Notes

Snapchat is Growing in Popularity and has Filed for An IPO

It's officially announced: Snap, the parent company of Snapchat is going public.



Let's get the fundamentals of an IPO. The company is said to be valued at between $20 billion to $25 billion and hopes to raise $3 billion from the IPO. It will list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SNAP.



The 5-year-old company was founded by a college dropout and released its long-awaited IPO filing public Thursday. This is likely to be the largest debut for a technology firm in a long time.



The social network that is based in Los Angeles, wildly popular among teens and young adults it has been one of tech's unlikeliest successes in recent the past few years. Started by Evan Spiegel, a 26-year-old who dropped out of Stanford University, the app was once dismissed as a sexting app.



It's much more than that. Kim Kardashian, John Mayer and DJ Kahled are some of the most influential users. Snapchat allows you to post videos and photos that aren't too long, which means that posts don't stack over one another as they do on Facebook. It introduced a type of social media that's something of an antithesis to Facebook's 2 billion-strong massive.



The filing said that the company believes that the camera screen on smartphones will become the primary point of entry for all smartphone products, similar to the way that the flashing cursor was utilized as an initial point of departure for desktop devices. "This means we are willing take risks to develop innovative and exciting camera products that better reflect and improve our lives."



While it's the most high-profile public debut the tech industry has seen lately The amount Snap is seeking to raise isn't comparable to the last major tech IPO which was from Chinese online retailer Alibaba. The Alibaba IPO, which took place in 2014, raised nearly $22 billion. Facebook comes in second, after raising $16 billion in 2012.



Snap also said it now has more than 158 million daily users. Snap reported $404.5 million in sales in 2016 which is an increase of $58.7 from 2015.



Spiegel & Co. have extended their vision beyond the main Snapchat feature. In September, they launched Spectacles, flamboyant smart sunglasses priced at $130 that come with a camera for video that are designed to make posting to Snapchat easy (pun intended).



In its filing, Snap said Spectacles have not yet "generated significant revenue" for the company. The launch of the product has been limited.



Snapchat's mysterious appeal with teens has been its main weapon until now. Sexting However, if Snap intends to grow as an open-source business it will need to expand beyond its existing users. Snapchat claims on its website that it is able to reach 41 percent of all people aged 18 to 34 in the United States. And nearly 70 percent of all 18-to-24-year-olds in the US use the app according to ComScore.



CNET Magazine: Here are a few stories that you will find in CNET Magazine's newsstand edition.


My Website: https://sexting.ink/