Telegram
Who created “Telegram”
The history of the creation of the popular cross-platform messenger began at the height of the struggle for free communication of citizens without supervision by controlling state bodies. The creator of “Telegram” Pavlo Durov, the famous founder and now former general director of the social network “VKontakte”, began searching for a means of communication, protected from the interference of special services, for personal communication with his brother. We had to think about creating the most secure messenger after a completely unfriendly visit by special forces in 2011. Awareness of the fact that any phone calls, messages in messengers or social networks cannot guarantee complete safety of communication, and became the impetus for starting the development of a new program.
With the joint efforts of the Durov brothers – Pavlo and Mykola – they created a project that allows you to protect personal data from any outside interference. Of course, the program was also worked on by many highly qualified specialists of the company Digital Fortress, owned by Pavel, and bright minds of our time hired on a competitive basis.
How did “Telegram” develop
Originally intended for personal use, it was decided to bring the experimental development to the masses in order to test drive the service under heavy loads. Pavel Durov’s idea to create a high-security application officially came to life on August 14, 2013. Then the first version of “Telegram” for devices on the iOS platform from Apple was born. Soon, the version of the messenger for Android was released, and already in November, “Telegram” was installed by about a million users.
In December 2013, Durov already offered $200,000 in bitcoins to anyone who could decipher his correspondence with his brother. A piece of encrypted text was published on the website, but no one deciphered it. After that, 300,000 dollars were offered to whoever could decipher the correspondence between the two bots Paul and Nick. No one has been able to read the messages encrypted by the application, which is why Telegram has become known as the most secure messenger out there.
Security issues
Telegram’s privacy policy remains unchanged. Durov, even while in the VC, was disagreeable to the authorities, acting as a central figure in a whirlwind of scandalous events. Liberal views and a principled position regarding intrusions into private life by the authorities forced Pavel to leave his own possessions, selling his share of the company’s assets.
With the development of “Telegram” in Russia, representatives of government departments became interested in the messenger and were not against getting access to user information, but Durov was adamant on this issue. The principle of operation of the program is to provide privacy to all account holders, and the transfer of data even to government structures is contrary to this position.
According to the security rating of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the secret messenger’s secret chats have a maximum score of 7, and the main encryption protocol – 4, because it is considered that the storage of keys on servers carries a potential threat of hacking. At the same time, Durov claims that MTProto is just as safe, and to verify this fact, anyone can try themselves as an attacker and try to hack the Telegram server, receiving a monetary reward. The keys are stored on different servers of the company, which are located in different countries, which is subject to its laws. For this reason, it is extremely problematic to force Durov to provide access to user information on legal grounds. And assembling a puzzle from keys as a result of hacking does not seem real at all.
Telegram is a white crow in the world of social media. Although the service is often included in the top ten most popular global communication platforms, its team has only about 30 people.
Telegram is often called a secure communication service. This is not entirely true: unlike the Signal or WhatsApp services, by default Telegram does not encode notifications and stores them on its servers. Full encryption is only possible if the secret chats feature is enabled – and it only works for one-to-one communication, not for groups or channels.
If the creators of Facebook met in a student dormitory, the shared history of the creators of Telegram began at an even earlier age. Pavlo Durov met some of his current colleagues at school, and his closest colleague, who is responsible for the technical part of the project, is Durov’s older brother Mykola. He is a brilliant mathematician, represented Russia at international competitions for schoolchildren in mathematics and informatics, and eventually became a two-time world champion in programming. In the fall of 2006, the VKontakte service appeared. At the time, the social network looked like one of the many Facebook clones popping up all over the world. In the first years of the social network, the Durov brothers continued to live with their parents – in an apartment in a Soviet block in the north of St. Petersburg.
In 2017, Telegram had 200 million registered users who sent 70 billion messages per day. Everything was paid for by Pavlo Durov, who was paid about $300 million for a share of VK. However, more money was needed. In June 2017, Durov tried to find a way out by releasing his cryptocurrency. TON, as the system was called, was supposed to be integrated into Telegram, and every user of the messenger could easily receive or send “grams” – units of virtual currency. And if the Bitcoin cryptocurrency system is limited to seven transactions per second, and Ethereum to fifteen, the planned capacity of TON was estimated at millions of transactions per second. This would turn the system into a “Visa or Mastercard equivalent for cryptocurrencies.” If these intentions were realized, the developers of Telegram would easily close the issue with the financing of the platform at the expense of payment commissions.
The preliminary sale of the cryptocurrency brought Durov and his colleagues $1.7 billion. However, the US Securities and Exchange Commission put a stop to the case. There, they called linking TON to the messenger a distribution of unregistered securities, saw a lot of opportunities for abuse in the operation of the system – and drew attention to the fact that almost all of the collected $1.7 billion went to support Telegram’s activities, and not to the development of cryptocurrency.
No ads! No games! No tricks!” — that’s the principle that helped a small messaging app beat such giants as iMessage, WeChat, Facebook Messenger*, Snapchat, LINE, Kik Messenger, Kakao-Talk and many others with a staff of 50 people.
