Gearing up to commence revenue operations, WhatsApp Co-founder, Brian Acton, briefed ways through which the messaging app can contribute to India’s vision for digital commerce. The vision was described in a meeting with India’s IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. Brian mentioned country’s significance in the global market and how the company plans to connect citizens further with their friends, family and communities.
Talking about the same, Acton said,
India is a very important country to us, and we’re proud to have 200 million people who use WhatsApp to connect with their friends, family and communities. We build every WhatsApp feature to be simple, reliable, and secure, and this vision is in line with what Digital India promises to achieve
According to the latter, presently, 200 million Indians engage with WhatsApp on a daily basis. Thus, the company is working towards building simple, reliable, and secure WhatsApp features as per the needs of the customers. The platform revamped its ‘Status’ feature enabling photos, videos and GIFs sharing. The company will focus on more innovative features that will line up with what Digital India promises to achieve.
Offering a glimpse of conversation with the Cofounder, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad tweeted,
Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp and a fine mind in the field of information technology met me today. I also appreciated the good role of platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp are playing in the field of digital empowerment.
The meeting was held during Acton’s one-day tour to India. He is here to deliver a tech-focused speech to students at IIT-Delhi, along with WhatsApp Head of Business, Neeraj Arora, later today. Earlier this month, the company announced plans of standing out as the commercial messaging app this year, especially for businesses.
The company now looks forward to collaborating with enterprises for monetising its platform, but it is still strictly against third-party ads. This has also led it to tweak its privacy guidelines and share data with its parent Facebook. The said decision has faced criticism in the form of petitions, and lawsuits but the company is strongly moving forwards with its monetization plan.
In the coming weeks, WhatsApp will pilot a set of tools that’ll enable users to communicate with businesses and organisations such as banks and airlines among others. The platform will function as an alternative platform for resolving customer grievances and issues. The company faces competition from other popular messaging apps including Hike, Snapchat and Viber, who’re already generating revenues.
