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Is Facebook’s $19B bid for WhatsApp a sign of a dot-com bubble? | Raleigh News & Observer

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SciTech

Is Facebook’s $19B bid for WhatsApp a sign of a dot-com bubble?

Matthew Fortner - mfortner@newsobserver.com

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February 20, 2014 06:20 AM

Facebook made a bold, maybe risky move to buy the popular messaging service WhatsApp. The $19 billion acquisition is Facebook’s largest and it eclipses any other by Apple, Google or Microsoft.

Functionally, WhatsApp doesn’t bring anything new to the social network. Facebook has already it’s own free messaging client Facebook Messenger. WhatsApp does bring 450 million users split between a free service and a $1 per year paid subscription.

It doesn’t take a lot of math to raise eyebrows and investors reacted nervously pushing the Facebook’s share prices down.

Maybe Facebook snapped up WhatsApp to keep it out of the hands of it’s competitors.

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Whether it is a good move or not won't unfold until later, but there is a lot of chatter that we are seeing a dot-com bubble 2.0.

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