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NEW YORK – Overweight and obese women who gain too few kilogrammes, or even lose weight, during pregnancy may be putting their unborn child at risk, a new study suggests.

“While many people recommend that weight loss in pregnancy, particularly for very obese women is ok... (there) may be adverse effects,” said Dr Patrick Catalano, director of the Centre for Reproductive Health at MetroHealth in Cleveland, Ohio.

“We don’t have much data, in particular on body composition changes in overweight (or) obese women who lose weight,” said Catalano, who led the new study. “Maybe we need to be a little bit more careful before we are just glib about saying it’s ok.”

Research has offered evidence of many risks posed by obesity to mother and foetus during pregnancy, up to and beyond the point of delivery.

Obese mothers are at raised risk of early spontaneous abortion and foetal birth defects. Later on, there is a higher chance of gestational diabetes and preeclampsia. At delivery, obese mothers are more likely to need a Caesarean-section and to have postpartum wound infections.

The newborns of obese mothers are at risk of being overly large for their gestational age and that has been tied to childhood obesity.

The US Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued guidelines in 2009 recommending that obese women gain between five and nine kilogrammes (11 to 20 pounds) during pregnancy, which is somewhat less than the gain recommended for women who start pregnancy at a normal weight.

However, some researchers have suggested that for obese women, little to no weight gain, and even weight loss, is preferable during pregnancy to minimise the risks associated with obesity.

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists recommends that individualised care be given to overweight or obese women who wish to gain less weight than recommended by the IOM.

Yet, little is known about the foetal health risks associated with weight loss or limited weight gain by overweight or obese women during pregnancy.

To investigate, Catalano, who was involved in developing the 2009 IOM guidelines, and his co-authors examined the effects of any weight loss or a weight gain of less than IOM’s minimum 5kg (11lbs).

They looked at 1,241 full-term singleton pregnancies among overweight and obese women.

Most (85 per cent) of the women gained more than the IOM’s minimum 5kg during pregnancy, averaging a gain of 14.4kg (32 lbs).

In contrast, 15 per cent of the study participants had weight gains below IOM’s minimum, averaging a gain of just 1.1kg (2.4 pounds) while pregnant.

Infants born to women who gained little or no weight during pregnancy tended to be small for their gestational age, and had less lean body mass and less fat mass than infants born to women who gained more than 5kg, Catalano and his team report in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

These infants also had a lower percentage of body fat, a smaller head circumference, lower birth weight and were smaller in length than infants born to women who gained more than 5kg during pregnancy.

The results held when the authors took into account the mothers’ pre-pregnancy weight, smoking status, glucose tolerance (a measure of pre-diabetes or diabetes) and other factors that may have influenced the infants’ development.

Infants born to 46 women who lost weight during pregnancy were also small for their gestational age and had decreased lean and fat mass, lower birth weight and a lower percentage of body fat.

In contrast, infants born to women who gained more than the IOM minimum were more likely to be large for their gestational age. Among infants born to women who gained more than 5kg, 13 per cent were large for their gestational age. In comparison, 7.5 per cent of infants born to women who gained 5kg or less were large.

“Everyone agrees having a very big baby is not good,” Catalano said. However, “the loss of lean mass may have long-term consequences” as well, he said.

What’s the bottom line for obese and overweight women? “Lose weight between pregnancies,” Catalano recommends. “We just don’t know if it’s safe to do during pregnancy.”

BARCELONA — Samsung unveiled two new computerised wristwatches on Sunday, this time including health sensors and related fitness features to give people a reason to buy one.

Samsung’s first Galaxy Gear smartwatch came out last fall amid much fanfare, but it landed with a thud in the marketplace. Samsung and its smartwatch rivals had failed to persuade many consumers that they need to be able to constantly check messages from their wrists. Wearable devices that succeeded tended to be fitness products such as the Fitbit.

The new Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo will have a heart rate sensor, a pedometer and various tools to measure exercise, sleep and stress levels. The low-resolution, two-megapixel camera on the Gear 2 is being moved to the main body; it was on the strap on the original Gear. It’s not immediately clear if the Gear 2 Neo has a camera.

It’s also unclear whether the new watches will continually display the time. In the original Gear, that was shut off to save battery, which lasted just a day. The new watches promise two or three days under normal use, putting them more in line with what rivals offer.

