The increasingly popular Viber service was developed by Viber Media, which was once founded by Marco Talmon and Igor Magazinnik. The last of them was born and spent his childhood in Russia.
From the biography of the founders
Igor Magazinnik, whose biography begins in 1975, when he was born, was at first a Russian citizen. His birthplace is Nizhny Novgorod, where he went to high school.
At the age of sixteen, his parents emigrated to Israel, where he became a university student after finishing school.
Like any Israeli citizen, Igor Magazinnik served in the army, where he became friends with Marco Talmon. They were brought together by a common love for gadgets. After the end of the military service, friends managed to establish their first file-sharing network iMesh.
They then went on to work on creating a Skype alternative that could be used on mobile devices without users needing to add people to their contact list to make a call.
What Igor createdShopkeeper with his friend? A similar principle is used in the WhatsApp application, when the user has the opportunity to see, immediately after installing the corresponding application, all contacts from his address book who also have the same application.
The difference between the created Viber application and the American WhatsApp is that it is based on voice calls, although free text messaging is provided.
Financial matters
The developers had to take money from their family members and friends to realize their idea. By 2014, 11.4 percent of the company's shares were owned by the Marco family, with just over 55 percent owned by the Israeli Shabtai family.
Nothing is known about Magazinnik's share, only there is information that the founders of the company invested part of the funds earned with iMesh in its organization.
When the Japanese company Rakuten decided to acquire Viber, about twenty million dollars had already been invested in it.
Viber Media is registered in Cyprus and the United States of America, but programmers are used from Belarus, where the labor force is cheaper. Compared to Israeli programmers, the use of Belarusian programmers costs the company more than two times cheaper.
App development
What Igor Magazinnik invented has been truly appreciated in recent years. First, from Viber, some seriousthere was no profit. The founders have been monetizing the application since November 2013. To this end, they launched a store with stickers - colorful drawings attached to text messages.
Users can also use free stickers, but their set is limited. The choice of paid stickers is much more diverse. By the end of January 2014, users of the application had downloaded about one hundred million stickers.
From December of the same year, the company launched a second paid service - cheap rates for calls to mobile and landline phones.
Today, there are about 280 million people in the Viber user base.
The application is also confidently conquering the Russian market. The daily increase in users reaches twenty thousand.
Which app belongs to Igor Magazinnik?
Viber is first and foremost a communication platform. In technical language, this is called an OTT service, in which VoIP is actively involved, as well as other functionality.
This mobile application allows you to make free calls to all Viber users located anywhere in the world. With it, you can send free messages, use group chats, send photos, information regarding current coordinates, add stickers to text messages.
The app also has other interesting features.
Creator o"Viber"
As Igor Magazinnik says in an interview, Viber gains up to five hundred users per day. In one month, more than three billion messages are passed through the network and over two billion minutes are used to transmit information by voice.
In 2013, the company employed about 120 employees, the server part was serviced in Israel, and the client part - in Belarus.
Soon, the Viber service was acquired by the Japanese Internet conglomerate Rakuten for nine hundred million US dollars. This is considered the largest acquisition for this company, which intends to become the world's largest Internet service provider.
Viber is different from other similar apps
The Viber application differs from Skype in that it was created for the mobile platform from the very beginning. Skype was not immediately adapted to the smartphone. It is this circumstance that determines the difference in the direction of development of these products.
For Viber, the mobile platform is the main one, and for Skype it is secondary.
"Viber" from WhatsApp is free, has a voice call and is constantly adding new features that are unique to this application.
For example, "Viber" has the ability to work on low-speed mobile communication channels - EDGE. To this end, there is a constant testing of sound quality, the search for a golden mean, for which various codecs are tried. The application is being optimized to stabilize operation in the event of a weak Internet channel, this should not adversely affect the sound quality characteristics.
More about the difference in approach
"Viber" differs not only in ease of use and quality of communication in 3G networks, but also in battery efficiency. If Skype is difficult to keep on for a whole day, then Viber works without problems for days. Even when Viber is not running, the user has the opportunity to receive a call or message. The technical implementation of this happens by receiving a service push message from the server.
It is worth pressing the "Answer" button, as the program starts instantly, the connection is established almost immediately.
Experience shows that Viber is able to work on a weaker device compared to Skype.
Igor Magazinnik considers the main secret of Viber's "omnivorous" nature to be its initial development for a mobile device, that is, it immediately took into account the hard limitation of memory and processor power typical of such a device. This makes it extremely economical to approach all resources.
For these purposes, the company's employees have collected a large number of various mobile devices that are used for constant testing.
Actively developing smartphones and their accompanying infrastructure allow a service such as Viberprovide users with a set of services not only free of charge, but also at a qualitatively higher level compared to the services provided by traditional cellular operators.
Store about me
In an interview with journalists, Igor Magazinnik says that when he has a free minute (which is extremely rare), he likes to listen to music and read a book.
He named skiing and scuba diving as his hobbies.
According to his expression, it is not necessary to achieve anything in life on purpose, the main thing is the process itself.
He calls himself a developer, not a politician, and therefore cannot make empty promises.
