China's Alibaba bets $215 million on chat app Tango

Facebook has made it a pretty darn good time to be a messaging app maker -- just ask Tango. It's received $280 million in funding including $215 million from Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, which is looking to bolster its forces against competitor Tencent. That gives it a minority interest in the video chat app, which has 70 million active users and 200 million in total. Tango has also stretched out recently with a social platform SDK for other apps that makes it easier for users to invite friends, for instance. According to Bloomberg, Alibaba could go public as soon as next month and its investment means Tango could be worth as much as $2 billion. We'll write a witty conclusion in a second, but first we're going to go learn some coding.

Update: Reuters has corrected its article to underscore that Alibaba led a $280 million investment round, but only bet $215 million of its own cash. We've updated our post to reflect that.