BBM coming to iOS and Android this Summer!

BlackBerry’s BBM messaging service is finally coming to Android and iOS. The long-rumoured release of BBM on handsets other than BlackBerry’s own was announced by CEO Thorsten Heins on stage at the BlackBerry Live conference in Orlando, Florida

“We are making the BBM platform more powerful than ever. We want to offer this powerful mobile service to everyone,” said Heins.

Any iPhone running iOS 6 or later will be able to download BBM. Android handsets need to be using Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean in order for BBM to work. BBM will also be free on both iPhone and Android.

“We are committed to making BBM on other platforms as fully featured as we can,” explained Heins, who was keen to emphasise that the messaging service would still be best on BlackBerry’s own handsets.

“Of course BBM on blackberry will be the premier experience,” said Heins. “It’s a statement of confidence.”

The CEO explained that the company was so confident with BlackBerry 10’s success that it wasn’t worried about sharing its premier draw, BBM, with other operating systems.

The rollout will begin in the summer with BBM in its most basic form. Messaging and groups will be available on Android and iOS, with video and screen sharing coming later in the year. The just announced BBM Channels should also arrive in 2013.

BB announces the BlackBerry Q5 for emerging markets

The start of the BlackBerry Live 2013 annual conference today in Orlando, USA, saw the announcement of the BlackBerry Q5 – a QWERTY device for emerging markets.

The Blackberry Q5 revolves around a 3.1-inch touchscreen and one of BlackBerry’s classic physical QWERTY keyboards, which they are so proud of. The screen has an unusual resolution of 720 x 720px – the same as on the Q10, but this time it’s an LCD unit. Inside the BlackBerry Q5 there’s a dual-core 1.2Ghz CPU and 8 gigs worth of storage. There’s a microSD slot to expand that, but the battery is not removable.

The new BlackBerry Q5 will be available in selected markets in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia (including the Asia Pacific region), and Latin America, with availability beginning in July. The smartphone will be offered in black, white, red and pink.

Another announcement that came from the today’s keynote is that the BlackBerry 10.1 update is now ready to seed to the BlackBerry Z10 (later this month in the US). Not only that, but starting today, Skype will be available to all users who update their Z10s to v10.1.

WhatsApp says Google acquisition rumors are false!

The internet was set ablaze last weekend with rumors that Google’s close to acquiring the WhatsApp team and its popular messaging app. One report claimed that negotiations went on for several weeks, and a deal was finally reached for $1 billion.

Not so fast. According to a new report, the two companies aren’t even holding talks right now, let alone discussing a buyout. WhatsApp’s business development head Neeraj Arora told AllThingsD last night that the Google acquisition rumors are false…

AllThingsD‘s Liz Gannes reports:

Popular messaging app WhatsApp says it is not in discussions to sell the company to Google. Neeraj Arora, WhatsApp’sbusiness development head, told AllThingsDigital today that the company is not holding sales talks with Google…

…Arora declined to comment further.”

It’s not surprising that the buyout talk was unfounded; WhatsApp has been the subject of similar rumors in the past. In fact, just a few months ago, TechCrunch reported that the company was in high-level talks with Facebook over a potential acquisition.

So what makes WhatsApp so appealing to larger tech firms? How about its enormous user base? As of last month, the service facilitated messaging for over 200 million users on over 700 networks, in more than one hundred countries. That’s pretty impressive.

Ok, but if it’s not selling out to Google or Facebook, what does WhatsApp plan to do? Well according to the company’s CEO, its immediate future includes bringing its subscription model to iOS. They’ll make the app itself free, and charge users $1 per year.

Google is buying WhatsApp for $1 billion?

WhatsApp, the cross-platform instant messaging application for smartphones, is rumored to be close to negotiating a landmark acquisition deal with Google. Sources reportedly close to the negotiations claim the Internet giant is considering dropping a whopping one billion dollars on the popular service that as of March 2013 had a cool 200 million users, a hundred million ones on Android alone.

The report ties nicely with talk of a new instant messaging brand from Google called Babble, and even more so given Facebook with its new Home UI layer for select Android devices is basically encouraging its one billion users to use its Messenger service right from their Lock screen or from whichever app they happen to be using at any give moment…

DigitalTrends reports that while the deal started four or five weeks ago, “we’ve been told that WhatsApp is ‘playing hardball’ and jockeying for a higher acquisition price, which currently is ‘close to’ $1 billion right now.”

The acquisition might make sense for both parties.

For WhatsApp, Google’s scale and reach would mean rapid adoption, especially on Android devices. More importantly, the software would probably gain video chatting, a feature it’s been conspicuously missing.

WhatsApp’s 200 million users come from more than a hundred countries and across an astounding 750 mobile networks.The number one paid app in more than a hundred countries, WhatsApp on New Years Eve 2012 alone saw a record eighteen billion messages processed in a day.

DigitalTrends lets us in on WhatsApp’s business model, said to pull in about $100 million in revenue:

WhatsApp has a proven monetization scheme. Its yearly but nominal $0.99 subscription fee keeps the service ad-free. Behind the scenes however, WhatsApp also generates revenue through profitable partnerships with international telecommunications companies.

