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.
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.
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.
I'd also personally rather just keep my domestic messaging monopoly than let in another competitor.
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.
Any messaging system that the Chinese government isn't able to assert control over and have access to gets banned.