Passion And Tech

By the time you read this, the din around FaceBook's purchase of WhatsApp for 19 Billion USD would have died down considerably. The pundits, bloggers and podcasters have been taking sides ever since the news broke out and I thought I'll add my 2 cents to this. The arguments in favor of why FaceBook bought WhatsApp have been around the following angles: User base of 450 million and growing fast - WhatsApp has been able to garner a huuuge and loyal user base of 450 million users in a very short time. Some of the facts, numbers floating around the web around WhatsApp 44% retention rate of users 50 billion messages every month which is much larger than the total number of texts (a.k.a SMS) sent around. Huge popularity and a viable alternative to using SMS for sharing short messages. See this article for more details on how mobile carries are losing out. "Free" - for the first year and as low as 1 USD from there on. No Ads. According to Brian Acton, WhatsA...

Yesterday, my colleague Rohith pointed me to this Technology Radar article that ThoughtWorks publishes annually the trends that they intend to catch on, put on hold or watch out for. Some details on how they arrive at this is listed here . The radar itself is neatly split into four categories: Techniques Tools Platforms Languages & frameworks I strongly urge any one with an interest in technology to read through the radar. If not  anything, it at least opened up my eyes to some of the techniques/technologies that are gaining traction and might help me in my work.. I'll write in detail about some of the interesting developments in a subsequent post.