Tag: mobile

WhatsApp passes 800,000,000 active users

whatsapp-numbers

TechCrunch is reporting on WhatsApp passing the 800,000,000 active users mark.  Almost exactly a year ago, it was at 500 million active users.  I don’t care much about WhatsApp’s business or service, but from the technical point of view this is quite significant.  That’s almost a million active users acquired every day for the last year.  That’d be a challenge for anyone to handle.  Thinking that this growth might have been not too linear gives me digital goose bumps.

I haven’t seen anything recent describing their infrastructure, but this article from last year provides a starting point for the imagination:  Erland + FreeBSD + 550 servers, with preference for larger box with loads of RAM and cores.  I’m sure that have grown quite a bit in a year too.

Evernote Hello vs. Facebook Hello

 

facebook hello

Facebook is launching a new app – Hello:

Billions of calls are made everyday on mobile phones and people often have very little information about who’s calling them. Today we are starting to test Hello, a new app built by the Messenger team. Hello connects with Facebook so you can see who’s calling, block unwanted calls and search for people and places.

I seem to remember another app with the same name and somewhat related functionality – Hello from Evernote.  Apparently, this one was discontinued earlier this year.  Surprising, given that some people called it the best business card scanner app.

evernote hello

The functionality of the two apps is not exactly the same but similar enough.  Given how little time passed between the “death” of one and “birth” of another, I wonder if this is a coincidence or part of a greater plan.