WhatsApp, the popular cross-platform messaging app, is gradually becoming a very powerful tool for police departments to curb crime. The Lucknow Police has introduced a WhatsApp complaint tool where users can send their complaints about traffic offences.

Police is also planning to connect the helpline no. 1090 with WhatsApp to curb eve teasing. Railway Police is also considering to use WhatsApp to keep a track on ticket collectors, vendors selling food products, and coach attendants.

The Police department in Mumbai has set up several WhatsApp groups aimed at helping people to lodge complaint about for crime such as eve teasing. The Delhi and Kochi police also have WhatsApp helpline number to help people report about corruption in the police department. With messaging apps such as WhatsApp becoming popular among users, it's heartening to see security agencies are also staying up to date with the latest trend. Source DeccanChronical.

WhatsApp may introduce voice call facility in its 4.5.5 version. The new version will have a 4-button series, which will include options like switch to text message, call mute, directing the call through device speaker and hanging up. Rakuten (OTCPK:RKUNY) bought Viber for $900 million a few days before Facebook bought WhatsApp. Viber has over 25 million users in India, and it allows users to call any phone number across the globe, including a non-Viber number at nominal prices through its Viber Out service. The user has to purchase Viber Out credit through the application and make the payment through the app store for using the service. Viber Out credits can also be purchased from the website. Facebook can introduce a similar service in India once voice call facility is available on WhatsApp.

This is beneficial for Facebook, as it need not charge its users for using its unbundled messenger app and the ad-free messenger, WhatsApp. Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) has 100 million users in India, while WhatsApp has 48 million users in the country. The company earns less than 0.1% of its revenue from India. Smartphone sales in India are expected to increase from 44 million units in 2013 to 80 million units by the end of 2014. The Indian mobile payment market is expected to grow from $86 million in 2011 to a $1.15 billion market by 2016. Last year, India topped the list of global remittances, with $70 billion in remittances. Facebook can monetize its unbundled messenger app and WhatsApp through mobile payments and remittances.

Facebook said Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire WhatsApp in a $16 billion cash and stock arrangement with the popular messaging application's parent company. The announcement was made in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.


The deal for WhatsApp includes 183,865,778 shares of Facebook stock, valued at $12 billion, along with $4 billion in cash. Once the acquisition closes, Facebook has promised to grant 45,966,444 restricted stock units (RSUs) to WhatsApp founders and employees, tacking on an additional $3 billion in value to the deal. The additional RSUs will vest over four years following closing.

WhatsApp has 450 million monthly active users, more than 70 percent of whom are active on a daily basis, Facebook said in a press release. The service is also adding 1 million new registered users per day. The application will, much like Instagram, remain independent from its new parent company.

"You can continue to use WhatsApp no matter where in the world you are, or what smartphone you're using," Koum said. "And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product."

WhatsApp, an early mover in the messaging app space, has racked up 430 million active users to date. But despite the influx of new competition from the likes of Line, WeChat, KakaoTalk and Snapchat, WhatsApp says it will be sticking to its guns: avoiding advertising; staying away from “gimmicks” like disappearing photos and games; and continuing to request its users to keep paying to use the service as its basic business model.

The app, which used to be paid, is now free to download and costs $0.99/year to use after the first year. The comments were made by co-founder and CEO Jan Koum, who was speaking at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany. “The important thing is focus,” he said, not disappearing photos — a reference to the ephemeral messaging service Snapchat.

Of WhatsApp’s 430 million users, some 30 million started using the app in the last couple of months (it only announced 400 million in December). WhatsApp now sees some 50 billion messages sent and received daily — rivalling SMS volumes.

“No ads, no games, no gimmicks,” Koum said today. It’s a credo that is written on a Post-It note from co-founder Brian Acton (who first worked with Koum at Yahoo). Koum keeps that note, which he got Acton to sign, on his desk as a reminder of where WhatsApp would like to remain anchored.
“We just want to focus on messaging.

Covering a wide range of topics, Koum also was upfront about his preference for Android as a platform over iOS. “Android is a lot more open. We are able to build new features and prototype faster on Android, not to mention that we have a lot more users on Android,” he said.
Longer term, it doesn’t look like WhatsApp plans to turn away from smartphones for its core experience any time soon. “Our goal is to be on every smartphone.” Quoting a projection of 5 billion total smartphones down the line, he said their goal is to be “on every single one of them.”

WhatsApp processed more than 54 billion messages on new years eve. The company tweeted that its 400 million users sent 18 billion messages and received 36 billion messages in a single day. The previous record set by the company was 27 million messages in a day in June last year. According to a recent report, the messaging service adds more than 50 million new users each month and aims to reach the half a billion user mark by 2014 mid year. According to a report the company will have more than 2 Billion users by 2014 year end.

The company recently disclosed in a blog post that its 400 million users send more than 16 billion messages every day, receive 32 billion and send 500 million images every day. That's much more than other popular messaging services like Snapchat, which gets 400 million images per pay.

WhatsApp has announced its instant messaging app now has more than 400 million monthly active users with with 100 million active users added in the last four months alone. The popular instant messaging app allows users to send free messages, photos, videos and audio messages to people on your mobile contact list. The app is available for free for iPhone, Windows Phone, Android, and BlackBerry.


