Facebook to buy WhatsApp for $19bn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Facebook has bought messaging app WhatsApp in a deal worth a total of $19bn (£11.4bn) in cash and shares. The deal announced on Wednesday bolsters the world’s biggest social network – which has more than 1.2 billion members – with WhatsApp which has 450 million active users.

The acquisition supports Facebook and WhatsApp’s shared mission to bring more connectivity and utility to the world by delivering core internet services efficiently and affordably. Announcing the deal, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg described WhatsApp’s services as “incredibly valuable”. WhatsApp allows users to send messages over internet connections, avoiding text messaging fees. The company claims it is currently registering one million new users a day. It makes money by charging users a subscription fee of $1 per year, although it offers a free model as well.

Zuckerberg said WhatsApp would operate in the same way as Instagram, as a separate firm. ‘It would be pretty stupid of us to interfere,’ he said. He also said he was not planning to put ads on the service. ‘Our strategy is to grow and connect people. ‘Once we get to 2-3 billion people there are ways we can monetise. ‘Now we want to focus on growing users. I don’t think ads are the right way here.’

 

WhatsApp Messenger is a proprietary, cross-platform instant messaging subcription service for smartphones. In addition to text messaging, users can send each other images, video, and audio media messages as well as their location using integrated mapping features. WhatsApp Inc. was founded in 2009 by Americans Brain Acton and Jan Koum (also the CEO), both former employees of Yahoo!, and is based in Moutain View, California.

Nigeria generated N86bn revenue from tourism in 2012-NTDC

Tourism is now one of the world?s largest industries and one of its fastest growing economic sectors. For many countries tourism is seen as a main instrument for economic development, as it stimulates new economic activities; especially with regards to creating  employment opportunities.

Tourism is fast becoming a big business in Nigeria, in a statement issued on Monday in Abuja by the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation, Nigeria earned an estimated N86 billion from the visit of some 4.7 million tourists in the country in 2012.The statement stated that the overall Gross Domestic Product from tourism returns stood at N40.5 million in that year.

It said that overnight tourist visits was more than 4.6 million; tourists on a single day visit were 160,544, while transit tourists were 276,788.

According to the statement, there had been a steady increase in the number of inbound tourists in the country in the last five years, especially from 2008.

The statement said that over 4.6 million tourists visited on personal grounds in 2012 as against over 3.7 million in 2011.

It also stated that some 1.4 million tourists came to the country on holidays, leisure and recreation in 2012 as against more than 1.1 million in the preceding year.

It also stated that more than 4.6 million tourists were accommodated in 2012 as against 3.7 million in 2011. read complete story- http://www.acrossstreets.com

AVCA Invests $20m in Nigerian And Ghanaian SMEs

African Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (AVCA), a non-profit investment vehicle, has invested $10 million each into the Nigerian and Ghanaian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) industries.

While noting that the company currently has about 1,000 investments across Africa, Ms. Tokunboh Ishmael, the Chief Executive Officer of Alitheia Capital and one of AVCA’s board members, said private equity is crucial for SME sector financing.

“Private equity and venture capital plays a crucial role in financing the SME sector, which is the engine of economic growth the world over,”Tokunboh noted. 

Source: Ventures Africa

MINT: Will Nigeria be among the ten largest economies?

13 years ago, the term ”Brics” was coined by Jim O’Neil, a chief economist at Goldman Sachs. The acronym ”Brics” was used to describe the four countries [Brazil,Russia, India and China, later South Africa] O’Neil predicted would emerge among the next global economic giants. This would have been a flawed conception but for China.

Recently, Jim O’Neil came up with a new acronym ”MINT” which represents Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. He predicts that these countries could be among the ten largest economies in the next 30 years.

Numerical strength and youthful population amongst others are key factors in the possible economic emergence of the MINT countries.

However, will Nigeria be one of the ten largest economy in the next 30 years? Will numerical strength do for Nigeria what it did for China?

Nigeria, is the most populous country in Africa and the seventh most populous country in the world. Nigeria’s economy is the second largest in Africa, and the 37th largest in the world. A middle income, mixed economy and emerging market, with expanding financial, service, communication and entertainment sector. Her role in Africa, although supported by her numerical strength and financial capacity puts her in the spotlight. But have Nigeria’s endowment been harnessed and translated to economic development to the extent of having noticeable impact in the globe? Is there any glimmer of hope that Nigeria could be one of the ten largest economy in the next 30 years? Read more

iknownaija App: Odili Charles talks App development

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having just returned from speaking on HTML5 at the 2013 GDG Uyo DevFest, and failing to qualify for the semi-finals of the 2013 Google Cloud Developer Challenge with MemoTickswhich was coded less than 48 hours before the deadline, I set out to begin development on an idea conceived and communicated to me by my brother Odili Chukwudi Emmanuel a few months earlier.

It was to be a mobile app with a sortable (chronological and reverse-chronological) timeline of Nigeria’s history, showcasing notable historical happenings in Nigeria since 1900. We affirmed it was a great idea, one that would make a desirable mobile app for Nigerians and even foreigners interested in Nigeria especially regarding tourism and as celebrating Nigeria’s Centenary buzzed.

Although the Centenary celebration has been heavily criticized in somw quarters, including Governor Fashola of Lagos State who opined that the Centenary Celebration was not only un-neccesary, but could also serve to distort Nigeria’s History as to whether Nigeria was 100 or 54. We decided it was best not to meddle in such waters and allow the Politicians and Law-makers do their due diligence, rather we would go ahead and provide a unique and un-biased digital experience on mobile for Nigeria’s History, Facts, Festivals, and Places of Interest. This was how iKnowNaija was birth.

With iknownaija.com registered, I put up a distro of Drupal 7, setup some Entities to allow my brother ( B.A History and International Relations Obafemi Awolowo University) enter and manage data. Next I created some Drupal Views that exposed the collected data in formats we could get into the mobile app.

It is common knowledge that with mobile development, most dev-shops have to choose between native and hybrid style, and since this was a startup with just two brothers, limited time, limited tools, and no budget (yes, no funding whatsoever, watch out for part 2 of this post), We settled for a HTML5 approach for the app. This was so that we could easily, develop and test, and leverage the promise of write-once-run-everywhere for mobile platforms fielding devices with a reasonable webkit browser implementation.

Developing the app was really challenging but fun. Our first attempt was with Sencha Touch, using its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) implementation called Touch4J. However, I later ditched it for a custom and lightweight home-brewed solution with Bootstrap 3, this time with a Errai – a GWT based framework I have come to love. Read more from source