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Snapchat Reportedly Acquires Bitmoji Maker Bitstrips For $100 Million (fortune.com)

An anonymous reader writes: According to a report from Fortune, Snapchat, the messaging platform which has recently become the number one free app on the App Store, has agreed to acquire Bitstrips, the folks behind the popular emoji-creation service Bitmoji. Fortune's sources has said the deal is "in the ballpark" of $100 million. TechCrunch writes, "The idea behind Bitmoji is simple. Users download the app and create an Avatar that represents them. They can choose from a wide range of options like face shape, hair color and cut, eye shape and color, etc. From there, Bitmoji is added as a third-party keyboard, and the app offers hundreds of options for users to send to their friends, all featuring their avatar." It'll be interesting to see which features of Bitstrips will be implemented into Snapchat, given Bitstrip's experience with keyboard integrations.

33 comments

  1. Insane by Natales · · Score: 4, Insightful

    May be I'm just getting old but I cannot wrap my head around these kinds of deals. Paying 100M for bullshit like that, when I can enumerate dozens of startups with amazing technology and real innovations in cloud, back-end services, automation, platform, security, etc, that can barely get a couple of millions to continue their development. The industry is ran by teens now.

    1. Re:Insane by TheRealHocusLocus · · Score: 1

      Free emoji for the homeless!
      Shoes for Industry! Shoes for the Dead!

      Every time I catch sight of a discarded fan spinning in the junkyard I think about all that wasted electricity and how it could eventually power the Whole World, if only for a split second. I feel the same way about these huge outlays of startup capital and bizarre valuations.

      --
      <blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
    2. Re:Insane by westlake · · Score: 3

      May be I'm just getting old but I cannot wrap my head around these kinds of deals. Paying 100M for bullshit like that, when I can enumerate dozens of startups with amazing technology and real innovations in cloud, back-end services, automation, platform, security, etc, that can barely get a couple of millions to continue their development.

      Snapchat gets about 6 billion video views a day.

      I am sure your back-room tech is interesting, but numbers like this are a real attention-grabber.

    3. Re:Insane by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      video views ... real attention-grabber

      Ah, yes, the Twitter valuation strategery.

      Can't wait to drink deeply of developer tears once Bubble.js bursts.

    4. Re:Insane by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Zero views a day if the back room tech fails, or their security software fails, or the backhaul fiber stops working, or all the phones go blank, or Taylor Swift decides Snapchat isn't cool anymore.

    5. Re:Insane by plopez · · Score: 1

      And no one in the companies are commenting about why they did it or what they plan to do with it. It's like waking up in a hotel suite with half a dozen naked people after a night of coke, weed, cheap vodka, and hookers and wondering just what the hell happened.

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    6. Re:Insane by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      " real innovations in cloud, back-end services, automation, platform, security, etc ..."

      No, you're not old yet. If you were, you'd write this instead:

      " real innovations in transport, medicine, automation, housing, food, etc ..."

    7. Re:Insane by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      May be I'm just getting old but I cannot wrap my head around these kinds of deals.

      I know...my mind refused to accept that anyone would pay "in the ballpark" of $100 million for a fucking widget that makes avatars. I mean, WTF?

      It's insanity.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    8. Re:Insane by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 1

      The character creation tool for Final Fantasy XIV is a lot more complex and I only paid $20 for that game.

    9. Re:Insane by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      GP is not criticizing Snapchat's worth.

      They found a niche market in self-destructing messages (yeah, right) for horny teenagers and exploited it up to 6e9 video messages a day. That has got to have a respectable market value, even if the software was complete horseshit (as other posters are claiming.)

      But this crappy avatar creator? Seriously? Looks like somebody is stealing $99.99M from somebody else, if you ask me.

  2. Talking with pictures... not my thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'll stick with English.

  3. bubble, bubble, who's got the bubble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This was almost certainly a dollars-per-user thing, or the price would never have reached that high.

  4. ayfkm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Do people really still use bitstrips? It seems that shit went buck nuts on facebook for quite a long time starting like =4yr ago and then thankfully eventually disappearing from anyone I know over a year ago. Unreal they might have gotten 100M well after the heyday.

  5. Seems like $100M is the entry level these days by darthsilun · · Score: 1

    If the company has $50M debt and you need to give four or five founders about $10M each? There you go, $100M.

    1. Re:Seems like $100M is the entry level these days by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How can you incur $50M debt to code and deploy a shitty avatar builder like that? I, and most other people around here, could build the same thing in a couple days and it would probably look better.

      I understand Snapchat's purpose and its user base, therefore its worth, even if I've never used it.

      But this thing? Seriously? Looks like somebody is stealing $99.99M from somebody else.

  6. Tulips! by goombah99 · · Score: 2

    Okay the internet bubble has reached stage Tulip.

    1) undervalued
    2) fair
    3) expensive
    4) Profit$$$$$
    5) Shiller shits pants
    6) can this keep going up? I better get in before the fools do
    7) Tulips
    8) it's different this time.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  7. pigeonholing ones emotions to others holes by sittingnut · · Score: 1

    emoji - another sign of unreal stunted western throwaway culture of death.
    no real emotion expressed naturally in vigorous language by individuals(when done well that amounts to art) -
    that wouldn't be politically correct.
    no we must now all express ourselves in narrow cookie cutters of approved politically correct emotions thought up by others.
    i suppose we should be glad that we can use combinations of those narrow cookie cutters (that is what customization of emoji parts amount to )

    1. Re:pigeonholing ones emotions to others holes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What culture? Mostly cube farms and apartments here in North America.

