I kind'a ponder the new cloud storage (like one could get from Webroot Security Softwar 25 free gigs, for example) as in the old days businesses would take backups to bank vaults and other off site fireproof places which would keep from loss in a solarflare or some kind of EMT... but if we get lazy and then get hit by a electronic whipout.... dark ages for a while (they're even doing away with microfilming newspapers at libraries, it'll be like lost records of the fires of Alexandria... lost forever)...
....The Tokyo start-up Line, along with WeChat from China, has sought to pepper the messaging experience with an array of stickers, social games and even weather forecasts. Their sprawling online offerings make them huge distribution platforms for content, not just messaging services.
“It’s messaging, evolved,” said Takeshi Idezawa, Line’s chief operating offer.
Line has signed up 430 million users, almost 90 percent of them outside Japan. (It does not break out the number of active users.) WhatsApp said in February that it had 465 million monthly active users, while WeChat’s parent company, Tencent, said its number of monthly active users reached 355 million at the end 2013.
Such apps have been the target of frenzied deal-making. Snapchat spurned a multibillion-dollar offer from Facebook last year; Facebook eventually bought WhatsApp in February for $19 billion. The same month, Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant, acquired Viber for $900 million. Yahoo snapped up Blink this month for an undisclosed sum.
Analysts speculate that Line could go public or be an acquisition target for a company like SoftBank, one of Line’s advertising clients. Justin Lee, a technology analyst at BNP Paribas, values the service at as much as $15 billion — slightly less than the valuation fetched by Twitter when it made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange in November. Line declined to comment on the issue.
“Line’s localization efforts are paying off,” Mr. Lee wrote in a recent note, pointing to improving momentum, especially in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The American market is still largely up for grabs. Although WhatsApp dominates in Europe and Latin America, users in the United States have been slow to move to messaging apps from texting, leaving WhatsApp and Snapchat vying for footholds. Much of Asia has gravitated toward local players: Line in Japan, WeChat in China and KakaoTalk in South Korea.
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“I do think Line and WeChat have the capability to challenge WhatsApp,” said Neha Dharia, a senior analyst at Ovum, a technology advisory firm.
