We first approached WhatsApp to tell its story last May, when the messaging app had a mere 250 million active users. By December, when I spent three days with the team, there were 400 million; a few weeks later, when Facebook paid $19 billion (£11.3 billion) for the company, it was up to 450 million. What's the secret to such extraordinary growth?
As co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton tell it, the key has been focus and simplicity -- "No ads! No games! No gimmicks!", as a note on Koum's desk reminds him. What excites Facebook is the app's vast reach on the world's mobiles, especially in fast-developing markets such as India and Mexico. For Koum and Acton, who professed to me no interest in selling ("It goes against my personal integrity," Acton told me), this was clearly an offer they couldn't refuse. Can WhatsApp stay true to its goals within a company obsessed with gathering user data to target commercial messages?
It's going to be interesting to watch: this is an era when app users can break a business as quickly as they make it.
It's that time of the year when hundreds of coloured name-tags fill the glass wall of my Hanover Square office. On each is the name of an influencer in the Wired world -- entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, social-media superstars. As we've moved the Blu-Tack-enabled tags around amid heated debate, a fascinating and often surprising list has emerged. The result -- the 2014 Wired 100 -- is our definitive list of the digital world's power brokers.
For the 2014 list -- our fourth -- we've extended our reach across Europe, in recognition of the increasingly borderless nature of startup culture. For the first time we've quizzed our networks in Berlin and Barcelona, and not just Britain, to identify the people who matter. As always, the list is a snapshot in time. It's also bound to prompt debate about who we missed (the overall winner is revealed next month).
Here's the process, which began late last summer. We built up a database of more than 200 names, the people we determined to have the greatest awareness of the real decision-makers. We weighted the list to avoid over-representing UK names, and then our researcher Harry Lambert sent out hundreds of emails asking for suggestions of who should be in. More than 750 nominations later -- with reinforced Blu-Tack supplies by now -- we pushed up the list those names that we saw mentioned repeatedly. We then spent hours among the editorial team debating whether our own insights suggested that individuals should be higher or lower (with Wired and Condé Nast employees disqualified).
Were we right? Tell us: rants@wired.co.uk. We do love a good debate.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