WhatsApp’s path is not like the usual startup story where the founders had an idea that made them drop out of college, build a team, and get seed funding from a giant like Facebook* or Google. The concept of WhatsApp was not developed by students, but by people who were in their thirties and had a stable job in a well-known company.
The success story of WhatsApp founder Jan Kum
As a native of Ukraine, after immigrating to the USA, in 20 years he went from surviving on help to creating the world’s most popular mobile messenger, which was bought by Facebook for $19 billion.
Jan Kum chose a symbolic place to conclude the agreement to sell the WhatsApp messenger to the Facebook social network. Along with the service’s co-founder Brian Acton and Sequoia Capital venture partner Jim Getz, Koom set off for a nondescript non-residential white building a few blocks from WhatsApp’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. It used to be the office of the nonprofit organization North County Social Services, where the 37-year-old Kum once had to go to get food with social stamps. Now, three of WhatsApp’s key figures have put their signatures on the document in the historic building, approving a deal that immediately made the messenger’s founders billionaires. On February 19, 2014, the world’s largest social network paid a record $19 billion for a project with a modest profit of $20 million.
Kum, who, according to Forbes, owns 45% of WhatsApp – a share worth $6.8 billion, was born and raised in a small town near Kyiv.
In September 2007, the future creators of WhatsApp finally broke with their tired corporation Yahoo, where they had worked for 7 years, and took a year-long rehabilitation leave. They traveled through South America, played their favorite team frisbee and enjoyed their freedom. Both tried and failed at Facebook.
Kum quickly came up with the name WhatsApp, a catchy reference to the question “How are you?” (What’s up?) A week after his birthday, February 24, 2009, he founded WhatsApp Inc. in California. “He predicted everything,” says Fishman. The program itself was not yet ready at the time of the registration of the legal entity, Kum was adding code around the clock so that WhatsApp would learn to synchronize with any phone number around the world, for this he combed the Wikipedia page with a complete list of international prefixes. It took several months of routine work for the founder of the company to account for regional nuances.
“At some point, WhatsApp became a means of communication,” says Fishman. – We started using it to ask, “Hey, how are you?” And someone answered immediately.” Ian watched user statuses change on the screen of his Mac Mini in a townhouse in Santa Clara, and it became increasingly clear that he had inadvertently created a convenient messenger service. “I was fascinated by the idea of being in constant contact with someone who is thousands of kilometers away, using a device that you always carry with you,” says Kum.
In October, Brian attracted the first seed investment for the service: $250,000 was invested in the project by five of his acquaintances – former Yahoo employees. Acton received co-founder status and a stake in WhatsApp. He officially started working for the company on November 1, 2009 (until the transaction with Facebook, Kum and Acton kept a combined share of 60%, which is a very high indicator for technology startups. Ian, as the author of the idea and the only developer during the first nine months of the service’s existence, had The first employees also collectively controlled a relatively large share – about 1%. Officially, the company does not comment on these figures).
Through connections at Yahoo, the startup found office space — several rooms in a former warehouse on Evelyn Avenue in San Jose. The rest of the house was occupied by the Evernote service, which eventually “survived” the humble neighbors from its territory. In winter, WhatsApp employees wrapped themselves in warm blankets to keep warm, and they had to work at cheap tables from Ikea. The office did not even have a company logo of the service. They explained the directions like this: Find Evernote’s house. Go around it. Behind you will see a door without a sign. Knock,” Michael Donohue, one of the first developers of the BlackBerry version of WhatsApp, recalls his interview.
First investment and buyout of the company
In April 2011, WhatsApp Inc. accepted $8 million from the venture fund Sequoia Capital, but with a condition: no advertising in the application.
In 2013, when the messenger had already gathered a significant audience, Sequoia Capital allocated another $50 million.
A significant event took place during the year, which made the owners of the application billionaires. Facebook bought What’s App Inc. for $19 billion.
Joining Facebook
In 2012, when Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, the photo-sharing platform had 30 million users. Over the next three months, the Instagram audience grew to 80 million people.
The agreement between Facebook and WhatsApp allowed the messenger to receive 25 million new users per month.
The purchase of WhatsApp by Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has sparked rumors that the app will start spying on users, collecting their personal data. However, Jan Kum categorically rejected these suspicions, saying that “respect for privacy is coded in WhatsApp’s DNA” and people have nothing to worry about.
As for how the company earns, its first revenue-generating product was the Whatsapp Business API. It allows companies to integrate WhatsApp for Business APIs with their systems to communicate with customers through messages and automatically process their inquiries.
Viber
People are rarely interested in brand stories, unless they have the characteristics of being a “good fairy tale” or a “mysterious mystery”. The Viber application can be attributed to a brand that has an unusual and interesting history.
The idea of creating one of the most popular messengers in Ukraine became a romantic love story at a distance. Talmon Marko, an Israeli, lived in New York for some time and was dating a girl from Hong Kong. He wanted to find a simple and convenient way to communicate with his beloved by phone. The young man in love never found a solution, instead an idea appeared, which turned into a brilliant implementation. Talmon Marko with his friend Igor Magazinnik and Belarusian developers created the Viber application in 2010. The Danish name was chosen – “Vibe” is translated as “Chibis” – a bird that sings very melodiously. Later, they began to equate the singing of a bird with the high quality of communication provided by the program.
