Those of you who have been following my DigiShort postings on LinkedIn will know that I’ve been stumped by Facebook’s recent $19B purchase of WhatsApp. Even to keep the technology/brand out of the hands of Google it seems an insane price to pay. And then we see a survey of US High School Users such as this one which says that this target segment not only use Facebook Messenger more than WhatsApp but that the latter doesn’t even beat SnapChat which at least is differentiated by its own take on privacy issues. Any ideas to help me understand this gratefully received…

As an Internet Entrepreneur, the advent of Amazon Web Services was like a magic
operational boost for my web businesses. The team could use our own software
licenses to run things in the Cloud or rent software and expandable space as
needs dictated. As an eBusiness consultant I often mention this to medium or
large companies and they ‘Um and Ah’ about security and other bollocks. I
wondered would AWS ever crack the Enterprise market? Well, with a $600M+
contract (says today's FT) with the Sneaky Beakies, crack it they have! And look
what the CIA is saying about AWS's flexibility…

 I often wonder if it is obligatory that if you start and IPO a digital business raising billions of bucks you should have to spend money on acquiring unprofitable businesses where the synergies are unclear and it seems entirely within the capacity of your own technical team to build the added functionality yourself. Twitter chasing Spotify and Pandora and other music streamers is a case in point. Spotify recently reached 10m subscribers. Whoopee! Twitter has several hundred million users! Why spend billions to buy them? Is it sheer laziness on the part of management or activity for activities sake? I mean Google built their own version - Google Play. Twitter should too.