Samsung didn’t immediately reveal prices for the new watches, but said they would be available in April.

Samsung Electronics Co. announced the new watches Sunday ahead of the Mobile World Congress wireless show in Barcelona, Spain. Samsung has a major event Monday evening, during which it is expected to announce a successor to its popular Galaxy S4 smartphone.

The company decided to make the latest smartwatches with a little-known operating system called Tizen OS, instead of the Android system from Google used in the original Gear, as the South Korean electronics company tries to break the dominance Google has on mobile devices.

The move gives some credence to a fledging system that Samsung and other backers want to see on all sorts of devices, including televisions, refrigerators and cars. Samsung already has a Tizen camera out, but a Tizen phone has yet to emerge, despite expectations of one last year. For now, Samsung is putting Tizen on a smartwatch instead.

Although Google gives away Android for any manufacturer to use in its gadgets, it’s loaded with a range of Google services, including stores for apps, music and video. Samsung is trying to promote its own stores as well and ends up confusing users by including two of everything.

To prevent Google from having a similar dominance in wearable devices and other gadgets beyond phones and tablets, Samsung is pushing Tizen OS as an alternative.

But before Tizen can take off, Samsung needs the new Gear to be a success.

The original Gear worked with selected Samsung phones to display e-mail and text alerts. It also had a camera on the strap for low-resolution photos and a speakerphone on the watch to make calls, Dick Tracy-style. The Gear’s 1.6-inch (4cm) screen keeps the watch small enough — at least for men — to work as a fashion accessory. Straps came in six colours.

The device had many shortcomings, however.

Its $300 price tag was 50 per cent higher than what Sony Corp. charges for its SmartWatch 2. And the Gear worked only with selected Samsung phones, while watches from Sony and Qualcomm Inc. work with a greater pool of Android devices from a variety of manufacturers.

In addition, app selection on the Gear was limited, while the apps that were available fell short on functionality. Although the Gear was supposed to offer quick access to information so you don’t have to constantly pull out your phone, many of the alerts simply tell you to return to the phone to read a new message.

BARCELONA – When the next super-fast mobile network launches in 2020 you will be able to download a high-definition movie in one second flat.

But the future fifth generation, or 5G, network is not really being designed for you.

In fact, it will be built for your car, fridge, smartwatch, toothbrush, lightbulb and a host of other everyday objects to communicate with each other online, a phenomenon known as the Internet of things.

Handling the new traffic is a key challenge for network operators gathering at the four-day Mobile World Congress opening Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

Worldwide data traffic generated by people’s mobile devices will multiply 11-fold by 2018, according to US telecommunications equipment manufacturer Cisco.

But the traffic generated between connected objects, so-called machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, will already be greater than all the world’s mobile telephones combined by 2015, it said in a study.

Mobile networks will need to boost capacity by 1,000 times by 2020 to cope with the huge growth in M2M traffic if lag time is to be avoided, said Ulrich Dropmann, senior executive at Finnish mobile services group Nokia Solutions Network.

Many objects will only send a trickle of data but the combined data flow will be “considerable” said Dropmann.

The 5G networks will launch in 2020, with a broader rollout from 2025, said Frederic Pujol, head of mobile broadband at consultancy group IDATE.

The prospect of 5G networks may seem distant in countries where 4G has yet to be deployed, but in countries at the cutting edge of technology such as South Korea, operators are already installing an advanced version of 4G to handle the demand.

Stakes could be enormous 

“If we don’t prepare now for the next generation, we will soon reach the limits that 4G can offer,” said Thibaut Kleiner, adviser to the Europe Union’s digital agenda commissioner, Nelly Kroes.

“It comes down to a question of leadership in technological innovation,” he told a conference.

The stakes could be enormous in a world increasingly reliant on mobile networks, a world in which Europe risks becoming a laggard — its last big success in the field dates back to the creation of the GSM, or 2G, network at the end of the 1990s.

To get back in the game, the European Commission launched late last year a 5G public-private partnership to develop the new network.

Known as 5G PPP, it brings together equipment makers and network operators.

Brussels has allocated 700 million euros ($960 million) up to 2020 for the project, a sum that is to be matched by the private sector.

South Korea’s science ministry announced last month the launch of a 5G development project with a budget of 1.6 billion won ($1.5 billion/1.1 billion euros).

