Snapchat Reportedly Acquires Bitmoji Maker Bitstrips For $100 Million (fortune.com) 33
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.
Insane (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Free emoji for the homeless!
Shoes for Industry! Shoes for the Dead! [youtube.com]
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.
Re:Insane (Score:4)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (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.
Tulips! (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
The character creation tool for Final Fantasy XIV is a lot more complex and I only paid $20 for that game.
ayfkm (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.
Seems like $100M is the entry level these days (Score:2)
pigeonholing ones emotions to others holes (Score:2)
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 )
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Bubble bubble, Snake-oil and trouble (Score:3)
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 snapchat development team should be hung (Score:2)
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
Wat (Score:1)
$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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.