Remember when WhatsApp didn’t want to make money?

WhatsApp is preparing to make money by facilitating conversations between business and consumers.

It’s a great move.

Messaging is huge, and there is vast scope for bringing brands and businesses on board. It’s a process that’s been happening for years, predominantly with Asia-based chat apps that let users follow official accounts, but enterprising business people in emerging markets have long found ways to make use of the hugely popular WhatsApp service despite no features.

Two years ago I wrote that chat apps were becoming as important as social media for brands, and that shift has only continued. So it is high time WhatsApp got on board given its insane userbase of more than one billion people.

But it wasn’t always that way.

WhatsApp once had a very strict focus on messaging only, with plenty of negative words for rival companies who dared to mix business with their chat app product

SpaceX runs its Tesla-powered pusher at 220 mph on Hyperloop test track.

Elon Musk apparently felt left out when student teams competed to achieve top speed on the SpaceX Hyperloop test track last weekend, because he decided to run the SpaceX pusher vehicle, which includes a Tesla drivetrain, down the track on its own to see how fast it could go.

The Tesla/SpaceX vehicle, which works basically like a Hyperloop tug boat to propel some of the student pods that don’t have their own built-in motor for acceleration, managed to get up to 220 mph in the sealed vacuum tunnel, which is faster than the winning student team at 201 mph.

Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 is a cautious return for the world’s best phablet.

Between the explosions, the recalls and its subsequent afterlife as airport PA system fodder, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the Galaxy Note 7 was a very good phone. In fact, the line has always been one of the industry’s best and most innovative. It seems it only takes a few well-publicized explosions to tarnish a beloved brand.

But Samsung rebounded quickly. In fact, the company didn’t appear to take any real financial hit from the Note 7 fiasco. It did, however, do its due diligence, investigating the cause of the phone’s battery issues, publicly apologizing and instituting an eight-point safety check in hopes of assuring that it wouldn’t ever repeat its mistakes again. And in spite of some momentary speculation that the company might dump the Note altogether, it was pretty clear to Samsung from the outset that the name it had spent a half-dozen years building up was too valuable to abandon.

Unveiled late last month, the Note 8 is the product of a newly cautious company. It’s easy to see how Samsung’s relentless push to include all the latest bells and whistles might have contributed to its predecessor’s problems. The new Note isn’t a bombardment of new features. Much of what the product brings to the table was borrowed directly from the recently announced Galaxy S8. And most of the rest that’s new seems to largely be an attempt to distinguish the phablet as a more premium option than the similarly sized Galaxy S8+

But that’s not a bad thing, really. The new device is built atop one of the most solid foundations in the smartphone space. And the additions — refinements, really — mostly help to make it that much better.