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 right now.
We’ve suspected for some time now that a messaging app would be the next billion dollar acquisition deal following Facebook’s Instagram buy-out last year. 2012 was the year for photo-sharing apps, which you know everything about by now. So, 2013 has been dominating by the messaging app-meets social network market.
There are rumors that Google Babble will combine Google’s disparate communication services under one roof, but the platform still needs to do something to innovate in this space; mobile messaging has been taken over by smaller apps and Facebook has made a major push as well. Google hasn’t given an answer to this competition.
Even Google Product Manager Nikhyl Singhal confessed to GigaOM in June of last year that “We have done an incredibly poor job of servicing our users here.” Messaging is a huge, gaping hole in Google’s mobile strategy.