Snapchat – Photo Sharing App – Now Worth $800 Million
Launched in 2011 the developers behind the photo sharing app Snapchat have just secured around $60 million in fundng, according to Petapixel, this investment ‘pegs the value of the company at a staggering $800 million’.
It’s a well known fact that the best ideas are the simple ones and Snapchat fits that remit. The purpose of the app is to transmit images to their friends mobile devices – but the ‘catch’ is that the photo only display for tens seconds or less – the app sends a notification message to the sender when the recipient screencaps the image. That’s it and believe it or not over 200 million snaps are shared via this service daily. In February this year there were 60 million daily snaps shared, with this new round of funding this service is about to get a lot bigger.
It’s interesting but as Petapixel point out ‘despite the impressive valuation, however, it remains to be seen how Snapchat will monetize the service moving forward’.
Click here to download Snapchat and give it a try for yourselves.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.Her journalism, criticism and commentary have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography, Android Magazine, NikonPro, DPReview, Which Digital Camera and Which Camera. She has lectured internationally on photography and mobile art, served as a juror for international photography awards, and exhibited her own photographic work across the UK, Europe, South Korea and the United States.Alongside her editorial work, Joanne's photographic and postgraduate research explores death, grief, memory, representation and social inequality through contemporary photography, participatory practice and visual research methods, with the longer-term aim of developing this work through doctoral research.Through TheAppWhisperer, she continues to publish independent photography journalism spanning contemporary photographic practice, mobile imaging, photographic apps, computational photography and emerging imaging technologies.Joanne is available for editorial commissions, photography projects, judging, curatorial work, speaking engagements, consultancy and selected collaborations.
