The expectation was maximum yesterday before the appearance of Mark Zukerberg on the stage of the Mobile World Congress , and it certainly did not disappoint. The founder of Facebook spoke of Whatasapp, of privacy but, above all, of his vital objective right now: to connect the planet.
Responding to the questions that the journalist David Kirkpatrick was asking him, Zuckerberg had to begin his speech by convincing the public that the 19 million dollars spent on the purchase of WhatsApp was a good investment : “I think it is a good acquisition, it fits perfectly in the Facebook strategy and that we have paid the value that the company really has. ” Zuckerberg argued his purchase stating that 70% of WhatsApp users use the app on a daily basis, which makes it one of the most successful applications in the world, also based on communication, which is his goal right now.
Faced with questions from the attendees about whether WhatsApp would change its privacy system, Zuckerberg convinced the audience by noting that the application would not change at all and that the service will maintain the same privacy policy that it had maintained until now.
However, Zuckerberg’s speech was all the time about the same fixation, almost sickly: global connectivity. In fact, two out of every three million human beings are not yet connected . “Maybe at the end of this decade there will be 1 million more people connected. I think we are going to go much faster than this,” he affirmed forcefully. That is the objective of the founder of Facebook at the MWC: to request the collaboration of 3 of the 5 main telecommunication operators in the world so that emerging countries can have a basic internet service: access the weather service, agricultural prices, education … The last question from a journalist served to close the session, and when asked: “Mark, are you going to buy Snapchat now?”, The answer was clear: ” This week I have spent 19,000 million dollars, I think I’m going to spend a season without buying anything else . “
