YEREVAN. - The messenger of Armenian Zangi has been labeled WhatsApp killer during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The information technology business has long been considered as the most promising direction of economy, the investment amounts being spent exactly in this direction. IT even creates brand new business directions, one of which is the big data.
Вig data is nothing but the registration of all the actions of users and applications, the permitted level whereof has not even yet been ascertained. Different discussions are organized on this issue, since all this also concerns the personal information of people.
Facebook appeared in the center of scandal over Big data, being accused of selling user data. Apple was required to provide the password of a terrorist, who used iPhone so that the US intelligence could access the information on his mobile.
In such a situation companies have no wide opportunities to maneuver: they must either succumb to the pressure of the government and provide top secret information, or become its “enemy.” In both cases the reputation of the company and therefore its capitalization suffer.
But there is also a third option: companies can withdraw form database collection, which negatively impacts the attraction of investments but gives rise to the full confidence of users instead.
Messenger of Armenian Zangi chose this very direction. The peculiarity of this application is that all the actions carried out by messenger are not registered on the server, that is the sent message, phone call, photo or video are saved on the device of the sender and receiver, for instance, on their mobile. The third party—in this case Zangi—is only a mediator here, serving as a “pipe” through which the user’s message is sent to another party.
CEO of Zangi, Vahram Martirosyan, told Armenian News – NEWS.am that in terms of expansion and development of its activity, the adopted policy made the company more flexible.
“First of all, we feel calm, since no government will be able to press on us, demanding data: We simply don’t possess them. Secondly, thanks to this policy it is possible to avoid enormous expenses, which would be necessary in case of big data. It is necessary to have a great number of servers for saving all this, and maintain them. And all this is of a continuous nature, since the data are continuously generated and grow in number. Thirdly, we are not interesting to hackers, since we don’t gather user information. Apparently, in case of an attack they can break our security system—nobody is 100 percent guaranteed against that—but even if this happens, they will have nothing to steal. That is, our system guarantees ideal data immunity,” Martirosyan said.
In his words, the absence of big data in Zangi makes the messenger uninteresting exactly to the organizations making investments in big data, but the company has also other apps for monetization. “We may have weaker positions in terms of monetization as compared to Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger. For instance, we have never sent commercial announcements to our users. For Zangi it is more important that the users trust it by 100 percent. I think this circumstance is more important than the financial flow,” he concluded.
