Snapchat's hardware ambitions are supposed to be a secret. Yet, there have been enough clues left behind (thanks to a combination of LinkedIn and the Sony hack) for us to begin piecing together a picture of what exactly Snapchat is up to.
The company started its eyewear ambitions as early as 2014, and most recently joined a Bluetooth special interest group as an "adopter" — an indicator that it's going to use that technology potentially in its secret glasses.
Here's what we know so far about Snapchat's secretive hardware plans:
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Snapchat's hardware ambitions started in March 2014 when it paid $15 million for Vergence Labs, a company that made glasses that could record video (pictured below on a model).
The acquisition was supposed to be a secret, but it came to light in the aftermath of the Sony hacks.
Deal terms in Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton's (a Snapchat board member) emails suggest Snapchat paid $15 million for the company, with $11 million of the price in cash and $4 million in stock.
Vergence Labs was famous for its "Epiphany Eyewear", a line of smart glasses that could record video and store up to 32GB of data.
Of the Vergence Labs team, several employees, including one of its cofounders, still work at Snapchat.
At the time, no one knew why Snapchat had bought a glasses company, but one of its investors had talked about an easy way to share from a smart device to Snapchat. “People haven’t thought about use cases on new computing platforms. In one tap you take a photo, one more and you can share it. Imagine [the difficulty] trying to post on Instagram from a Google Glass device,” Thomas Laffont, managing director of Coatue, told Forbes in 2014.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider