Multi-platform messaging service Imo.im has raised $13 million in second-round funding and updated its iOS and Android apps with a new feature called “Broadcasts.”

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Imo.im offers web, iPhone, iPad, and Android apps for communicating with friends and family. The new Broadcasts feature inside iOS and Android creates a channel where Imo.im users can meet new people who have similar interests and discuss those interests. Connections to new people are auto-generated based on your interests, location, and friends. Users can also share photos directly to the Broadcasts feed.

“Social discovery is an important feature,” Imo.im CEO Ralph Harik said in a statement. “We want users to find relevant and useful information, people, news, and other content that will make their lives better. imo broadcasts is a platform to achieve that.”

Imo.im claims that its apps have been downloaded more than 7 million times and that its 750,000 unique daily visitors send 50 million messages per day.

While those numbers might sound good, the messaging landscape is incredibly competitive now. Hot messaging service MessageMe just announced that it hit 5 million registered users just 75 days after launching. And then there’s WhatsApp, the hugely popular service that claims to be processing more than 20 billion messages per day.

The new funding was led by Imo.im co-founder Georges Harik, who is also known for being one of Google’s first 10 employees.

Photo via Imo.im

BlackBerry’s decision to bring BBM to Android and iOS was, in many senses, inevitable.

The world of mobile messaging apps has changed since BlackBerry introduced BBM in 2006. While the service still has a whole bunch of users (60 million of them, by BlackBerry’s latest count), those numbers are small compared to those of, say, WhatsApp, which claims it has 200 million active users, and China’s WeChat, which claims 190 million. There’s also Kik, which recently hit 50 million users.

Those numbers should speak for themselves: The smartphone world is moving away from BBM. But don’t tell that to BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins, who’s arguing that the opposite is true.

“Why are we doing this now? It’s a statement of confidence. The BlackBerry 10 platform is so strong and support has been so good that the time is right for BBM to become and independent messaging solution,” Heins said, possibly out of sorts with reality.

Source: giaomeng/Flickr

Services like WhatsApp are rapidly eroding BlackBerry’s command over the mobile messaging market.

BlackBerry’s strategy here is clear: Rather than cede the messaging app world to the likes of WhatsApp, the company is piggybacking off the marketshare success of iOS and Android, which have many more users than BlackBerry could ever hope to attract with BlackBerry 10 alone.

In fact, BlackBerry’s move isn’t very different from its decision to allow developers to port Android apps to its own smartphone platform. As an underdog, BlackBerry doesn’t have much to lose from taking these sorts of bold moves — even if they betray some of company’s current weaknesses.

Unlike the Android move, however, BlackBerry’s decision to bring BBM cross-platform comes with its own set of risks. Despite BlackBerry’s shrinking smartphone influence, BBM remains one of the central, most enticing things about owning a BlackBerry, and it’s possible that BlackBerry could cannibalize its BB10 ambitions while trying to increase its BBM user numbers.

Still, considering how successful BBM has been over the years, maybe we should give BlackBerry the benefit of the doubt. This, could after all, turn out to be one the savviest things the company ever done: While the initial set of Android and iOS BBM functionality will be limited to chat, BlackBerry also plans to adds features like screen sharing and video chat as time goes on.

Those are the sort of things that could give BlackBerry the edge over its newer competitors. While WhatsApp and company are attracting the users, it’s BlackBerry that has the experience. The question is whether experience alone will be enough.

Bringing BBM is both smart and inevitable – but it may also be happening a few years too late.

Originally available only on smartphone platforms like Android, iOS, and others, Viber has added a desktop client that seamlessly interoperates with its mobile apps and now enables video calling for the first time.

The result is a combination of just about every kind of communication you could wish for in a single client: mobile text-like messaging, audio, and video. Which means that not only is Viber competing with mobile messaging platforms like the massive WhatsApp, it’s also competing with existing VOIP giant Skype.

And it’s got a few advantages on both sides.

With its new desktop client, Viber can seamlessly transfer calls between mobile and laptop, handy if you need to get out of the office in the middle of a call. It seamlessly syncs contacts between devices, silently and continuously, and it shows your received and sent messages on all your Viber-equipped devices.

“People spend a substantial amount of time on their smartphones,” Viber CEO Talmon Marco said in a statement. “However, a lot of that usage takes place at home or in the office, where they have laptops or desktops close by. With Viber Desktop you always get to use the most convenient device. You can seamlessly switch devices while messaging and even transfer calls between your mobile and desktop.”

Skype has been the de-facto leader in desktop audio and video communication for years, but its days at the top may be numbered if relatively young upstart Viber continues to grow at its current pace.

The VOIP communications company with its roots in mobile announced today that it has hit the 200 million user mark — startlingly fast growth for the young company which had 140 million users just in December. That’s perhaps not surprising, as the company is growing at mobile speed — it was the ninth most-downloaded app on Google Play as of March, 2013.

In contrast, Skype hasn’t released user numbers in some time, but the company did say it had about 280 million users six months ago, and it has made no secret of its goal: one billion users. It’s worth noting, however, that Skype probably has some user acquisition surprises up its sleeve: It had the third most-downloaded app in Google Play in March, and it recently announced that its users were spending two billion minutes a day on Skype.

On the mobile side, messaging apps such as WhatsApp are killing it, too. WhatsApp was the second most-downloaded app on Google Play, just behind Facebook … and two spots up on Facebook Messenger.

Clearly, messaging is a very, very competitive market.

According to Viber, however, it is “more flexible” than existing VOIP apps (read: Skype) and more convenient than mobile-only platforms. And the company just added eight languages to reach 27 total, to help it expand globally.

photo credit: coreyokada via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

One of the more interesting, potentially troubling developments of the last few years is the rise of the social messaging app. Software like WhatsApp, Kik, and iMessage are all the rage nowadays, mostly because they’re cheaper than the alternative — our old, price-gouging friend, SMS.

That trend reached a major milestone last year. For the first time ever, smartphone users sent more messages via chat apps than they did with SMS — 19 billion versus 17.6 billion, according to analysis firm Informa. For carriers, that’s a worrying thing: If people are using software like WhatsApp, then they could be decreasing their reliance on SMS.

In theory, anyway. While social messaging app use is on the rise, so is SMS revenue: Informa expects that SMS will help carriers pull in $127 billion by 2016, up from $115 billion last year.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/booleansplit/8414735791/sizes/c/in/photostream/

The death of SMS could also mean the death of texting interoperability.

Still, the decline of SMS is, in many senses, inevitable. Social messaging apps are cheaper and more exciting than SMS, so it’s not surprising to see people flocking to them. Still, it’s worth considering what we lose in that transition away from SMS — specifically, interoperability.

SMS, while obviously a cash cow for carriers, is actually a great thing for the average phone owner. It’s a standard, and in our increasingly balkanized tech world, standards are a great thing to have. WhatsApp, on the other hand, is not a standard. It’s a proprietary platform, which makes it a lackluster option if you’re looking for a communications medium. (This is true especially for people who own feature phones, where social messaging apps don’t exist — but SMS does.)

With so much interest in messaging apps, it’s not hard to envision a time when it will be virtually impossible for you and your friends to text each other because you’re all using different platforms. Some people will be using iMessage and others will go with WhatsApp or Kik. It’ll be a texting Tower of Babel.

SMS clearly isn’t going to survive forever; it’s dated and, frankly, boring. But unless the successor to SMS addresses the question of standards and interoperability, it’s pretty likely we’re all still going to wind up defaulting back to plain old texting.

Photos: Giaomeng, Robert S. Donovan

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

WhatsApp is fifth in the app store for monthly revenue. Fifth on Google Play for downloads, and seventh on Google Play for revenue. And it’s the second-most-downloaded app on Google Play.

Impressive? Sure. But a billion dollars impressive? Hard to say.

That’s the question as rumors continue to swirl of a potential Google acquisition in the billion-dollar range. According to Digital Trends, the acquisition talk has been ongoing for a month, and WhatsApp execs want more. Perhaps, I’m thinking they should recall what happened last time Google offered a company billions of dollars.

Groupon, anyone?

WhatsApp is a cross-platform mobile messaging app: It sends messages to anyone on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone via an iMessage-like network. The messages use your data plan, not text, and require that both sender and receiver have WhatsApp, which, of course, makes the service inherently viral. Perhaps 300 million WhatsApp users send hundreds of billions of messages daily.

Industry insiders I’ve spoken to don’t put a ton of credence in the acquisition rumors. My question is: WhatsApp is hot — there’s no doubt about it — but is being one of the top revenue-producing apps on the app store or Google Play worth a billion dollars?

Google already has many messaging apps and services currently, such as Talk, Messenger, and Hangouts. Too many, in fact, which don’t integrate or connect. Based on some leaks and screenshots, Google appears to be working on a unification of its communications platforms, called Babel. Adding yet another SMS-style communications app to its stable wouldn’t appear to simplify the situation.

In addition, Google has shown an impressive capability to create great apps and distribute to enormous audiences.