Since the creation of the messenger, there have been many changes and updates, new functions have been added. At each stage of improvement of the program, the company’s logo also changed. It all started with the opportunity to make free calls, so the initial Viber logo design included the brand name along with a phone icon. In order for the new program to stand out from others on the market, it was important to choose an original color that was not similar to other logos. Purple was a great decision.
When the company gave users the ability to make calls and send messages on Android, the logo was updated to reflect the new feature available. In 2013, Viber completely redesigned the program to support the new style of iOS 6 from Apple. The logo was also redesigned in a unique shape combining a square and a circle, which was called “squarcle”. Later there were changes from the parent company Rakuten, which merged the brands of its subsidiaries, and this year users saw another update – a new design that shows the company’s innovation, desire to be ahead of time and desire to take the brand to the next level.
The idea of creation
The idea to write a program for mobile platforms came to Israelis Talmon (Talmon) Mark and Ihor Magazinnik. It was these young men who created Viber. They met while serving in the army. IT education and love of gadgets led to the fact that mutual interests led to the birth of a friendship, and then a business partnership.
The story of the future successful business began with the fact that later friends traveled to different continents and spent decent sums on international conversations. They used Skype and various VoIP programs (voice and video telephony using computer networks).
It turned out that there is no simple, affordable and free product for smartphone owners. It was necessary to invent a utility for mobile devices ourselves so that users did not have to first add each other to contact lists for calls and messages.
Development
From the very beginning, the development was carried out near Belarus. They did it for reasons of economy. The prices of American, Chinese, or even Indian specialists would be an order of magnitude higher. Among the programmers who worked on the project, one can mention the name of Belarusian Serhiy Honcharyk.
A small group of IT experts worked on the first experimental version. It took 2 months to create. A year later, the final version was placed in the Israeli AppStore.
Stages of development
- On December 2, 2010, the program was launched on the iPhone. Initially, it was written specifically for the operating system of these devices.
- In 2011 – 2012 – release of the version for Android.
- In May 2012 – for BlackBerry, Bada and Windows Phone.
- In 2013, a desktop version for PCs on Windows and OS X was launched.
- Free video chats appeared in 2014 (before that – only in the computer version)
- In 2015, the money transfer procedure was established.
- In 2016, the function of forwarding files of various formats was added.
- Since August 11, 2017, the problem of saving all settings and correspondence when changing the number has been solved.
- In 2018, the possibility of online shopping was launched in the USA and Great Britain
Who is the owner?
Let’s talk more about those who created the program and developed it, who owns Viber now.
The tandem of Mazinnik and Talmon
Not much is known about Talmon Mark’s biography. In the English version of Wikipedia, it is written that he was born in Tel Aviv, received a degree in IT and management from Tel Aviv University. In the army, he held the position of IT director of the Central Command of the Israel Defense Forces. Then he moved to the USA, where he spent most of his adult life.
From 1997 to 2004 Marko was the co-founder and president of the Israeli ISP Expand Networks. In 1998, she opened a company that developed the file-sharing network iMesh, until 2010 she was its president. In 2010, he founded Viber together with Igor Magazinnik, where he was the CEO until 2014.
Ihor Magazinnik was born in the USSR, in the city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). In 1991, at the age of 16, he moved with his parents to Israel. Received an IT education at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and an MBA degree (Master of Management) at the Open University. He served in the Israel Defense Forces.
Helped Talmon Marko to found his first startup – iMesh file exchange, then Viber. Lives and works in several countries, has Israeli and Belarusian citizenship.
Financial nuances
The amount of investments was at least 20 million dollars, the exact share of each of the founders is unknown. Part of the shares belonged to the Marco family, the rest was distributed between the Shabtai family and several American investors.
The company was registered as a resident of the Belarusian High-Tech Park. This gave great tax benefits and helped to do without borrowing funds.
Since February 2014, the controlling block of shares has been owned by a holding from Japan, the owner of which is businessman Hiroshi Mikitani. Prior to this agreement, there were rumors that the company was going to be sold to an Asian firm for $400 million.
Magazinnik and Marko managed the organization from the day it was founded until 2015, then they left to work on a project in another region.
About Viber developers
Like many products, Viber, in the form in which it is presented now, did not come immediately. It’s a long story of evolution, failures and bug fixes.
- The messenger first appeared on the market in 2010 and worked only on the iOS platform.
- Two years later, versions for such systems as Android and Windows Phone were released.
- Another year, a service was introduced into the messenger that allows you to make calls to home phones.
- In January 2014, development company Viber was sold to Rakuten for more than $900 million.
- In 2015, Viber broke Skype’s polarity record, surpassing it with a target of one hundred million people.
- To date, Viber still holds a high position and continues to develop, having released a version for desktop computers.
copyright / intellectual property / Telegram / Viber / WhatsApp