“Countries in Europe, China and the US are making aggressive efforts to develop 5G technology... and we believe there will be fierce competition in this market in a few years,” the South Korean ministry said at the launch.

But beyond the commercial battle to come, network builders and handset manufacturers want to agree on a technological standard to allow economies of scale and global roaming, said Viktor Arvidsson, head of strategy for France at Swedish multinational Ericsson.

Such an agreement is the goal of METIS 2020 project, which brings together operators such as Orange or Telefonica and equipment makers like Alcatel Lucent and Huawei, the Chinese company that announced last year it would spend $600 million on 5G research and development by 2018.

LONDON — Procter & Gamble Co (P&G’s)is bringing the dentist into the bathroom with the world’s first smartphone-connected toothbrush, a device that gives personalised advice to help people improve their brushing.

The toothbrush, to be sold under P&G’s Oral-B brand and which will be widely available from June, has a Bluetooth 4.0 link to a smartphone app that can be programmed with the help of a dentist, for example to pay more attention to any areas of the mouth being neglected, P&G said.

“The app provides real-time guidance,” Michael Cohen-Dumani, global associate director for Oral-B, told Reuters. 

“Dentists always tell us: ‘People do a great job in the week before they come to visit us and in the week after they visit us. But nothing can hide the fact that when we look inside the mouth we can see all the areas they miss’.”

The toothbrush will be unveiled at the phone industry’s annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next week, joining an expanding range of devices connected to smartphones that measure everything from sleep patterns and calorie intake to distance walked and exercise taken.

Professionals had helped develop the app as a tool to manage their patients’ behaviour between visits, Cohen-Dumani said. The app displays brushing progress in real time, telling the user when to move to a different part of the mouth and warning if they are brushing too hard, he said. 

“It will guide you in terms of how to brush, and you will be able to fully personalise the brushing routine for you,” Cohen-Dumani said. 

In tests, the app had extended average brushing times from less than a minute for a manual toothbrush to two minutes and 16 seconds, he said.

The device will be at top end the Oral-B electric toothbrush range, with a recommended retail price of 199 pounds ($330) in Britain and 219 euros in Europe.

French startup Kolibree has also developed a connected electric toothbrush that it plans to launch in the third quarter, according to its website. 

WASHINGTON – The melting of ice in the Antarctic is considered a top threat to global sea level rise, and scientists said Thursday the trend could continue for decades or even centuries to come.

Researchers focused on the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, which has been thinning at an increasingly rapid pace for about the past 20 years, as the waters beneath get warmer along with the rest of the ocean.

Based on new geological surveys and advanced dating techniques on rocks that have been exposed by the retreating ice, experts said in the journal Science that a similar phenomenon occurred thousands of years ago.

Some 8,000 years ago, the glacier thinned as fast as it has in recent decades, suggesting it may follow a similar pattern in the future, they reported.

“This thinning was sustained for decades to centuries at an average rate of more than 100 centimetres per year, comparable to contemporary thinning rates,” said the article in Science.

“Our findings reveal that Pine Island Glacier has experienced rapid thinning at least once in the past, and that, once set in motion, rapid ice sheet changes in this region can persist for centuries.”

The research team came from Britain, Germany and the United States.

Last month, scientists reported in the journal Nature Climate Change that the glacier was melting irreversibly and could add as much as a centimetre (0.4 inches) to ocean levels in 20 years.

A massive river of ice, the glacier by itself is responsible for 20 per cent of total ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet today.

On average, it shed 20 billion tonnes of ice annually from 1992-2011, a loss that is likely to increase up to and above 100 billion tonnes each year, said the Nature study.

NEW YORK — People take to Twitter to talk about everything from politics to breakfast to Justin Bieber in what feels like a chaotic stream of messages. So it may come as a surprise that the conversations on the short messaging service fit into just six distinct patterns.

The Pew Research Centre, working with the Social Media Research Foundation and using a special software tool, analysed and mapped millions of public tweets, retweets, hashtags and replies that form the backbone of Twitter chatter. The resulting diagrams show how people, brands, news outlets and celebrities interact on Twitter, depending on the topic of conversation.

