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Saturday, February 22, 2014

Why Facebook Just Paid $19 Billion for a Messaging App

Why Facebook Just Paid $19 Billion for a Messaging App

MEMPHIS TN (IFS) -- As you may or may not know, I am no friend of Facebook.  I have a running Freud with them that will never go away.  However, I must bend with the purchase of this application.  It totally bypasses the telephone company when it comes to texting, sending videos and pictures and in the future, it will make telephone calls without going through the telephone system.  This is a major find.  All ready over 1 billion apps are in use worldwide.-khs
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Ariel Zambelich / WIRED
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Ariel Zambelich / WIRED

Facebook is buying WhatsApp, agreeing to pay $19 billion in cash and stock for the popular smartphone messaging service.

Revealed today in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the deal is Facebook’s largest acquisition to date, but it’s just the sort of move the company was expected to make. The social networking giant has been quietly exploring the use of WhatsApp and other messaging services popular among teens, a demographic where Facebook’s influence has begun to wane. Recently, the company failed in its efforts to acquire another of these teen-centric services, SnapChat, and it has now filled the gap with WhatsApp.
On a recent earnings call, Facebook admitted that teens are spending less time on its service, and a tool like WhatsApp is a way of pushing this trend in the other direction. Facebook offers its own messaging services for smartphones — including a SnapChat clone — but WhatsApp gives it instant access to a new and relatively large group of youngsters who are actively messaging each other on a daily basis. According to Facebook, the service now spans 450 million monthly users, and about 70 percent of those are active on any given day.

The deal is Facebook’s largest acquisition to date, but it’s just the sort of move the company was expected to make.
 
According to the SEC filing, Mark Zuckerberg and company will acquire all outstanding stock and options in WhatsApp for about $4 billion in cash and 183 million Facebook shares, which are currently worth about $12 billion. The deal also includes an additional $3 billion in stock that will go to the founders and employees of WhatsApp. Jan Koum, the WhatsApp co-founder and CEO, will join the Facebook board.

“WhatsApp is on a path to connect 1 billion people. The services that reach that milestone are all incredibly valuable,” read a statement from Zuckerberg. “I’ve known Jan for a long time and I’m excited to partner with him and his team to make the world more open and connected.”

Facebook is by far the world’s most popular social network, with over 1.2 billion users worldwide. But if Zuckerberg and crew are to retain their hold on the world — and continue to expand its efforts to serve ads to all those people — they must continue to evolve with the ever-changing tastes of the teenage set. For this reason, the company won’t fold WhatsApp into its existing service.

As it has done with the photo-sharing site Instagram — another recent purchase — Facebook will continue to operate WhatsApp as a largely standalone service, under the existing WhatsApp name. That’s what the company said in its press release, but more importantly, it’s the best way to retain the young set of users the company has just paid so much for.

In many ways, WhatsApp’s breed of smartphone messaging is “the killer app,” something that can capture the attention of users no matter where they are or what else they’re doing. And ultimately, services like this can be great place to serve ads. For Facebook, the trick is to find subtle yet effective ways of dovetailing myriad smartphone apps with its larger service, of eventually bringing teens and others into the larger fold.
It’s a trick the company must learn well. Increasingly, the world is moving away from sites like Facebook.com and towards a wide range of applications loaded onto mobile phones. Clearly, Facebook recognizes that its future lies with tools like WhatsApp. Now, the task is to make it happen.
Cade Metz
Cade Metz is the editor of Wired Enterprise. Got a NEWS TIP related to this story -- or to anything else in the world of big tech? Please e-mail him: cade_metz at wired.com.
Read more by Cade Metz
Follow @cademetz on Twitter.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

What ever happened to G. E. Kincaid? Smithsonian Denies they ever knew him

Tag Archives: G.E. Kincaid

Much of the criticism leveled at this story makes reference to the barely researched assumption that this was a one time appearance of an "Inquirer" type yellow journalism headline story. As I have stated in this web site, the story was very unique in an otherwise pretty boring everyday mainstream Phoenix paper that was NOT even remotely prone to such "Inquirer" type sensationalism. Tyler Pauley has the well deserved credit for discovering what the debunkers wish never existed, and that is a previous article mentioning a casual reference to G. E. Kincaid arriving in Yuma. The article predates the April 5th date and was published March 12th 1909. Here is the article as I printed and scanned it directly from the microfilms of the Arizona Gazette of 1909. I have also typed the article so it can be more clearly read. As I have said, this story is much more mysterious, involved and complicated than it's religious debunkers would like you to believe. It cannot be neatly labeled a "hoax" or "fraud". Once one leaves the debunker's realm of shoddy research and snap judgments based on emotion, rather than hard and serious objective research, it becomes evident that there is much more to this story than meets a the eye of a casual skim reading of the 1909 article. - Jack Andrews copyright 2001 may be only used in it's entirety with this notice clearly visible.