For instance WhatsApp’s monthly local plan in Hong Kong with mobile operator 3 HK costs just $8HK ($1.03 USD) and an international package will run for $48HK ($6.18 USD) per day. And whatever Whatsapp is doing is working: The app has even had a direct hand in declining SMS usage around the world. 

It’s interesting that although Google played its cards well with Android, it somehow has managed to drop the ball when it comes to the mobile instant messaging playground.

The company is now rumored to be consolidating its many instant messaging offerings under the new Babble brand so it could certainly use a standout app such as WhatsApp to drive people away from rival offerings and give them another reason to go Android.

The search giant’s Nikhyl Singhal told GigaOM last June that “we have done an incredibly poor job of servicing our users here.”

WhatsApp is thought to be toying with a subscription model on iOS and has suffered its share or privacy-related hiccups. Google previously acquired some other popular developers who made names for themselves creating popular apps for Apple’s iPhone, iPod, iPad and Mac.

Most notably, it boughtemail client Sparrow last Jul and mobile productivity suite QuickOffice in June 2012. Last September, the company unexpectedly acquired Nik Software, the maker of the popular photo editing software Snapseed.

Viber, another popular IM app, has for some time been in a neck and neck race with WhatsApp over which service gets to become the default cross-platform messaging solution on mobile devices.

But taking advantage of Viber’s feature shortages and slow pace of development, WhatsApp zoomed past its rival, which as of February 26, 2013 had 175 million users.

WhatsApp Messenger update brings Holo UI to the Android app !

Popular instant messaging client WhatsApp has gone through a major UI redesign on Android. While the former version was nothing more than just a slight revision of the iOS app, the latest update takes advantage of the new Holo UI guidelines for Android.

Right off the bat you’ll be able to see that the menu bar on top is now flat and in line with the new UI guidelines. Drop into a conversation and you will find new flat message bubbles and a redesigned text input field. The emoticons have also been moved down and placed next to the text field, which makes them easier to access on smartphones with large displays. The Settings menu has also been redesigned.

Unfortunately, the new version of the app is not yet available through the Play Store, and you will have to click on the link below to download the APK from WhatsApp website. You can safely update the app with the new one and maintain all your current app data. There is also no beta sign anywhere, so the app should be stable enough for everyday use (I haven’t faced any issues with it yet).

If you are on Android and use WhatsApp Messenger regularly, you should definitely give the new update a try.

Download

WhatsApp is violating Phone Number privacy laws, reforms being made!

WhatsApp, the popular mobile messaging service, has been accused of violating international privacy laws over its handling of personal information.

In a collaborative investigation by Canadian and Dutch data privacy officials, it was determined that app users “do not have a choice to use the app without granting access to their entire address book.”

While the focus by privacy officials was around WhatsApp’s violations, the committee did note that the company had taken steps to implement many of its recommendations in order to comply with Canadian and Dutch privacy laws, of which was the basis of the charges. And while some of the privacy issues have been resolved, a statement revealed that there are other outstanding issues that have yet to be fully addressed.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada cited examples that it believes shows WhatsApp’s lax privacy enforcement:

• In order to facilitate contact between application users, WhatsApp relies on a user’s address book to populate subscribers’ WhatsApp contacts list.  Once users consent to the use of their address book, all phone numbers from the mobile device are transmitted to WhatsApp to assist in the identification of other WhatsApp users.  Rather than deleting the mobile numbers of non-users, WhatsApp retains those numbers (in a hash form).
• At the time the investigation began, messages sent using WhatsApp’s messenger service were unencrypted, leaving them prone to eavesdropping or interception, especially when sent through unprotected Wi-Fi networks.
• Over the course of the investigation, it was found that WhatsApp was generating passwords for message exchanges using device information that can be relatively easily exposed.  This created the risk that a third party may send and receive messages in the name of users without their knowledge.

The investigation has already resulted in some reforms. WhatsApp has introduced encryption in its platform that it says will prevent anybody from intercepting or eavesdropping. What’s more, the company says it has strengthened its authentication process in its latest version — it uses a “more secure randomly generated key instead of generating passwords from Media Access Control (MAC) or International Mobile Station Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers.”

Although both countries have conducted a joint investigation, they have issued separate reports, respecting each of their data protection laws. However, both say that they will be monitoring WhatsApp’s progress to ensure that it is fulfilling its commitment towards user privacy.

According to the investigators, WhatsApp is committed to making changes to protect the users’ privacy by letting them manually add contacts to their profiles.

This investigation comes at a time when WhatsApp has achieved enormous popularity. Earlier this month, it announced that it has processed 18 billion total messages in a single day, exceeding an August 2012 record of 10 billion messages — this surpasses Apple’s iMessage service, which generated more than 1 billion a day.

Additionally, WhatsApp has partnered with Hong Kong operator Three as its first carrier roaming deal giving customers unlimited access to the app in Hong Kong and 78 other countries.