
Alibaba Sinks $215 Million Into Messaging App Tango - amitkumar01
http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/03/20/exclusive-alibaba-sinks-250-million-into-messaging-app-tango-valuing-it-at-more-than-1-billion/
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madaxe_again
Is it just me, or are many of the recent acquisitions relatively senseless?

Facebook do search, google do social, amazon do streaming video, alibaba and
ebay do messaging - I really do not understand why all of these big players
seem to feel the need to increase their competitive surface area, and
therefore compromise on their core businesses.

We're going to end up with a bunch of corporate jacks-of-all-trades and
masters of none, to nobody's benefit, not even theirs.

I mean, from TFA, Alibaba regard themselves as "social media giants". They're
a marketplace. If that's not a profound misunderstanding of ones own business
model, I don't know what is.

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viraptor
I think the amazon one makes most sense actually. They already sell movies, so
they can do better recommendations than anyone else. They also have massive,
distributed infrastructure and uplinks without additional cost. They just
bought themselves the tech/licenses/customers via lovefilm in the UK.

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sudomal
They also own IMDb... a slight annoyance for me because it's integrated with
Amazon's streaming service rather than being a neutral platform for movies.

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rahimnathwani
"200 million registered users, 70 million of whom are active on a monthly
basis"

That sounds high to me. Does anyone know how they count MAU? I just launched
the app and enabled push notifications. Would I count as active this month
(and the month in which I joined) even though I've never made/received a call?

Which groups of people (communities or countries) use Tango more than
Viber/WeChat/Line/KakaoTalk?

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ZenoArrow
I can't speak for everyone who uses Tango, but I can tell you I used to use it
as an alternative to Skype when I was in a long distance relationship. Both
Tango and Skype offer video chat, neither was perfect, but Tango seemed to
handle connection slowdowns in a less disruptive way than Skype did. YMMV.

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not_paul_graham
I feel that "Sinks" isn't really conveying how Alibaba sees this investment
and perhaps does a disservice to the announcement.

Given that these investments (WhatsApp, WeChat, Tango, Viber) aren't acqui-
hires, there is still a relatively long term horizon over which these
investments will play out.

Perhaps if certain areas are completely blanketed in wi-fi/connectivity these
apps will make calling / messaging completely independent of cell phone
providers (such as ATT, Sprint, etc) which is a massive industry to displace.
But then again these providers might be the only ones providing wi-fi access.

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caligarn
I wouldn't include WeChat as an investment in the same way the others are.
Tencent developed WeChat (then called Weixin) themselves. Also, the
interesting about WeChat and its difference between the others you mentioned
is it functions more as a platform for mobile games and mobile commerce.
Tango, Viber (which finally got stickers a few months ago), and Whatsapp are
all exclusively about communication. No doubt all of them have looked at folks
like WeChat (from China), Line (from Japan), Zalo (from Vietnam) and KakaoTalk
(from South Korea) for profitable business models. All of the Asian chat apps
are headed in that direction.

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ZenoArrow
> Tango, Viber (which finally got stickers a few months ago), and Whatsapp are
> all exclusively about communication

That's not quite true. Tango has a limited selection of games too.

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nasalgoat
Isn't Tango a Jerry Yang project? That might explain why Alibaba would buy
into it.

