hoerwick; its backstory is based on the "Epitaph of Twilight", an epic poem by Emma Wielant. Her death inspired Hoerwick to create the game. Elements of the poem are coded into the game's programming. The hidden purpose of Hoerwick's game is to develop the ultimate artificial intelligence (AI), which is capable of making decisions for itself. To this end, Hoerwick inserted functions into the system which monitor and extract behavioral data from millions of the game's players to aid in the AI's learning process. After Hoerwick's death, these pieces of code became black boxes to the current developers, who cannot fathom their purpose, yet are critical to the proper functioning of the game.
Zinc (company)
Zinc Inc. (renamed from Cotap Inc, Jun 2016) is a San Francisco-based company that sells a mobile messaging application for businesses. Unlike consumer-focused apps such as Whatsapp and WeChat that require phone numbers, Cotap allows users to find and connect with other users who share their corporate email domain. The company was founded in May 2013 by former Yammer executives Jim Patterson and Zack Parker. That month, Cotap announced it had received $5.5 million in a Series A funding round from Charles River Ventures and Emergence Capital Partners. Cotap received $10M in Series B funding in January 2014.
WhatsApp
Cade Metz, writing in "Wired", said, "WhatsApp, more than any company before it, has taken encryption to the masses."
WhatsApp
On May 10, 2016, the messaging service was introduced for both Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems. WhatsApp currently does not allow audio or video calling from desktop operating systems. Similar to the WhatsApp Web format, the app, which will be synced with a user's mobile device, is available for download on the website. It supports OS versions of Windows 8 and OS X 10.9 and higher.
WhatsApp
On November 18, 2014, Open Whisper Systems announced a partnership with WhatsApp to provide end-to-end encryption by incorporating the encryption protocol used in Signal into each WhatsApp client platform. Open Whisper Systems said that they had already incorporated the protocol into the latest WhatsApp client for Android, and that support for other clients, group/media messages, and key verification would be coming soon after. WhatsApp confirmed the partnership to reporters, but there was no announcement or documentation about the encryption feature on the official website, and further requests for comment were declined. In April 2015, German magazine "Heise Security" used ARP spoofing to confirm that the protocol had been implemented for Android-to-Android messages, and that WhatsApp messages from or to iPhones running iOS were still not end-to-end encrypted. They expressed the concern that regular WhatsApp users still could not tell the difference between end-to-end encrypted messages and regular messages. On April 5, 2016, WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems announced that they had finished adding end-to-end encryption to "every form of communication" on WhatsApp, and that users could now verify each other's keys. Users were also given the option to enable a trust on first use mechanism in order to be notified if a correspondent's key changes. According to a white paper that was released along with the announcement, WhatsApp messages are encrypted with the Signal Protocol. WhatsApp calls are encrypted with SRTP, and all client-server communications are "layered within a separate encrypted channel". The Signal Protocol library used by WhatsApp is open-source and published under the GPLv3 license.
Switch.co
Switch.co (Now Dialpad) is an enterprise business phone solution built by Switch Communications, Inc. The product was released on October 1, 2014 by the team that built UberConference. The creator of Switch.co, Craig Walker, is also known for being the creator of Google Voice and Yahoo! Voice. Switch’s customers range from Fortune 500 multi-nationals like Motorola Solutions to startups like Uber.
Marc Andreessen
Marc Lowell Andreessen ( ; born July 9, 1971) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook, eBay, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, among others. Andreessen was one of six inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web in 1994.
TouchWave
In 1997, TouchWave was a privately held, venture-backed startup company in Palo Alto, California, with future entrepreneur Oliver Muoto as its marketing director. Co-founded by CEO Bo Larsson, Jeff Snider, David F. Wittenkamp, and Jesper Stroe, TouchWave released its first product, WebSwitch, in 1997. WebSwitch, a Web-based phone switch, provided telephony over IP and targeted small to medium-sized businesses and branch networks of larger organizations. The WebSwitch was designed to deliver significantly lower costs for communications, ease of management and administration and offered services on a single IP-based network platform. The timing of TouchWave's late 1997 release of its phone switch product matched Level 3's development of its first softswitch, a method to connect calls from one phone line to another without a need to use traditional hardware.
Signal Protocol
In November 2014, Open Whisper Systems announced a partnership with WhatsApp to provide end-to-end encryption by incorporating the Signal Protocol into each WhatsApp client platform. Open Whisper Systems said that they had already incorporated the protocol into the latest WhatsApp client for Android and that support for other clients, group/media messages, and key verification would be coming soon after. On April 5, 2016, WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems announced that they had finished adding end-to-end encryption to "every form of communication" on WhatsApp, and that users could now verify each other's keys. In February 2017, WhatsApp announced a new feature, WhatsApp Status, which uses the Signal Protocol to secure its contents.
Fake news
Fake news in India has led to episodes of violence between castes and religions and interfered with public policies. It often spreads through the smartphone instant messenger Whatsapp, which had 200 million monthly active users in the country .
Highlight (application)
Highlight is a social networking application for iOS and Android created by Paul Davison. The application finds nearby users and shows things they have in common with a user. The application received a large update which introduced Android support on November 20, 2012. On April 30, 2015, the developers announced a change of focus towards social networking via photo-sharing through their Roll app.
Reception and criticism of WhatsApp security and privacy features
In November 2014, WhatsApp introduced a feature named Read Receipts which alerts senders when their messages are read by recipients. Within a week, WhatsApp introduced an update allowing users to disable this feature so that message recipients do not send acknowledgements.
On December 1, 2014, Indrajeet Bhuyan and Saurav Kar, both 17 years old, demonstrated the WhatsApp Message Handler Vulnerability, which allows anyone to remotely crash WhatsApp just by sending a specially crafted message of 2kb in size. To escape the problem, the user who receives the specially crafted message has to delete his/her whole conversation and start a fresh chat, because opening the message keeps on crashing WhatsApp unless the chat is deleted completely. In early 2015, after WhatsApp launched a web client that can be used from the browser, Bhuyan also found that it had two security issues that compromised user privacy: the WhatsApp Photo Privacy Bug and the WhatsApp Web Photo Sync Bug.
Whitney Wolfe Herd
Whitney Wolfe Herd (born July 1, 1989) is an American entrepreneur. She is founder and CEO of Bumble, and a co-founder of the dating app Tinder. The founder of Badoo contacted Wolfe Herd about creating a dating platform and partnered with her on a new company in 2014, launching Bumble that year. Bumble is launching into new verticals such as BumbleBizz, and launched BumbleBFF for finding friends. According to "Forbes", the company is valued at more than $1 billion.