The Mummies of the Grand Canyon

What if everything we know about American history is wrong? What if the ancients came here long before Columbus and Jamestown? And what if they left behind clues, so that we could one day learn the true history of humanity?
In 1909, two men stumbled upon the missing link between the ancient world and our own. Professor S.A. Jordan and explorer G.E. Kincaid (sometimes spelled Kinkaid) discovered a cave system in the Grand Canyon that was home to much more than stalagmites and bats. Actually, a tunnel-system is a better description than that of a cave. What the two men found was a dug-out maze of geometrically perfect tunnels filled with ancient Egyptian and Indian artifacts, including mummies. A Buddhist shrine with plainly Egyptian hieroglyphs, boomerangs, and distinct metal objects were also among the finds. How could this be? Why have we never heard of this?
Jordan and Kincaid were both funded by the Smithsonian, our national museum. ThePhoenix Gazette published their report as a front-page story on April 5th, 1909. This raised a few eyebrows, but never gained the national media’s attention. What amounts to the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century, possibly even the greatest ever, was promptly swept under the rug.
If you ask the Smithsonian about this find, they’ll swiftly deny its validity and say they don’t know of a Professor Jordan or a G.E. Kincaid. The relics they brought back are nowhere to be found, and the section of the Grand Canyon purported to hold this tunnel system is strictly off limits. With conventional research, the trail goes cold.
We’re left with two possibilities. Either the story is an elaborate, highly detailed hoax put on by two fame-hungry explorers in cahoots with a local newspaper, or the biggest evidence of pre-historical civilization was deliberately covered up.
The hoax theory doesn’t hold much water. Newspapers used to exist to educate the public, not to sensationalize current events, like they do now. If the journalist had indeed created this whole scenario from his own vivid imagination, wouldn’t he have found some national news source to pick it up? If he was in it for fame, he sure didn’t put much effort into pitching the story. And what about Jordan and Kincaid being fictional characters? Though the Smithsonian will say, “Never heard of ‘em,” if you dig deep enough, you can findrecords that contain their names. After the news-story was published, however, both men seem to vanish into thin air. Is this because they never existed or because they’d seen too much?
The cover-up theory suggests that The Smithsonian and other “powers-that-be” have a vested interest in making sure that anything that disproves conventional history, especially a discovery of this magnitude, is suppressed before it shatters the status quo, the perceived reality. It runs much deeper than some grumpy old historians having to admit that they were wrong. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the ancients were privy to an advanced technology, and the monuments and relics they put away for safe-keeping are clues to this mystery. The fossil-fuel and electricity magnates would be dethroned if humankind had access to all the pieces of the puzzle. Other than our taxdollars, who do you think funds the Smithsonian?
The people we refer to as Native Americans have many legends that describe pre-Columbian visitation form advanced civilizations. The Hopi legends describe what Jordan and Kincaid found, almost exactly. These Native Americans did not mummify their dead, but numerous mummies have been unearthed in North America. They’ll tell you that Egyptians, Indians, and other cultures had a great influence on their own. Maybe it’s time we listen.
The evidence for the Grand Canyon Mummies and other claims can be found everywhere…except for a history book.
Seek and you will find.

Friday, February 7, 2014

America's Most Epic Submarines Surfaces Through Thick Arctic Ice

This Is What It Looks Like When One Of America's Most Epic Submarines Surfaces Through Thick Arctic Ice


The submarine surfacing in the picture is the USS North Dakota - the second warship to bear that name.
In the picture, the USS North Dakota is breaking through three feet of solid ice in the Arctic Ocean in order to surface. Some member of the crew, on the far left, disembarked the submarine to grab a quick breather.
It is a nuclear powered vessel, and can carry up to 134 officers and men.


Over the weekend, the U.S. Navy christened its newest nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, the USS North Dakota, during a ceremony in Groton, Conn.
The North Dakota is the newest Virgina-class submarine and the first of the Block III submarines, which is the most recent upgrade. 
The sub has the ability to launch cruise missiles, deliver special operations commandos, and conduct critical surveillance operations over a wide area.
That's why the Navy is producing Virginia-class submarines at a rate of two per year, adding to the 11 currently in the fleet. They may not carry nuclear missiles like the larger Ohio-class submarines, but these are seen as the future.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-navys-expanding-submarine-program-2013-11?op=1#ixzz2sfD2E2Ag