    2. Re:pigeonholing ones emotions to others holes by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      emoji - another sign of unreal stunted western throwaway culture

      You know emoji is a Japanese culture thing which has been heartily adopted by the West, right?

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    3. Re:pigeonholing ones emotions to others holes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He never said anything about the origins dumbass. Just how the fanbois pieled onto it just like they do with everything.

  8. Bubble bubble, Snake-oil and trouble by Sir+Holo · · Score: 2

    I smell another internet bubble about to pop.

    In 2006, there were services that would use a photo of your face to make a 'skin' for your Unreal Tournament model.

    In 1996, you could take an image of your face, reduce it to 16 x 16 pixels, and still have it be recognizable.

    The ancient Egyptians used pictures as their written language at least 350 years ago. Scratch that... 3500 years ago.

    This is as bizarre as shooting hamsters out of a cannon in a Superbowl Ad, or K-Tel Records announcing that they "were going to open a web site," and seeing a 1200% increase in their stock price in just a few days.

    "Who likes short-shorts? We like short-shorts!"

    1. Re:Bubble bubble, Snake-oil and trouble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Egyptian hieroglyphs aren't really "pictures" except in the same sense the letter 'X' is a picture. They specifically aren't (usually) logograms, or ideograms, the individual squiggles don't mean a particular thing, except occasionally in context, the way our letter "I" doesn't mean "Me, specifically, as an individual" when it appears in the word "CITY" but it does mean that in the sentence "I AM HERE". Figuring out what they meant after nobody had used them for over a thousand years was difficult not least because Egyptian scribes made Slashdot users look like careful spellers and consistent writers.

      Egypshun CAN BEE tricEE 2 REEDE aynd Egyptions apparrentie NO cared ande NO worrred anyd noo boffered

      Literacy of the sort which transformed some cultures later, with ordinary people all able to read and write basic text, would have been unworkable for Ancient Egyptian, it could really only function with a handful of highly educated users. Even fairly "obvious" things that would have made it more accessible were never attempted, suggesting that those who could write had no interest in making it any easier to learn how. Scribe was probably a relatively high status role, so it makes sense that this skill would be guarded jealously.

  9. The snapchat development team should be hung by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

    The program is dogshit.

    I used it for a year to chat with a friend who used it almost exclusively.
    The amount of insane bugs in that application is off the dial and oddly enough they seem to get patched then unpatched endlessly.

    Biggest one is the classic "black screen" bug. Unlock your phone, pull down notifications "you have 5 snaps from blah"
    Tap that, opens the app and it goes to your chat with blah. But then the screen instantly goes black, no reason. You can't read your messages - but they are already marked as read and of course, fucking disappear.

    Then there's the one where you're typing to your pal while they are away, they open the app and the program goes into 'direct' mode (icon turns blue, you can live chat, ala facetime, if you like) except the screen goes black and switches into camera mode as if you'd done this. You're not broadcasting or sending, they didn't initiate a video chat, the program just puts you into some photo mode, randomly. Again - lost chats.

    There's also an awful flash camera bug on Samsung phones it's been there for a year, fixed? Nope......

    I sent a suggestion / request in to them about having REAL friends on there, not just sexting bullshit, so you can 'reverse' snapchat them - and ALL messages actually get retained, but with the OPTION of insta-deleting stuff - best of both worlds, your girl or boy wants to show you their junk but on a 3 second timer, sure! but if they wanna send you directions or an important message "we need to talk, I'm pregnant" - those messages don't disappear.
    I wouldn't mind the disappearing messages if the program didn't god damn lose the asshole things. It caused me multiple arguments with someone over the course of a year. I filed bugs, I sent feedback - seriously the program is atrociously coded - on ios and android. It's, well as I said - dogshit

    I switched to whatsapp as an IP based chatter and it works great - only feature it's missing is the ability to auto-nuke images same as snapchat - if they add that functionality, it's got everything snapchat does and MUCH more.

    Fuck snapchat, a lot - best thing I did uninstalling that daily frustration of an app.

    1. Re:The snapchat development team should be hung by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL at Snapchat team being well hung!

      Frankly, I don't think you understand the app at all, nor are using it properly.

      (hint: it's not made for chatting with friends or sending important messages)

  10. why is tech now revolving around by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    dumping millions of dollars on retarded companies that make useless shit for retards?

    1. Re: why is tech now revolving around by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Retards happen to be a prime advertising market. They will buy whatever you tell them.

  11. $100 million for a widget that makes avatars? Seriously?

    Damn, I would have made them a widget that churned out avatars for only $50 million.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    1. Re:Wat by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but could you design a completely useless and at times positively frustrating GUI for it? Completely useless GUIs don't design themselves, you know.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    2. Re:Wat by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but could you design a completely useless and at times positively frustrating GUI for it? Completely useless GUIs don't design themselves, you know.

      Well, okay, for an extra $5 million we'll throw in a shitty UI and a non-working control panel.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  12. $100M is for the userbase, not the software by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's still crazy money, but they are paying for users rather than some code that they could easily clone for less than $1M.

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  14. Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Someone got me to install snapchat and every time they send an update on it, I open the app and am confused as to what the fuck it's for. I'm always one accidental step away from sending video from my side it seems and I can never figure out where the fuck to view their content without trying two or three different times. On top of that, why the fuck do I want to see short video clips of someone that will soon disappear/ Just send me a fucking email or IM.