The Mobile Messaging Space in All its Glory

Content regarding the hyper-saturated mobile messaging space. The best source there is on messaging!

By Hillel Fuld

Facebook Messenger’s audio and video calling reaches 300M users
TechCrunch - Josh Constine
Phase 1: Kill SMS. Phase 2: Kill Skype, FaceTime, and your phone. Phase 3: Profit? Facebook is making strides towards becoming a multi-media communication juggernaut, its head of Messenger David Marcus
Microsoft working on Skype Teams, its own Slack competitor
mspoweruser.com
Editor’s Note: Skype Teams will likely get renamed to “Microsoft Teams”, and it’s set to launch on November 2, 2016. It was recently reported that …
Yik Yak yearns to be local, not just anonymous
TechCrunch - Josh Constine
Anonymity has proven a dangerous path for startups like Secret, so Yik Yak is pushing a soft pivot towards connection with people close by. You can still share anonymous quips on the sagging college app,
The REAL reason Slack became a billion dollar company
medium.com
Satya van HeummenBlockedUnblockFollowFollowing Jun 5, 2015 And why its business model is evilly brilliant, Twitter is going nowhere and how you can …
WhatsApp adds support for document sharing, but only PDFs at launch
TechCrunch - Sarah Perez
WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned mobile messaging service that recently hit 1 billion users worldwide, is today rolling out a much-anticipated feature to its apps on iOS and Android devices: document sharing.
Slack voice calling arrives on desktop
TechCrunch - Josh Constine
Slack was being cheeky when yesterday it said voice chat would start testing “very, very soon”. Today the new “Calls” feature starting rolling out on Slack for desktop and on the Chrome browser. It lets
No More Voicemail is an app that kills voicemail so callers have to text you instead
TechCrunch - Sarah Perez
Voicemail is so last century. The idea of phoning someone then leaving a rambling message when they don’t pick up seems decidedly antiquated in the age of instant connectivity, where friends, family, and
Slack will soon start testing voice and video chat
TechCrunch - Josh Constine
Slack is gunning for Skype and Google Hangouts with the 2016 product roadmap it revealed today. The biggest change coming: the ability to seamlessly turn a text chat into a voice or video chat will begin
Mobile messaging app Telegram passes 100 million monthly active users, a 60% increase in 9 months
VentureBeat - Paul Sawers
BARCELONA, Spain — Mobile messaging app Telegram has passed 100 million monthly active users (MAUs), the company announced today. During a keynote at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Pavel Durov,
How BBC is using Yik Yak to talk to millennials (and get them to talk back)
Digiday - Ricardo Bilton
BBC has already experimented with Whatsapp, WeChat and Line in an effort to reach readers on the apps they’re already using. Now, it’s going deeper …
Chat App Company Tango, Valued At Over $1 Billion, Makes More Layoffs
TechCrunch - Jon Russell
Messaging app Tango has made further layoffs as new CEO Eric Setton continues to orchestrate changes in a bid to transform the struggling company’s fortunes. Setton, who moved from CTO to CEO last month,
Messaging is eating the app store: New Tribe app growing 80% weekly
VentureBeat - John Koetsier, TUNE
The new Quartz app tells you the news like a friend sending texts. Messaging apps command bigger audiences than social networks. And now Apple is featuring the one-week-out-of-beta video-messaging app
Imagining Snapchat's Future
TechCrunch - D.J. Sherrets
Snapchat could be used by over 1 billion daily active users in time and substantially accelerate how many videos and photos people share and consume. But there’s more to be done and questions to be answered.
Why messaging is the future of the news brand
fusion.net - Felix Salmon
Apps
HipChat adds Cloudo for centralized cloud storage search in your team chat
TNW - Nate Swanner
HipChat just added a plugin that will help you keep track of all your cloud files, no matter where you store them. With Cloudo, HipChat users can search for files in just about any cloud storage solution,
Slack Wins A Crunchie For Fastest Rising Startup
TechCrunch - Sarah Buhr
Slack is growing up and to the right and as such a rapid climber won a Crunchie last night for Fastest Rising Startup at TechCrunch’s 9th annual awards show. Slack also claims to have a more diverse workforce
Tribe Is A Nifty Walkie-Talkie App
TechCrunch - Romain Dillet
Meet Tribe, a new social app for iOS and Android that is going head-to-head against Taptalk, Snapchat and countless other social messaging apps. Tribe is an interesting take on messaging thanks to its
Messaging App Kik Begins Offering Branded GIFs
TechCrunch - Jon Russell
Brands, start your GIF engines. Kik, the chat app with over 275 million registered users, is giving companies the chance to augment their existing marketing efforts with branded GIF campaigns on its messaging
WhatsApp passes 1 billion monthly active users
VentureBeat - Ken Yeung
WhatsApp has joined a growing club of services that can now count having more than 1 billion monthly active users (that means 1 in 7 people in the world use it), Jan Koum, the head of the Facebook-owned
Asian Messaging App Firm Line Is Developing A Digital Butler Service
TechCrunch - Jon Russell
Line, the Asian messaging app company known for its cute animated stickers, is developing a digital butler service as it bids to boost its revenue with standalone apps and services. A source inside Line,
Automatically send your important emails to a private Slack channel with this integration
TNW - Ben Woods
There’s a certain appeal of handy tools that serve only one job, and when it comes to email, simplicity saves time. Despite Slack billing itself as a tool to put an end to email (spoiler: pretty sure is
Workato Chat Bot Brings Enterprise Workflow Into Slack
TechCrunch - Ron Miller
As we head into 2016, enterprise chat applications like Slack are suddenly a hot commodity, and if you’re inside chat a good portion of the day the argument goes, you should be able to access other work
Walkie-Talkie Voice Messaging App Roger Lands $1M Led by Social Capital
TechCrunch - Jon Russell
Roger, a walkie-talkie-style voice messaging app that launched in late 2015, has landed a $1 million seed round led by Social Capital. Voice messaging — known as push-to-talk — is nothing new. It originated
WhatsApp Ditches $1 Annual Fee, Tests Business Accounts But No Ads, Says CEO
TechCrunch - Ingrid Lunden
Today at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, the CEO of Facebook-owned WhatsApp made a couple of big announcements about how the messaging app plans to evolve to its next phase as it approaches 1 billion
THE MESSAGING APPS REPORT: Messaging apps are now bigger than social networks
Business Insider - Business Insider Intelligence
This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence,Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here. Users around the world
Skype Brings Group Video Calls To Mobile Devices
TechCrunch - Sarah Perez
In celebration of its 10-year anniversary, Skype announced today the launch of free group video calling on Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows 10 mobile devices. The feature has been available for a couple
Slack Appoints Company's First Chief Security Officer And Chief Architect
TechCrunch - Lucas Matney
Slack just slated a former Palantir exec for its new Chief Security Officer position and an Ex-Facebook employee, who worked on the company’s AI efforts, for its newly created role of Chief Architect.
Chat App Kakao Buys Majority Stake In Korea's Top Online Music Service For $1.5B
TechCrunch - Jon Russell
Kakao, South Korea’s dominant mobile messaging app that merged with Internet company Daum in a $3 billion deal in 2014, is pinning its international expansion hopes on music after it announced plans to