India is a huge market for WhatsApp, says 'Disco Dancer'-loving co-founder Jan ... - Economic Times ~ Electronic Gadgets

BARCELONA: Growing up in the former Soviet Union, Jan Koum watched a lot of Bollywood. The Communist leadership deemed it to be healthy entertainment unlike the decadent trash churned out by the West. That's how the cofounder of WhatsApp had the surprising privilege of seeing Disco Dancer — and not just once or twice. "I grew up watching Indian movies as a kid in Russia. I am quite familiar with Bollywood," said the man who's just sold his company for $19 billion to Facebook. "I grew up watching Disco Dancer. I watched it some 20 times as a kid."

For those who don't remember, this was a worldwide smash hit starring Mithun Chakraborty that was released in 1982, featuring music by Bappi Lahiri and a guitar electrified with 5,000 volts that's used as a murder weapon.

It might seem cheesy to draw a parallel with the rags-to-glory story of the character played by Chakraborty (Anil aka 'Jimmy') and that of the lad from Ukraine who moved to California in 1992 at the age of 16 and who worked as a cleaner at a grocery store while his mother did babysitting jobs to make ends meet.

Still, the analogy is inescapable. Apart from this cultural connection, India is now important for other reasons — hard commercial reasons. "India is important... we want all smartphone users (in India) to be on WhatsApp," Koum said in an exclusive interview to ET at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "Then if that number is a billion, then it's a billion. Currently, (it's) over 40 million. So we still have some way to go before we hit a billion." That makes sense given the nature of the app, which thrives on ever-increasing subscriber numbers. And since China already has WeChat and QQ, India is the monster market for WhatsApp.

WhatsApp currently has 465 million monthly active users and 330 million daily ones across the globe. Koum is clear that the big sale to Facebook doesn't mean he gets to sit back and relax. "I have work to do. I get on a plane and have to go back to the office and work. We still have a lot of work to do. We still have a lot of people who will get onto smartphones, we still have a lot of bugs to fix and improvements to make. Our mission is still not done," said Koum, who was celebrating two landmarks on the day of the interview, February 24 -- his 38th birthday and the fifth anniversary of WhatsApp's incorporation.

Life for him, fellow co-founder Brian Acton and the other 50 or so people at WhatsApp will get even more hectic soon with the plan to roll out voice services, something that has the potential to cause massive disruption in the telecom market.

Voice will be added to the app, initially on iPhone and Android, in the second quarter of the year, with BlackBerry and Windows Phone to be updated later. "We will make sure voice works just as well. I understand that there are bandwidth constraints, network constraints, but we will take the same approach to voice that we took to (messaging) five years ago, which is focus on quality, simplicity, performance so that it's the world standard for voice just as (for) messaging it's the world standard," Koum said.

He's confident that the company has the best technology in messaging and voice and that this will allow it to build an even a better product than what's already in the market. He wants to replicate the success of messaging in voice, though the revenue model may be slightly different. "We haven't finalised it internally yet... we might do something different in terms of implementation but fundamentally it will be very similar," he said.

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