In February, ComScore’s Digital Future report said that Google has five of the top six apps in America on any platform. Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube took positions two through six on a combined Google Play/iOS app store downloads list. And Google’s YouTube and Google Maps have been swapping top spot on the iOS-only download charts for months.

Which means that when and if Google decides to create and release a unified messaging platform for both iOS, Android, web, and Windows Phone, it could very well do so on its own and become very successful.

The thing that WhatsApp does have going for it, of course, is those hundreds of millions of users. That’s what Arjun Sethi, the founder of WhatsApp competitor MessageMe told VentureBeat today:

“At the end of the day, they’re valuable because they have a massive userbase.”

Others, like Hille Fuld, the senior evangelist for app monetization platform InnerActive, agree that a high valuation is warranted:

@johnkoetsier I’d say so, yes. Technology: check. Users: check. Retention: check. It’s a great success story.

— Hillel Fuld (@HilzFuld) April 8, 2013

The massive userbase worked, famously, for Instagram, which didn’t even have a revenue model when it was acquired by Facebook for what turned out to be a little under a billion dollars in post-IPO money. Instagram had about 30 million members at the time, which has now grown to over 100 million.

I just wonder if it’s billion-dollars valuable, when Google has shown the capability to grow its only solutions in-house.

When asked, a Google representative said only that “we don’t comment on rumors and speculations.”

Image credit: ShutterStock/Billion dollars

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This past month, Google Maps lost its position as the most downloaded app on Apple’s iOS store — to one of Google’s other apps, YouTube. And mobile messaging app WhatsApp continued its meteoric rise to messaging supremacy.

Those are just two of the quirks and insights in App Annie‘s February index of what’s happening in mobile apps, which has just been split from its game index to provide more insights into which companies and apps are doing well on Google Play and Apple’s iOS app store.

Here’s a selection of the most interesting insights:

Google still owns top spot on Apple’s app store

Source: App Annie

Top downloaded iOS apps

Months after YouTube and Google Maps were unceremoniously booted from Apple’s core iOS offerings, they continue to be the top downloaded apps on the App Store, swapping first and second position in the past two months.

Essentially, users are speaking with their fingers and telling Apple they want these apps.

Google Play is more diverse than the iOS app store

Source: App Annie

Top apps by platform

There’s more variety in the top apps on Google Play than on Apple’s iOS app store. While the top 10 apps on iOS are all from just five publishers, most notably Apple itself, the top 10 apps on Google Play are from eight publishers.

Aside from Apple, Google, and Facebook, there’s just one small company (Keyloft) on the iOS top 10 list and one individual (Jessie Tao). On Google Play, there’s WhatsApp, Adobe, Viber Media, and Outfit 7.

Gree and WhatsApp are completely killing it

Source: App Annie

Google Play top publishers by revenue (excluding games)

Gree, the mobile social gaming company, is tops in monthly revenue on Google Play. And WhatsApp jumped an astounding 93 spots on App Annie’s index to slot in at number seven.

That’s not all WhatsApp has done — it’s also fifth in the iOS app story by monthly revenue, fifth on Google Play by downloads (for both of its apps), and it took the second spot on Google Play’s most-downloaded list for its main WhatsApp Messenger app, which is also the sixth highest-grossing individual app on Google Play. By any measure, that’s impressive.

Other highlights?

TurboTax by Intuit jumped into the top 10 list on both iOS and Google Play as tax season is upon us, and Evernote nudged into the top 10 list on iOS, jumping 45 spots.

Find more details and info at App Annie’s index page.

photo credit: Sugar Daze via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Forget buying WhatsApp — Facebook wants to completely replace it.

Facebook is making its strongest effort yet to create its own texting empire with the latest update to Facebook Messenger for Android: Starting today, users will no longer need a Facebook account in order to use the app which Facebook hopes will get a lot more people to use it.

With the move, Facebook is clearly making a play at being the go-to app for not only messaging, but texting as a whole. The update’s appeal for users should be clear, too: Using Messenger now means freeing yourself from carriers’ SMS stranglehold, which is loosening by the day, anyway.

For Facebook, the move is also aimed at roping new users into its social ecosystem. After all, once users install Messenger, they’re not too far from creating a Facebook account as well.

The one big drawback here is rollout: Only India, Indonesia, Venezuela  Australia, and South Africa will get the feature at first, though it shouldn’t be long before it makes its way to other countries (and iOS, too).

While SMS and WhatsApp seem like the most obvious targets here, it’s RIM that should really be worried  While the BlackBerry Messenger is still number one in countries like Indonesia, it’s clear that Facebook is serious about stealing some of that interest in favor of its own messaging platform.

Whether that will happen is still unknown, but we do know this: SMS, your days are numbered.