Google in talks to buy WhatsApp for $1 bn, says report

WhatsApp is consistently the No.1 paid app in more than 100 countries

Internet giant Google is planning to acquire mobile application company WhatsApp, according to a report by Digital Trends. The report said: “Messaging app WhatsApp is in the negotiating phase over prices with Google in what could be Google’s next billion dollar-acquisition, according to an inside source.”

“While the deal started four or five weeks ago, we’ve been told that WhatsApp is playing hardball and jockeying for a higher acquisition price, which currently is close to $1 billion,” it added.

Previously, there were reports that Facebook was planning to buy Whatsapp.  Earlier in 2012, Facebook had acquired photo-sharing app Instagram for a billion dollars. There are rumours that Google was working on Babble — a service meant to unify more services and combine Google’s all communication services under one roof.

The report also said that Google “can’t afford the time to rebrand and rebuild a competitive messaging app at the risk of entering the game too late or, it needs to be able to work off the platform WhatsApp has already established and use this technology (and the user base) to fill out the purported Babble.”

WhatsApp is consistently the number one paid app in more than 100 countries with a user base size spread throughout more than 100 countries and 750 mobile networks. According to the company, on New Years Eve 2012, WhatsApp saw a record 18 billion messages processed in a day.

Apps like WeChat, Nimbuzz, Tango, KakaoTalk, and WhatsApp, are making a splash on the mobile and as social apps in record time and these applications have even had a direct hand in declining SMS usage around the world.