WhatsApp Messenger is a proprietary cross-platform, encrypted, instant messaging client for smartphones. It uses the Internet to send text messages, documents, images, video, user location and audio messages to other users using standard cellular mobile numbers.
As of February 2016, WhatsApp had a user base of one billion, making it the most popular messaging application.
WhatsApp Inc., based in Mountain View, California, United States, was acquired by Facebook Inc. on February 19, 2014, for approximately US$19.3 billion.
Messaging app WhatsApp was bought by Facebook today! And when you’re facing the prospect of a 5 year old company being acquired for $19 billion, can you really blame founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum? Probably not.
What
WhatsApp Inc. is an early stage technology startup founded in the heart of Silicon Valley. What does the name mean you ask? Well, WhatsApp is a pun on What's Upin case you didn't get it yet:)
Why
Because we want to build a better SMS alternative. Because we believe we can. Because someday very soon everybody will have a Smartphone.
Who
WhatsApp was founded by two guys who spent combined 20 years doing geeky stuff at Yahoo! Inc. before starting WhatsApp Inc.
Facts Of WhatsApp
- WhatsApp founded in 2009 by former Yahoo! employees Brian Acton and Jan Koum
- Sequoia Capital invested $18 million in 2011
- 70% of users are active on a daily basis
- WhatsApp says they are adding 1 million users everyday.
- They currently employ 50 people
- 32 engineers working on WhatsApp, i.e. one engineer is responsible for 14 million active users!!
- 400 million active users in December
- Rising to 450 million active users according to Facebook’s press release
- The app is the 5th most downloaded app on Android
- WhatsApp doesn’t sell ads and zero have appeared on the app
- Twitter and Facebook had the chance to hire founder Brian Acton but didn’t!
- The total value of the deal: $19 Billion ($4 billion in cash, $12 billion in stock, and $3 billion in restricted stock)
- $1 Billion Break-up fee should the deal not go through.
- Jan Koum keeps a note from Brian taped to his desk that reads “No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!” To keep them focused on building a pure messaging experience.
- WhatsApp spent ZERO cash on marketing, PR and user acquisition
- WhatsApp’s messaging volume is approaching the entire global telecom SMS volume
- On Dec 31st 2013 users sent a total 54 billion messages during the day (3x increase from 2012
WhatsApp is Developed in Erlang Programming Language .
Erlang is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional programming language. It is also a garbage-collected runtimesystem. The sequential subset of Erlang supports eager evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing. Erlang is known for its designs that are well suited for systems with the following characteristics:
- Distributed
- Fault-tolerant
- Soft real-time,
- Highly available, non-stop applications
- Hot swapping, where code can be changed without stopping a system.[3]
It was originally a proprietary language within Ericsson, developed by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding and Mike Williams in 1986,[4]but was released as open source in 1998. Erlang, along with OTP, a collection of middleware and libraries in Erlang, are now supported and maintained by the OTP product unit at Ericsson and have been widely referred to as Erlang/OTP.
Erlang has eight primitive data types:
- Integers
- Integers are written as sequences of decimal digits, for example, 12, 12375 and -23427 are integers. Integer arithmetic is exact and only limited by available memory on the machine. (This is called arbitrary-precision arithmetic.)
- Atoms
- Atoms are used within a program to denote distinguished values. They are written as strings of consecutive alphanumeric characters, the first character being lowercase. Atoms can contain any character if they are enclosed within single quotes and an escape convention exists which allows any character to be used within an atom.
- Floats
- Floating point numbers use the IEEE 754 64-bit representation.
- References
- References are globally unique symbols whose only property is that they can be compared for equality. They are created by evaluating the Erlang primitive
make_ref(). - Binaries
- A binary is a sequence of bytes. Binaries provide a space-efficient way of storing binary data. Erlang primitives exist for composing and decomposing binaries and for efficient input/output of binaries.
