I once got asked "what was a life changing company/product" and my answer was WhatsApp - to slightly bemused looks.
WhatsApp connected the world for free. Obviously they weren't the first to try but when my (very globally distributed family) picked up WhatsApp in '09/'10 we knew we were onto something different. Being able to stay in touch with my brother half way across the world in realtime was very special. Nothing else at the time really competed. SMS was expensive and had latency. Email felt clunky and oddly formal - email clients don't feel "chatty". MSN was crap on mobile and you both had to be online. Ditto for Skype. For calls we even used to do this odd VOIP bridge where you would each call an endpoint for cheap international phone calls.
Meanwhile in 2012, I was able to install WhatsApp on my mum's old Nokia Symbian feature phone, use WhatsApp on a pay-as-you-go sim plan in Singapore communicating over WAP. The data consumption was so low I basically survived 2 months on maybe 1-2 top ups. Compare that with the other day where I turned on roaming on my phone (so I could connect to Singtel to BUY a roaming package) and my phone passively fetched ~50+ MB in seconds and I was hit with 400SGD of data charges (I was able to get them refunded)
I am very grateful to all the work and thought WhatsApp put into building an affordable global resilient communication network and I hope every one of the people involved got the payout they deserve.
I once got asked "what was a life changing company/product" and my answer was WhatsApp - to slightly bemused looks.
WhatsApp connected the world for free. Obviously they weren't the first to try but when my (very globally distributed family) picked up WhatsApp in '09/'10 we knew we were onto something different. Being able to stay in touch with my brother half way across the world in realtime was very special. Nothing else at the time really competed. SMS was expensive and had latency. Email felt clunky and oddly formal - email clients don't feel "chatty". MSN was crap on mobile and you both had to be online. Ditto for Skype. For calls we even used to do this odd VOIP bridge where you would each call an endpoint for cheap international phone calls.
Meanwhile in 2012, I was able to install WhatsApp on my mum's old Nokia Symbian feature phone, use WhatsApp on a pay-as-you-go sim plan in Singapore communicating over WAP. The data consumption was so low I basically survived 2 months on maybe 1-2 top ups. Compare that with the other day where I turned on roaming on my phone (so I could connect to Singtel to BUY a roaming package) and my phone passively fetched ~50+ MB in seconds and I was hit with 400SGD of data charges (I was able to get them refunded)
I am very grateful to all the work and thought WhatsApp put into building an affordable global resilient communication network and I hope every one of the people involved got the payout they deserve.