Roughly one year after WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton made his highly-publicized exit from Facebook, another executive and early employee of the messaging platform is doing the same. Neeraj Arora, WhatsApp’s chief business officer, announced today that he would be “taking some time off to recharge and spend time with family.”
Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014 and pledged to allow the messaging giant to continue to operate independently under Acton and co-founder Jan Koum, who served as its chief executive officer until abruptly quitting over privacy and data concerns in April. Arora, who joined WhatsApp in 2011 from Google, was rumored to be the frontrunner to replace Koum as CEO. With him out the door, it’s unclear who will be tapped to lead WhatsApp .
In today’s announcement, Arora said he was “deeply indebted” to both Acton and Koum, “who entrusted me to be their business companion for so many years.”
Facebook subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram are both in periods of flux following the exits of their original founders, which are believed to be caused by quarrels with the social media giant’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg .
In what was one of the largest tech stories of 2018, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger announced they were leaving Facebook years after the company acquired their photo-sharing app for $1 billion. They shared the news in September, just a few months after Koum stepped down from WhatsApp.
According to The New York Times, Zuckerberg, over the course of the last year, had begun to assert more and more control over Instagram, upsetting its leaders.
Koum, for his part, reportedly wrote in a since-removed WhatsApp blog post that Zuckerberg and Facebook no longer had respect for privacy: “These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends they day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect your personal data… remember, when advertising is involved, you the user are the product.”
According to TechCrunch’s Josh Constine, Koum was unhappy “about how Facebook would monetize his app and the impact of that on privacy.” Both Acton and Koum departed Facebook before they fully vested from the multi-billion acquisition, meaning the pair chose to lose hundreds of millions of dollars over continued employment at Facebook.
Arora’s exit is further evidence that Facebook has entered a new era, one in which the company’s acquisition strategy may be in serious danger of long-term damage.
You can read Arora’s full post below.
Source: TechCrunch
Inside Mission Support at Lockheed Martin, which led spacecraft operations for NASA’s InSight lander, tensions ran high as the robot prepared to touch down on martian soil.
Source: Wired
After focusing on Asian markets, particularly in Southeast Asia, Bangkok-based Eko Communications is getting ready to take on Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other enterprise messaging apps in Europe. The startup announced today that it has raised a Series B of $20 million and opened offices in London (which will serve as its new commercial headquarters), Amsterdam, and Berlin.
The funding, led by SMD Ventures, with participation from AirAsia’s digital investment arm Redbeat Ventures, Gobi Partners, East Ventures, and returning investors, brings Eko Communication’s total raised to $28.7 million. The company’s Series A was announced in 2015, followed by $2 million in strategic funding from Japanese conglomerate Itochu last year. Eko Communications (not to be confused with Eko, an interactive video startup) has already served clients like Thai mobile operator True, Radisson, and 7-Eleven.
Eko Communications’ Series B is earmarked for its ambitious global expansion plans in the first quarter of 2019. Korawad Chearavanont, the company’s CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch in an email that it has already localized products for target markets including the UK, Ireland, Benelux, and the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland).
Eko Communications wants to expand in the European Union and the United States because their economies are both significantly larger than Southeast Asia’s, said Chearavanont. This, plus the fact that both have larger enterprise IT markets thanks to higher spending on software by companies, means that “for Eko to achieve the necessary scale to become a global player in the mobile enterprise market, continued growth in these markets is critical,” he added.
The company claims that its revenues have more than tripled in the past year and that it now has more than 500,000 recurring paid users. Of course, any enterprise messaging startup has to contend with the specter of Slack and Microsoft Teams. Positioning Eko Communications as a rival to those services, however, isn’t totally accurate because they are aimed at different customers.
Slack and Microsoft Teams are “primarily utilized by ‘knowledge workers’ and these systems are priced for these types of users,” Chearavanont said. “Being a mobile-first company, we target companies that have a large presence of mobile-first staff traditionally in industries like retail and hospitality (the services sector in general).” Many employees in those sectors still rely on messaging apps like WhatsApp or email to communicate, so Eko Communications seeks to make it easy for companies to transition from their ad hoc communication methods to a more secure and efficient system with tools like APIs to help them integrate legacy systems.
Source: TechCrunch
Amazon’s Cyber Monday sale is in full swing, with price cuts on Bose products, a sweet Galaxy S9 bundle, huge Amazon device sales and more.
Source: CNET
Cyber Monday is the best time to buy a new gaming console, and this year’s deals have begun.
Source: CNET
Jiankui He’s work has been condemned by members of the scientific community. Now he’s facing formal probes.
Source: CNET
The first gritty photo, a NASA employee’s hat and that elaborate handshake all come in for comment.
Source: CNET
Chromebooks support file compression, though they work a little differently than on Windows or Mac. Here’s the step-by-step process to zipping files on a Chromebook, and then unzipping them again for extraction.
The post Here’s how to easily zip and unzip files on a Chromebook appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Buying an Ethernet cable can be confusing. Luckily, our quick-and-dirty guide makes sense of all the initials, so you can figure out which cable is best suited for your LAN dungeon or living room setup.
The post Prefer the reliability of wired internet? Here’s how to choose an Ethernet cable appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
El prestigioso encuentro de talento emprendedor europeo South Summit aterriza en el país azteca por primera vez. Ofrecemos un 30 % de descuento a nuestros lectores para acudir a esta cita que se celebrará el próximo 4 de diciembre
Source: MIT