When it comes to politics, for example, Twitter’s citizens tend to form two distinct groups that rarely interact with one another, divided along liberal and conservative lines, according to the report, which was published on Thursday. Liberals tend to post links to mainstream news sources, while conservatives link to sites with a conservative blend, according to the study, whose authors likened their methods to taking aerial photos of crowds gathered in public places.

The researchers are quick to note that not everyone uses Twitter — only 14 per cent of the US population — and not all who do use it to talk about politics, for example. Still, looking at how conversations flow on social media can provide new insights into how people communicate in a way that was not possible until very recently.

“You could never do that in the old days when you were running around with a pen and clipboard,” said Marc A. Smith, one of the study’s authors and director of the Social Media Research Foundation.

What emerged in maps of political conversations that the liberal and conservative groups are not even arguing with one another. Rather, they are “ignoring one another while pointing to different web resources and using different hashtags”, according to the study.

The telephone polls that take the pulse of the country about everything from politics to race, religion and technology will continue to form the research centre’s backbone. But Lee Rainie, one of the study’s authors and director of the Pew Research Internet Project said there are other kinds of data that deserve exploration. Looking at social media — something that large swaths of people participate in — can give insights to important information about people’s lives.

Here are the other five types of conversations:

— People who talk about well-known brands on Twitter tend to be disconnected from one another, focusing only on the topic at hand and not really interacting with each other. The study calls these “brand clusters.” One graph, that looked at mentions of Apple, found that users didn’t follow, reply to or mention any other person who also tweeted about the company.

— People who tweet from a social media conference, or about another highly specialised topic tend to form tight crowds of people who are connected to one another as followers. There are only a few users who are not connected to at least a few others in the group.

— “Community clusters” happen when several, evenly sized Twitter groups are connected to each other. In a sense, these can be compared “to people clustering in different stalls at a bazaar”. The conversations in this group share a common broader topic, whether that’s Michelle Obama or a tech conference, but each cluster takes a different focus.

— “Broadcast networks” are often media outlets or prominent social media figures with a lot of followers who repeat the messages such outlets send out.

— A Twitter “support network,” is the last major conversation type. These conversations usually involve a large company, such as a bank or airline, that listens and replies to consumer complaints. When mapped, the interactions in these groups tend to look like a bicycle wheel hub with many spokes.

SAN FRANCISCO — If Facebook hopes to remain the social networking leader, CEO Mark Zuckerberg knows the company must follow the people. That realisation compelled Zuckerberg to pay $19 billion for WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application that is redefining the concept of texting while its audience of 450 million users expands at an even faster clip than Facebook itself.

The deal sent shock waves through the technology industry because of the staggering price being paid for a four-year-old service that isn’t as well known in the US as it is overseas where WhatsApp has become a hip way to communicate instantaneously.

Although the amount of money involved is difficult to comprehend, the reason Facebook prizes WhatsApp is easier to grasp.

“This is a ‘go big or go home’ moment for Facebook,” said Benedict Evans, a former cellphone analyst who is now a partner with the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Just as he did nearly two years ago when Facebook bought photo-sharing service Instagram for $715 million, Zuckerberg is trying to ensure that his company doesn’t get left behind as people move to the next trend.

And WhatsApp is what’s hot now.  The Mountain View, California, start-up already has nearly twice as many users as the better known short messaging service, Twitter Inc. What’s more, WhatsApp is adding about 1 million users each day — more than even Facebook.

The rapid growth has convinced Zuckerberg that WhatsApp is bound to exceed 1 billion users within the next few years to give Facebook even more telling insights into what matters to people. Even at its current size, WhatsApp is already handling an average of 19 billion messages per day. Those daily messages include about 600 million photos. Facebook believes that WhatsApp’s messaging volume already exceeds all the traditional texts sent through the networks of cellphone carriers. Those short messaging services, or SMS, generate about $100 billion in annual revenue while WhatsApp charges just $1 annually after the first year of free usage.

By making a big bet on WhatsApp, Zuckerberg is trying to avoid the mistake that one of his heroes, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, made during the late 1990s when the Internet began to trigger an upheaval in business and culture. Gates recognised that Microsoft’s lucrative Windows software franchise could be undermined by a variety of new services made possible by the Internet, but didn’t act on some of his early instincts.

By the time that Steve Ballmer had succeeded Gates as Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, Google Inc. was already way ahead in the lucrative field of Internet search and Apple was gearing up to develop the iPod music player that paved the way for the iPhone.

