[randartie]

With TenCent having the pull that they do in China, I wonder if this could mean Snapchat possibly being unblocked in China soon.

The cynical part of me thinks that when a big purchase like this happens, the buyer knows something we don’t.

Then again, they bought 5% of Tesla as well this year.

[Naritai]

I don't think that's cynical at all. If you're going to spend a ton of money on something, you'd better have analyzed it more closely than has the general public.

[zitterbewegung]

Nah, they just want to do something with all that money they have. Leaving it in China might be an issue if the market in China changes.

[verelo]

So why not just buy something safe, like a US bond?

[pm90]

Diversification. The Chinese Govt. already holds trillions of dollars in US bonds.

I think if Snap goes south and wants to get acquired, Tencent would get first dibs. It would be in a better position to gobble up the company and get all those engineers who already have a ton of messaging app experience for cheap.

[tanilama]

They don't need another IM, they have WeChat and QQ, both have close to 1 billion users in China. I didn't see how SnapChat has something that Tencent can't offer in WeChat much so they would want release a standalone app.

[ghthor]

Despite the poor sales of the spectacles, the hardware itself is actually really well designed and functional, If it wasn't bogged down by being bound to the snapchat app. I assume this is the source of the value tencent is investing in, a hardware design company.

[giobox]

I'd agree there are parts of the Spectacles user experience that were nicely done, but I'd draw the line at "really well designed and functional" as you describe it. Each press of the button only recorded 10 seconds of video up to a max length of just 30 seconds, it could only store about 30 minutes total, the battery could only manage ~15 minutes of recording before dying, transferring HD clips via wifi was pretty awful...

The design, while about as good as we've seen for glasses with a camera strapped to them, still left a lot to be desired. Not everyone is going to want such a giant plastic pair of sunglasses on their face either, and the yellow camera ring wasn't exactly subtle.

Some interesting ideas in there for sure, and I'd genuinely be interested to see what future revisions may/might have looked like, but as it is today it has a long ways to go before I'd call it both "well designed and functional". I'm not surprised in the least this fizzled out once the pretty nicely done viral marketing campaign with the vending machines ended.

The 'circular' recording/playback format for the video that meant every recording worked in either landscape or portrait was really nice though. It was especially neat how one could alter the viewing format while the video played by rotating the phone, almost as if exposing a rectangular portion of the underlying circle. The charging case was also a nice touch.

[gaius]

Snapchat people are mainly interested in selfies. It was always going to be a stretch to sell them a product that was about other people. That suggests a bigger issue: that Snapchat's management doesn't understand its user base, and will therefore struggle to develop new products for them.

[umeshunni]

Good point. Also, failure of the product in the US doesn't necessarily preclude it from being successful in China or other Asian markets where the cultural norms around wearables might be different.

[alexbeloi]

I use WeChat and Snapchat, they are not at all interchangeable.

[hkmurakami]

Or this is just a way to cheaply buy into the US messaging market, where Wechat is still weak.

I'd also personally rather just keep my domestic messaging monopoly than let in another competitor.

[speeq]

I believe Tencent also invested something like $50M in Kik.

[dmix]

I'm surprised it's banned there... how could Snapchat possibly be threatening to the Chinese government? Are selfy videos really danger to the party? Were the keyword filters not effective?

[pavlov]

There are two things about Snapchat that rub Chinese authorities the wrong way:

1) Ephemeral messaging. They want to keep records of what people are saying.

2) Reputation for sexting. Pornography is a major target for censorship in China.

[balls187]

Has it been proven that snap does not record messages?

[dannyw]

Has it been disputed that Snap, a publicly traded company who will fall under GDPR, with thousands (?) of employees, are not recording messages?

[imron]

> how could Snapchat possibly be threatening to the Chinese government?

Any messaging system that the Chinese government isn't able to assert control over and have access to gets banned.

[toast0]

It's running on Google infra, of course it's banned.

[JulianRaphael]

They also seem to run on AWS, so not necessarily a problem. http://fortune.com/2017/02/09/snap-inc-signs-big-aws-deal/

[wiradikusuma]

there's an "open source" Google App Engine called AppScale that can run outside Google Cloud.

[dymk]

Managing the software used to run a cloud platform isn't the hardest part of running a cloud platform. It would be a significantly larger effort for Snap to run and manage their own physical infrastructure. It's a big reason why Google Cloud is a service that makes money.