WhatsApp's closest competitor is messaging app Line which has 300 million registered users, followed by WeChat which has about 270 million users.

Ever since news got out that BlackBerry Messenger (or BBM as its known to its hordes of loyal users) would be making its way to iOS and Android devices, we expected it to make a huge splash. The demand for BBM was only highlighted by the number of times the leaked version of the client was downloaded by Android users, forcing BlackBerry to postpone the actual launch because of the massive hit its servers took from the huge numbers.

However, iOS and Android already had a large number of popular IM apps such as WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Viber and Skype. Therefore, while the rush to adopt BBM was expected, we didn’t think it would cause the rest of the IM clients to lose too much ground on account of them being first-movers.

As it turns out, and as our poll shows, we had vastly underestimated the popularity of BBM. Almost 8,000 of our readers responded to the question “Will BBM now be the messenger of choice on your smartphone?”, out of which a sizeable majority (5,728 which translates to 73.4%) said that they indeed plan to rely on BBM more than other clients on their smartphones. Only 1,574 (or 20%) of our readers plan to stick with the IM clients they were using before BBM, while 500 of you (6%) thought you needed some more time to come to a decision on BBM.

Instagram has formally announced its new private photo/video-sharing and messaging feature called Instagram Direct. The new feature allows users to send each other private chat-like messages that includes text, images or videos.Instagram's new feature is considered as an attempt to compete with Instant Messaging apps such as Snapchat, WhatsApp and Viber.

A new icon appears in the top right corner of home feed. Tap it to open the inbox, where you can see images and videos that others have sent. To send an image or video, tap the camera button for image or video capture and editing screens.

At the top of the share screen, there are two options – share with followers or send to particular persons (Direct). To use Direct, enter the names of the people you want to share image. You can also add caption. Tap “Send” when you're done.

You will receive notifications for who's seen your photo or video, who's liked it and see recipients commenting in real time. Images and videos you receive will appear immediately. You have the option to decide if you want view a photo or video from someone who you're not following.

WhatsApp Messenger for iOS has been updated with an iOS 7-inspired design. The new version is tailor made for Apple's new iOS 7 OS, which has a flat design.

Facebook had announced that the phone company integrating with the Courier app was in limited beta investigating on iOS strongbox now. But, as of this salutation, you can download the updated Facebook Courier app on your iPhone or Automaton smartphone. This alternative now gives the app the added malleability of allowing you to substance your friends who are in your phone's contacts database, but not on Facebook.

The programme has been bestowed a makeover as intimately, with the labourer looking and a redesigned painting.

Understandably the pressing is now on Whatsapp, with Facebook Traveller also actuation in the contact for a pie of the fast messaging market. The modern IM ecosystem feature was already grappling push from the BlackBerry Traveller, which has seen a rather heady actuation freshly, and already supplementary statesman than 10 cardinal users on Robot uncomparable in the premier hebdomad of propulsion. Whatsapp currently has around 300 meg users, and numeration.

Facebook has emotional off from disagreeable to incorporate the grouping SMS as comfortably, at littlest on Humanoid, and instead focusses its tending on the larger IM soul number, including those who may somebody advisedly stayed forth from making a Facebook salience dirt now.

Facebook admitted that it was a decrease in daily teen users, indicating that they are still on the site but not using it as much acebook is reportedly witnessing a decrease in its daily users, especially teens, who have started to prefer mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat, over the social networking giant.

According to the Guardian, the mass exodus from the social networking giant is attributed to the coming of messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk, which host free instant messages through a phone's data connection.

Unlike Facebook, these apps promote dynamic real-time chatting with different groups of real-life friends, because one gets to connect with people who already exist in their phone book. WhatsApp, established in 2009, is the biggest messaging app in the world by users, with more than 350 million monthly active users globally, putting Twitter's 218 million users behind.

The report said that since apps like these shun advertising, provide a more private sharing space like in SnapChat, and some like Kakao Talk offer services other than simple messaging or photo sharing, which includes gaming and music sharing.

Whatsapp, possibly the most popular cross platform messaging app, has added the voice messaging feature to the offering. This announcement was made by Co-Founder and CEO Jan Koum, while speaking with AllThingsD. He also confirmed that the service has now crossed 300 million active users.

By the sounds of it, the procedure of sending a voice message seems fairly simple. Record a message within the app, and the moment you let go of the recording button, the message is immediately sent to the user. In case you are unsure about what you said, swipe left, and the message is immediately removed from the conversation. “The number of taps matters. People want to send a message and be on their way,” Koum said. “We’re not going to come out with a big gaming platform launch. All these little details are so important. I’ll spend six months obsessing over how it works on every platform.”, he added.

After years of surviving as a $0.99 (Rs. 58 approx.) paid app, WhatsApp, the popular messaging app has finally gone free to download for Apple devices. From today, iPhone and iPad users will be able to download WhatsApp for free and use it without paying anything for the first year. The second year onwards, users will have to pay an annual subscription amount of $0.99. This is the same system employed by WhatsApp on Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

WhatsApp has been at the top of the popularity charts despite tough competition from other IM apps like Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Hike, WeChat and Viber. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum claimed back in April that his company saw more activity than Twitter with over 200 million active monthly users and about 20 billion messages sent and received daily.