Zuckerberg, 29, is showing his savvy and moxie by moving quickly to adapt to fickle tastes, said David Rogers, a professor at Columbia University’s business school and the author of the book, “The Network is Your Customer.”

“User behaviours in these digital experiences evolve so rapidly that you can’t afford to play the Windows game and say, ‘We are the dominant platform so we are just going to hold our position by making little tweaks,’” Rogers said.

Zuckerberg signalled his interest in mobile messaging apps late last year when he offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion only to be rebuffed, according to several media outlets and technology blogs that quoted unnamed sources. It took less than two weeks to pull of the WhatsApp deal, according to Zuckerberg.

Being nimble has become even more important as smartphones supplant personal computers as the primary way people interact with digital services.

The advent of smartphones has been accompanied by a seemingly bottomless well of free smartphone applications that make it easy for people to hopscotch from one service to the next. The phenomenon has made it more difficult for a single application to become a one-stop shop that fulfills everyone’s digital desires.

“The smartphone is a social platform in ways that the desktop computer never really was,” Evans said. “A lot of the winner-take-all dynamics don’t apply on the smartphone.”

NEW YORK — Rumours have been swirling since news broke this week of a possible meeting between Apple’s top executive for acquisitions and the CEO of electric car maker Tesla.

Citing a person familiar with the matter, The San Francisco Chronicle reported Sunday that the meeting between Adrian Perica and Elon Musk took place last spring. The companies haven’t commented on the report.

With $158.8 billion in cash on its balance sheet, Apple certainly has the money to buy Tesla, which has a market cap of about $24 billion.

Although a pairing of the two companies is a likely long shot and far off at best, it’s kind of fun to think about a car made by the company that brought us the iPhone and iPad. Here are a few ideas:

NAME — There’s no question it would be called the iCar. With iPads, iPods and iPhones on the market, do they really have a choice? New models to follow could be called the iCar 2, iCar3, etc. Or the company could just make an iCarS if it didn’t feel like making any real changes to the product.

COLOUR — Two words: Space Grey. Of course, there also would be a hard-to-find gold-tone version and a slightly cheaper model featuring a shiny plastic exterior that could come in an array of eye-popping colours.

PLUG — Whatever it looks like, it’s sure to differ from the one Tesla currently uses. After all, Apple can’t have drivers re-using their current accessories.

APPS — The dashboard of a Tesla already looks like a giant iPad. But in addition to the latest version of iOS and Retina display, an Apple version could include apps for podcasts, photos and of course iTunes and iTunes Radio. Want to let your passengers binge watch the second season of “House of Cards” as you blow down the freeway? Just fire up the Netflix app. And Candy Crush Saga would come preinstalled to give you something to do while waiting out traffic jams.

NAVIGATION — Google Maps? Forget about it. Apple Maps, all the way.

PRICE — Probably above what a Tesla currently sells for, but cheaper with a two-year agreement.

LONDON – University researchers are working on a system that could quash rumours spreading on social media by identifying whether information is accurate.

Five European universities, led by Sheffield in northern England, are cooperating on a system that could automatically identify whether a rumour originates from a reliable source and can be verified.

The researchers said Tuesday they hope the system will allow governments, emergency services, media and the private sector to respond more effectively to claims emerging and spreading on social media before they get out of hand.

The three-year, European Union-funded project, called PHEME, is an attempt to filter out the nuggets of factual information from the avalanche of ill-informed comment on Twitter and Facebook.

“Social networks are rife with lies and deception,” the project leaders said in a statement. Such messages can have far-reaching consequences, but there is so much of it that it is impossible to analyse it in real time.

Claims during the 2011 riots in London that the London Eye observation wheel was on fire or that all the animals were let out of London Zoo were given as examples of false rumours that spread rapidly via the Internet.

The research is being led by Dr Kalina Bontcheva of Sheffield University’s Faculty of Engineering.

“The problem is that it all happens so fast and we can’t quickly sort truth from lies,” she said.

“This makes it difficult to respond to rumours, for example, for the emergency services to quash a lie in order to keep a situation calm. Our system aims to help with that, by tracking and verifying information in real time.”

The project is trying to identify four types of information –– speculation, controversy, misinformation and disinformation –– and model their spread on social networks.

