On stage at VidCon, Snap announced its first accelerator program for emerging Black creators. Over the course of a year, Snap will pay 25 selected applicants $10,000 a month ($120,000 total) to help launch their careers, marking a $3 million total investment. This program is part of Snap’s 52…
Game studio HiDef partners with Snap to develop a Bitmoji dance social mobile game
A game studio, HiDef, announced today that it is teaming up with camera company Snap Inc. to develop an off-platform Bitmoji-based dance and music social game. The game will leverage Snap’s augmented reality tech as well as Bitmoji, the personalized cartoon avatar maker. Bitmoji joined the Snap fam…
Snap says it will miss this quarter’s revenue goals and slow hiring
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in an internal memo that the company will miss its revenue goals for this quarter. Snap will also slow its pace of hiring, a tactic that companies like Meta and Uber have employed as a way to cut costs. Though Snap continues to grow year over year, Spiegel says that [&he…
Snapchat’s stricter policies for anonymous apps and friend finders aren’t yet fully enforced
A small handful of Snap Kit platform developers have not yet complied with the new guidelines around anonymous messaging and friend-finding apps announced in March. The Snapchat maker revamped its developer platform policies on March 17, 2022, to ban anonymous apps and require developers to build f…
Snap snaps up database developer KeyDB to make its infrastructure more snappy
As Snapchat’s app continues to grow, the company is turning to the open source community to help further improve its technology infrastructure. This morning, Snap announced it’s acquiring the Toronto-based KeyDB, the developer of an open-source, high-performance database, for an undiscl…
Snap further invests in AR Shopping with dedicated in-app feature, new tools for retailers
At Snap’s Partner Summit on Thursday, the Snapchat maker announced a number of new initiatives focused on using its AR technology to aid with online shopping. Most notably, the company is introducing a new in-app destination within Snapchat called “Dress Up” that will feature AR f…
Snapchat’s new ‘Director Mode’ will help anyone become a video creator
In its ongoing battle with TikTok, Snap announced today it’s launching a new feature called Director Mode, aimed at providing easier access to Snapchat’s native creative tools for publishing video on its platform, including to its short-form video feature known as Spotlight. At launch, …
Snapchat is growing faster than Facebook and Twitter
Snap released its first quarter financial results for 2022 today, affirming that it’s growing faster than its fellow U.S.-based competitors Facebook (now Meta) and Twitter. Meta reported its first loss in daily active users (DAUs) last quarter, while Twitter’s monetizable DAUs grew by 2…
Walmart is acquiring Memomi, an AR startup powering virtual try-on for eyewear
Walmart is expanding its array of virtual try-on services for shoppers with today’s news that it’s planning to acquire Memomi, an AR optical tech company and current Walmart partner offering virtual try-on experience for eyewear. Deal terms were not disclosed, but Memomi has enabled dig…