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