Igor Magazin. Biography of the creator of the Viber program

More and more popular Viber service is developed in the company Viber Media, which was once founded by Marco Talmon and Igor Magazin. The last of them was born and spent his childhood in Russia.

From the biography of the founders

Igor Magazin, whose biography begins in 1975, when he was born, was first a Russian citizen. His birthplace is Nizhny Novgorod, where he went to high school.

At the age of sixteen his parents emigrated to the territory of Israel, where he became a student at the end of the school.

Like any Israeli citizen, Igor Magazin served in the army, where he made friends with Marco Talmon. They shared a common love for gadgets. After the end of the army service, friends managed to found their first iMesh file-sharing network.

Then they began working on creating a counterpart to Skype, which could be used on mobile devices, while users did not need to add subscribers to the contact list to make a call.

What did Igor Magazin create with his friend? A similar principle is used in the WhatsApp application, when the user can see immediately after installing the corresponding application all contacts from his address book that also have a similar application.

The difference between the created Viber application and the American WhatsApp is that it is based on voice calls, although the opportunity to free text messaging is provided.

Financial questions

Developers had to take money to implement their ideas from their families and friends. By 2014, 11.4 percent of the company's shares were owned by the Marco family, just over 55 percent belonged to the Shabtai family of Israel.

About the share of the Storekeeper is not known, only there is information that the founders of the company in its organization invested part of the money earned with the help of iMesh.

When the Japanese company Rakuten decided to purchase Viber, it already invested about twenty million dollars.

Viber Media is registered with Cyprus and the United States of America, but programmers use it from Belarus, where the workforce is cheaper. If compared with Israeli programmers, then the use of Belarusian companies costs more than two times cheaper.

Application development

What invented Igor Magazin, really appreciated in recent years. At first, from VibER, there was no serious profit. The founders started monetizing the application from November 2013. To this end, they launched a store with stickers - colorful drawings, attached to text messages.

Users can use free stickers, but their set is limited. The choice of paid stickers is much more diverse. By the end of January 2014, application users had downloaded about one hundred million stickers.

Since December of the same year the company has launched a second paid service - cheap tariffs for calls to mobile and landline phones.

To date, the user base of "Weiber" is about 280 million people.

The application confidently conquers the Russian market. The daily increase in users reaches twenty thousand.

Which application belongs to Igor Magazin?

Viber is primarily a platform for communication. In technical language this is called OTT service, in which VoIP is actively involved, as well as other functional.

This mobile application allows you to make free calls to all the users of "Weiber", located anywhere in the world. With it, you can send free messages, while using group chats, to send photos, information about current coordinates, add stickers to text messages.

The application has other interesting features.

Creator of "Vaiber"

As says in one of the interviews Igor Magazin, Viber dials up to five hundred users per day. In one month, over 3 billion messages are passed through the network and over 2 billion minutes is 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 was serviced in Belarus.

Soon the service "Weiber" was purchased 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 provider of Internet services.

The difference between Viber and other similar applications

From "Skype" Viber application differs in that it was created from the very beginning for a mobile platform. "Skype" was adapted for a smartphone not immediately. It is this circumstance that determines the difference in the direction of the development paths of these products.

For "Vaiber" mobile platform is basic, and for "Skype" - secondary.

"Whiber" from WhatsApp differs free of charge, the presence of a voice call and the constant addition of new features inherent only to this application.

For example, "Weiber" has the opportunity to work on low-speed channels of mobile communication - EDGE. To this end, there is a constant testing of sound quality, searching for the golden mean, for which different codecs are tried. Optimization of the application is performed to stabilize the work in the case of a weak Internet channel, this should not adversely affect the sound quality characteristics.

About the difference in approach

"Weiber" is distinguished not only by the ease of use and quality of communication in 3G networks, but also by the efficiency of using the battery. If "Skype" is difficult for the whole day to keep on, then "VibER" works without problems for days. Even with Vibeera not running, the user has the opportunity to receive a call or message. Technical realization of this occurs by taking an official push message from the server.

It is worth pressing the "Answer" button, as an instant start of the program occurs, the connection is established almost immediately.

Experience shows that "Weiber" is able to work on a weaker device in comparison with "Skype".

Igor Magazin believes the main secret of "omnivorous" Viber initial development of it for a mobile device, that is, the typical for such a device is a strict limitation of memory and processor power. This makes it very economical to approach all resources.

For this purpose, the company's employees have collected a large number of various mobile devices that are used for continuous testing.

Actively developing smartphones and related infrastructure allow such service as "Weiber" to provide users with a set of services not only free of charge, but also at a qualitatively higher level, in comparison with the services provided by traditional cellular operators.

Shop about me

In an interview with journalists, Igor Magazine tells that when a free minute falls (which is extremely rare), he likes to listen to music and read a book.

As hobbies, he called mountain skiing and scuba diving.

In his words, it is not necessary to achieve anything specifically in life, the process itself is the main thing.

He calls himself a developer, not a politician, and therefore can not give empty promises.