WhatsApp Launches Voice Messaging, Hits 300M Monthly Active Users

With all the texting that people do these days, it’s naturally taken a messaging app to re-introduce the act of using our voices to...
communicate.

WhatsApp, the increasingly ubiquitous global messaging app, has launched “voice messaging,” a new feature that will let users record and send audio files with one tap on their smartphones.

The messaging company, which has 45 employees and is based in Mountain View, Calif., confirmed a report inAllThingsD that the service would allow users to press and hold the microphone on their keyboard to send a voice message, a bit like using a walkie-talkie.

WhatsApp also said it had reached an extraordinary 300 million global monthly active users, surpassing 20 million monthly active users in four countries: Germany, Spain, Mexico and India. It wouldn’t give numbers on its retention rates, but business manager Neeraj Arora said they were “very healthy.”

Push-to-talk messaging as it’s technically known, was a pet project of WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, who worked closely with the company’s engineers over the last six months to fine-tune the feature. It will be pushed out to WhatsApp users across all platforms and devices in the next 24 hours.

“Certain languages such as Chinese are very difficult to type,” says Arora. “For some people it’s easier to send a quick voice message… and it’s more fun and expressive.”

He emphasized that WhatsApp was constantly iterating, and that at its core, it was a communications company, not just a text messaging app. “It’s not only about one thing but many things,” he said.

WhatsApp also allows users to send video files; might more seamless video messaging be a next step? “Depends on what users want and how the industry evolves,” said Arora, “but we’re definitely going to improve various ways of messaging.”

WhatsApp was founded by Koum and Brian Acton, both ex-staffers at YahooYHOO -1.23%!, and has become one of the world’s largest messaging apps by active users. It may only surpassed by Tencent’s WeChat (or Weixin), the popular Chinese messaging app that was estimated by researchers at Portioto have 300 million active monthly users in April 2013. Following behind, according to Portio’s research, was texting and calling app Viber with 175 million users, and LINE, of Japan, with 100 million users in January 2013.

WhatsApp has remained independent in spite of widely-reported rumors that Google GOOG -0.93% and Facebook FB -1.63% were both interested in buying the company. It also refuses to show ads, instead making money by charging users 99 cents (in the United States) after the first year of use. It used to charge the fee once, upfront for new iOS users, but recently switched themto the “freemium” business model it was using for Android devices.

For a company that has gained so much traction among users, it has collected relatively little in venture capital funding: just $8 million from an initial funding round led by Sequoia Capital in 2011, and nothing more since. The company says it is profitable.

Once voice messaging has rolled out, WhatsApp’s Koum will focus on developing other features such as photo sharing, he told AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes; WhatsApp users share 325 million photos per day, well above the 200 million self-destructing photos reportedly shared each day by Snapchat users.

Source:http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2013/08/06/whatsapp-launches-voice-messaging-hits-300m-monthly-active-users/