It will try to use three factors to establish veracity: the information itself (lexical, syntactic and semantic); cross-referencing with trustworthy data sources; and the information’s diffusion.

The results can be displayed to the user on screen.

“We can already handle many of the challenges involved, such as the sheer volume of information in social networks, the speed at which it appears and the variety of forms, from tweets, to videos, pictures and blog posts,” said Bontcheva.

“But it’s currently not possible to automatically analyse, in real time, whether a piece of information is true or false and this is what we’ve now set out to achieve.”

The Times newspaper said the EU would meet most of the predicted 4.3 million euros costs of the project and a final version is hoped for within 18 months.

The project is a collaboration between five universities –– Sheffield, King’s College London, Warwick in England, Saarland in Germany and MODUL University Vienna –– and four companies - ATOS in Spain, iHub in Kenya, Ontotext in Bulgaria and swissinfo.ch.

SEOUL, South Korea — Facebook’s announcement it is paying $19 billion in cash and stock to acquire WhatsApp is a milestone in the short history of mobile messaging apps. Hundreds of millions of people have downloaded such apps to their smartphones and tablets to chat and share photos and videos for free, making them potent rivals to Facebook. WhatsApp alone has 450 million active monthly users.

The stunning price tag for a company that employs just 55 people is likely to boost valuations of other messaging applications and also stoke worries about a new tech bubble. Many of the apps are still figuring out how to make money from big pools of users.

Their main features are free messaging and voice calls between two individuals or in groups. Some have been adding gift buying and mobile games. They are already undercutting the mainstay businesses of mobile phone network companies: text messages and voice calls.

Some of the most popular messaging apps were developed in Asia, where a slew of competitors are vying for dominance.

LINE

Developed by Naver Corp. in 2011, LINE is a free messaging app that has become hugely successful in Japan and Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand. It built its popularity around cute “stickers” of animal or comic characters that users can share in chat rooms. As of November, 300 million people were using LINE around the world. In less than three years, LINE has become a cash cow for Naver, which operates South Korea’s most visited web portal but is little known outside of East Asia. Its money making prowess makes it a rarity among messaging apps. Most of the app’s revenue comes from mobile games. Some also comes from sticker sales which cost about $1 for a dozen. LINE raked in revenue of 454.2 billion won ($423 million) in 2013.

Viber

Created by Cyprus-based Viber Media, Viber offers its core Internet phone call function for free to its 280 million global users. Japan’s top online retailer Rakuten Inc. said last week it will buy Viber for $900 million as the retail giant is eager to expand outside Japan. Rakuten founder Hiroshi Mikitani sees Viber as a potential platform for games and other content. Viber users can make video calls and exchange photos and messages between mobile devices and desktop computers. Access from a desktop computer is a feature that more mobile messenger apps are offering as they want users to stick with their service as they shift between devices.

WeChat

China’s dominant mobile messaging app is WeChat, launched in 2011 by Tencent Holdings Ltd., one of China’s leading Internet companies. Tencent, which makes most of its revenue from games, said WeChat had 272 million active users last year, with more than 100 million of them abroad. Other Chinese Internet companies including Alibaba and Baidu and phone carrier China Mobile Ltd. also offer instant messaging apps but have far fewer users. WeChat has added features including short voice messages and video calls over WiFi, which saves users money on phone calls. WeChat has added a payment feature for use in e-commerce. Alibaba, which dominates e-commerce in China, sees that as a threat to its own online payment service and is scrambling to shore up its dominance.

Kakao Talk

Created in 2010 by Kakao, a South Korea startup, Kakao Talk spread quickly in South Korea along with rapid adoption of smartphones. It has become the go-to free messaging service enjoyed by nearly all Korean smartphone users, giving birth to new idioms such as “Let’s do Ka Talk.” Some government officials and business people hold online meetings in Kakao Talk’s group chat rooms. Abroad, it has lagged behind LINE and others in popularity. As of last month, Kakao Talk had 130 million users exchanging 5.5 billion messages a day and spending 213 minutes on the app every week. Kakao Talk is looking for ways to extend beyond messaging and mobile games to become a portal for navigating the mobile Internet and an e-commerce platform. Mobile games helped the app become profitable in 2012 and Kakao plans an IPO for 2015. Tencent became Kakao’s second-biggest shareholder in 2012.