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| Co Founder of WhatsApp Jan Koum |
WhatsApp, the globally popular texting app that Facebook just acquired for a whopping $19 billion, is adding phone calls to its list of services.
At the Mobile World
Congress in Barcelona, Spain, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said the voice service will
be free and begin rolling out to users within the next few months.
Currently, WhatsApp
offers unlimited text and voice-mail messages between users. Its service is
free for the first year, then costs 99 cents annually.
"We want to make
sure people always have the ability to stay in touch with their friends and
loved ones really affordably," Koum said in a speech at Mobile World Congress.
As reported by
multiple news outlets, Koum also announced that WhatsApp now has 465 million
monthly users and 330 million daily users. The latter is 15 million more than
what was made public last week when Facebook announced the purchase.
Voice service will
come first to Apple devices and Google's Android operating system, with Windows
phones and Blackberry to follow.
The move puts WhatsApp
in competition not only with other messaging apps that offer voice but chat
tools such as Skype and even mobile carriers. WhatsApp's unlimited texting has already helped
establish it in places where smartphones and fancy data plans are less common.
It has 40 million
users in India and another 38 million in Brazil, two countries highly coveted
by tech companies such as Facebook for their large populations and emerging
mobile customer base. WhatsApp hasn't released figures for the United States, where it is less
popular.
Last week, Facebook
shocked the business world when it announced it was buying WhatsApp for up to
$19 billion in cash and stock -- by far the social network's largest
acquisition to date.
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