Japanese company Rakuten acquired Belarusian-Israeli service Viber for $ 900 millions.

Program ”Viber“ helps its users to talk and exchange messages using Wi-Fi and 3G-Internet. You have to pay only for web traffic and not for expensive international calls.

”Viber“ is similar to legendary ”Skype“ although the creators try to avoid parallels with more popular competitor.

However, there are some fundamental differences. For example, Igor Magazinnik noted that his program was originally created for mobile devices while ”Skype“ began its triumphal march from computers. That’s why ”Viber“ save energy of smart phones .

To use ”Skype“ at first you need to get to the contact list of a prospective interlocutor, while you need only the mobile phone number of a prospective interlocutor to use ”Viber“.

The program is very popular in Asia rapidly conquering the Chinese market. Number of its users exceeds 300 million people.

Viber Media Company was registered in Cyprus and has offices in Belarus and Israel.

Founders of the project are Igor Magazinnik and Talmon Marco who met in the Israeli army. They launched the service in late 2010. Since that time it was free for users. At least $ 20 million were invested in ”Viber”, but the share of each founder is unknown.

On the territory of Belarus in Minsk and Brest about fifty programmers are working at creating client programs for different platforms - smart phones with operating systems Android, iOS and others. Recently a version for stationary computers based on Windows appeared.

In addition the company is registered as a resident of the Belarusian High-Tech Park. This gives to "Viber" huge tax breaks.

Igor Magazinnik grew up in Belarus but now lives in several countries and has Belarusian and Israeli citizenship.