A few months before its lukewarm IPO late last year, Germany’s Rocket Internet took a $446 million investment from the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT), the largest telecoms operator in… Read more »
As predicted last month, Samsung is pulling the plug on its ChatOn messaging service. The Korean news service Yonhap reported on Friday that will axe the service on February 1,… Read more »
The Chinese web giant Baidu will buy a stake in Uber worth up to $600 million, according to sources quoted by Bloomberg. The ride-booking company, which raised $1.2 billion earlier this… Read more »
If the GSMA’s predictions are correct, two-thirds of the nine billion non-M2M mobile connections in 2020 will be from smartphones, with the vast majority coming from emerging markets. Read more »
China’s Sina, proprietor of the highly popular Weibo, is reportedly preparing to float the microblogging platform as a spinoff on the New York Stock Exchange. According to a Financial Times piece… Read more »
Israel’s Calcalist says bootstrapped Viber is negotiating a sale worth somewhere between $300 and 400 million — but who’s the mystery suitor? Read more »
According to analysts at Informa, IP-based platforms such as WhatsApp now carry more messages than SMS infrastructure does. However, we should be cautious about how we interpret the figures. Read more »