WhatsApp, the popular cross platform smartphone chat app, has been in talks to be acquired by Facebook, according to a report in  TechCrunch. Facebook has been aggressively focusing on its mobile efforts especially after it stocks took a drubbing down. More than 750 carriers have WhatsApp users spanning across a multitude of mobile platforms like S40, Android, S60, iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

 

“Whatsapp also has a footprint that fits with Facebook’s focus on international/emerging markets: The messaging app has users in over a hundred countries covering 750 mobile networks, on the iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia S40, Symbian and Windows Phone platforms.

The startup also has demonstrable scale. We’ve heard the company has something like 100 million (!!!) daily active users globally and these users utilize Whatsapp to send messages to family and friends. Every minute a user spends on Whatsapp is likely at the expense of a minute spent on Facebook.

At the end of October 2011, the last time Whatsapp updated its usage numbers, it announced that it was serving 1 billion messages per day — “Just how much is 1 billion messages? That is 41,666,667 messages an hour, 694,444 messages a minute, and 11,574 messages a second,” the company wrote then. The app, which is built on Erlang, has the potential and ambition to grow more and wants to provide “a great mobile messaging system for a global market, regardless of your handset.”