The Facebook acquisition of WhatsApp may seem excessive, and some insiders echo this sentiment. Reviewing the acquisition may present a different perspective, and the $19 billion price may not seem excessive after all.

WhatsApp users fit the demographic mix of customers that Facebook may be searching for. Facebook enthusiasts display a preference for mobile messaging that works as a social network as well.

You can send messages to a single recipient or to many recipients with WhatsApp. 600 million photos are sent daily with WhatsApp, and this is greater than the number of photos that are uploaded to Facebook each day. 62 percent of Facebook users are active each day, but WhatsApp reports daily activity of 70 percent.
Facebook wants to grow its base, and the WhatsApp purchase mirrors the Instagram acquisition of 2012. Facebook has lost some of its younger customers, but WhatsApp may help them recapture the teen and tween mobile messaging market.

Comedians have found a lot of material in the offices of corporate Americans. Even the workers themselves understand how dreary it can be to spend their days at work in a cubicle. According to one study in 2005, American corporate employees waste more than twenty five percent of their eight hour workday, and their lunch break is not included in this figure. While underachievers may take comfort in this statistic, the rest of us are wondering where all that time goes.

The study was a joint effort by AOL and Salary.com, based in their findings after polling more than ten thousand employees in America. The participators confessed that they wasted their time and their employer's money using the Internet for personal reasons, socializing, conducting personal business, daydreaming, and doing personal errands.

Ride-hailing companies based on mobile applications have immediately become popular since they were introduced. However, the lack of government regulation is preventing this new industry from truly taking off the ground.

Key players are now pushing for the fast-tracking of regulations given the rising demand and potential for taxes. Nevada is leading the way with transport regulators voting in favor of asking the governor for emergency status.

Siri and Google Now have attempted to answer questions that users have with artificial intelligence but have fallen short of answering the more difficult and complex questions. Now a demo has surfaced of a product called Hound from SoundHound that is better than others at breaking apart complex questions and giving answers to sections of a question, providing a more thorough answer.

Tim Schofield has posted a review of this brand new voice assistant app on Youtube, and you should see the video. The application is quick and more accurate than other applications that have tried to provide this service. From the demonstration, Hound is far ahead of the competition answering difficult and multi-part questions. Currently in Beta, the application has a few bugs and you need to be invited to try it out.

This weeks OpenStack Summit in Vancouver showcased some of the ways large corporations and newer startups have used the OpenStack framework to build some cool applications. Companies like HP, IBM, and Redhat along with SwiftStack and Bluebox were on-hand at the conference to show developers what is new in cloud computing. We all know that OpenStack has been one of the most popular open source development projects ever. And companies like Rackspace use the framework to host applications at their data centers.

App developers will be getting something new from Microsoft when the company releases Windows 10 according to news coming out of Build 2015, the Microsoft developers conference. The operating system designed to work on PCs, Phones, and Tablets, will be open to almost all developers including some that worked on Android and iOS when it is released later this year. The Microsoft store currently contains near 585,000 apps which is about half of what Google and Apple offer in their stores. So new apps are greatly needed to keep their products useful and competitive.

Google announced that it would be rolling out a Mobile Friendly Update this week based on the mobile qualities of a website. Early Wednesday morning, there was not much change in the search results of many sites leading some to wonder if a change had been made at all. Google has stated that the roll-out will be a one week process, so changes might still be coming. Companies such as Search Metrics and SEOClarity were not able to pick any winners or losers as they did not see any significant change in the search results from Google.

Sites such as WikiPedia.org might see better results within mobile searches as their site is fairly friendly to mobile devices. Websites should not see any change in ranking when searching from a desktop as this update only affects mobile searching. Google started informing webmasters in their webmaster tools dashboard if their site had mobile issues. But no action was taken against those sites until this week and the announcement from Google.

Microsoft and Yahoo are going to continue their 2009 partnership in order to increase Yahoo search potential and add value for its advertisers.

The two companies have a goal to make their partnership even stronger.  They want to make the search engine experience even better over various platforms.  They also want to add value for their advertisers and make the platform stronger for other partners that are involved.

The Microsoft and Yahoo partnership began back in 2009 when the two CEOs of the companies Carol Bartz and Steve Ballmer made it official.  The companies want to compete with Google and in order to do so, they collaborated with a plan in which Yahoo would get more into sales while displaying Microsoft's search tools.  This would happen over a 10 year period.

Microsoft is looking to increase the number of autistic workers employed at the large technology company. Hiring managers at Microsoft recently voiced their opinion that autistic employees offer many skills that are need in the technology field including the ability to recall data, think at deep levels and perform well writing code. There are many different levels of autism on the spectrum with some appearing normal in all situations.

American Commitment has put together a petition of over 500,000 Americans who want the FCC to overturn the recent Net Neutrality decision. The group American Commitment does get some funding from the Koch Brothers. The petitions went to two representatives and one Senator, based open the location of the person who signed the petition. The group feels the recent mid-term elections was a clear sign that the country wants smaller government, and the FCC action goes in the complete wrong direction, expanding the role of the federal government.