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…

 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.

17Apr14 0845hrs Weibo Watch. The Sino micro-blogging site IPOs today in a volatile market:

Is it possible for corporations to have too much cash? Of course it is. A sure sign of this is when they pay silly money for acquisitions. As I posted on the day, WhatsApp at $19B is a silly money acquisition for FaceBook when they have their own far superior Messenger App. It can be used across multiple devices with one login (i.e. it is not phone number dependent so the same messages on your iPad can be viewed your Android  phone). Now some bright spark at Facebook has realised this and the company is forcing all Facebook Users to download it if they want to send private messages. Go Figure!