- Pids
- Pid is short for process identifier – a Pid is created by the Erlang primitive
spawn(...)Pids are references to Erlang processes. - Ports
- Ports are used to communicate with the external world. Ports are created with the built-in function
open_port. Messages can be sent to and received from ports, but these messages must obey the so-called "port protocol." - Funs
- Funs are function closures. Funs are created by expressions of the form:
fun(...) -> ... end.
And three compound data types:
- Tuples
- Tuples are containers for a fixed number of Erlang data types. The syntax
{D1,D2,...,Dn}denotes a tuple whose arguments areD1, D2, ... Dn.The arguments can be primitive data types or compound data types. Any element of a tuple can be accessed in constant time. - Lists
- Lists are containers for a variable number of Erlang data types. The syntax
[Dh|Dt]denotes a list whose first element isDh, and whose remaining elements are the listDt. The syntax[]denotes an empty list. The syntax[D1,D2,..,Dn]is short for[D1|[D2|..|[Dn|[]]]]. The first element of a list can be accessed in constant time. The first element of a list is called the head of the list. The remainder of a list when its head has been removed is called the tail of the list. - Maps
- Maps contain a variable number of key-value associations. The syntax is
#{Key1=>Value1,...,KeyN=>ValueN}.
Two forms of syntactic sugar are provided:
- Strings
- Strings are written as doubly quoted lists of characters. This is syntactic sugar for a list of the integer ASCII codes for the characters in the string. Thus, for example, the string "cat" is shorthand for
[99,97,116]. It has partial support for Unicode strings.[13] - Records
- Records provide a convenient way for associating a tag with each of the elements in a tuple. This allows one to refer to an element of a tuple by name and not by position. A pre-compiler takes the record definition and replaces it with the appropriate tuple reference.
Erlang has no method of defining classes, although there are external libraries available.[14]
Companies using Erlang
Companies using Erlang in their production systems include:
- Amazon.com uses Erlang to implement SimpleDB, providing database services as a part of the Amazon Web Services offering.
- AOL's digital advertising business is using Erlang for its real time bidding exchange systems.
- Battlestar Galactica Online game server by Bigpoint
- Bet365, the online gambling firm uses the language in production to drive its InPlay betting service, pushing live odds of sporting events to millions of customers in near real-time.
- Call of Duty server core
- DNSimple, a DNS provider that uses Erlang to run DNS servers in a globally distributed Anycast network, managing billions of requests per day.
- Ericsson uses Erlang in its support nodes, used in GPRS, 3G and LTE mobile networks worldwide.
- Facebook uses Erlang to power the backend of its chat service, handling more than 200 million active users. It can be observed in some of its HTTP responseheaders.
- Facebook Chat system was running on ejabberd based servers
- GitHub, a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git version control system. Erlang is used for RPC proxies to ruby processes.
- Goldman Sachs, high-frequency trading programs
- Huffington Post uses Erlang for its commenting system on HuffPost Live.
- Issuu, an online digital publisher
- Klarna, a Swedish e-commerce company, has been using Erlang to handle 9 million customers and 50 million transaction since 2005.
- League of Legends chat system by Riot Games, based on ejabberd
- Linden Lab uses Erlang in its games.
- Machine Zone, a developer of Free-to-play games, uses Erlang in Game of War: Fire Age.
- Smarkets, sports betting exchange
- Tuenti chat is based on ejabberd
- Twitterfall, a service to view trends and patterns from Twitter
- Rackspace uses Erlang in some of its internal applications to manage networking devices.
- Rakuten uses Erlang for its distributed file system.
- Vendetta Online Naos game server
- World of Tanks uses Erlang for message delivery and communication between game players.
- WhatsApp uses Erlang to run messaging servers, achieving up to 2 million connected users per server.
- Whisper, an anonymous social network on mobile
- Yahoo! uses it in its social bookmarking service, Delicious, which has more than 5 million users and 150 million bookmarked URLs.
References
Wikipedia
WhatsApp
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