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Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles

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231–240 of 342 posts

Re: Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles

#231

There's been an empty store on exchange place in NYC financial district (near Tiffany's) that for a couple weeks has had a huge Snapchat logo taking up the entire window. I wonder if they're also gonna explore retail along with hardware.

That's probably their New York office.

Re: Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles

#233

Hype and grumbles aside, I believe optimizing the "I want to record what I'm seeing right now" to a tap near your temple is pretty compelling. Fumbling to get my camera out of my pocket, or even just grab from tabletop and swipe-to-cam is often long enough to miss that precious moment with my daughter.

True, this removes a ton of useless and uber-annoying friction.

And replaces it with the uselessness of only being able to record to snapchat and the friction of only 10 seconds at a time.

Re: Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever use the first iPhone? It could barely make PHONE calls. It was a terrible phone.

Are you seriously comparing a pair of shitty-looking sunglasses to the iPhone? These are sunglasses that take a ten second video that is tied to Snapchat. They cost 130 bucks and immediately signal that you are a techie douchebag because that's what people still associate video-taking glasses with. It is literally a novelty toy that is using a WSJ article (native content advertising) to make it seem like a revolution…

I spoke to a 25 year old girl this morning that is not a techie, but likes Snapchat, and she had already heard of the glasses and wanted a pair. Sample size of one, but I'm pretty confident that non-techies will buy them.

The question is whether it can grow to anything bigger than instant film Polaroids, which people also buy and enjoy using at parties, etc.

Re: Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead serious. "Cool" is all this product needs to be successful. People buy sunglasses. People like Snapchat. At $129 this is a no-brainer. Don't underestimate the power of social signaling.

> Don't underestimate the power of social signaling. You mean the social signaling that is going to brand these users as "glassholes" as well? >At $129 this is a no-brainer. Please step out of your tech bubble. Most snapchat users are teenagers or college-age persons who absolutely do not have $129 to drop on a pair of novelty sunglasses.

Cheaper than a pair of raybans, which are fairly ubiquitous. If they are successful, the price will drop too. If the hardware is minimal, and people like the design, why not buy these instead of whatever other sunglasses they were going to buy and get a fun toy as well?

Re: Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever use the first iPhone? It could barely make PHONE calls. It was a terrible phone.

Are you seriously comparing a pair of shitty-looking sunglasses to the iPhone? These are sunglasses that take a ten second video that is tied to Snapchat. They cost 130 bucks and immediately signal that you are a techie douchebag because that's what people still associate video-taking glasses with. It is literally a novelty toy that is using a WSJ article (native content advertising) to make it seem like a revolution…

The article says over and over again it's a toy.

Young people, 14-25 are going to buy these and make them cool. Not the 35 year old engineers who bought Google Glass.

Google has never made something cool. Snapchat was cool out of the gate.

Re: Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever use the first iPhone? It could barely make PHONE calls. It was a terrible phone.

Are you seriously comparing a pair of shitty-looking sunglasses to the iPhone? These are sunglasses that take a ten second video that is tied to Snapchat. They cost 130 bucks and immediately signal that you are a techie douchebag because that's what people still associate video-taking glasses with. It is literally a novelty toy that is using a WSJ article (native content advertising) to make it seem like a revolution…

Everything you just said are things people said about every iteration in the tablet market. Including the iteration to the iphone.

I'm not personally enamored with these glasses either, but let's be fair. Plenty of folks considered the iphone an expensive tool for douchebags at its release. This is true of nearly all new personal computing products and is not a distinguishing characteristic.

Re: Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One tenth the cost, one tenth the functionality. This is just a wireless camera for your smart phone. Point and shoot, that's it. It really reminds me of the cheap "Spy Sunglasses" I had as a kid. Glass had a camera but it was secondary. Glass was about AR, it was an interactive experience.

Except the market isn't ready for this. Impedance mismatch.

This is the key that nobody seems willing to admit in this thread. For about fifty different reasons, most of which have been hashed out ad nauseum, these products are not what people want.

The best you can say right now is that there's a prospective customer base who wants these kinds of products to be popular or even just not considered laughable, but we're not there yet.

Re: Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few of the more significant American innovations in the last 15-20 years: -CRISPR, gene editing -iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. -re-usable space rockets (Spacex and Blue Origin) -IBM's Watson and Deep Blue, Google's AlphaGo -LIGO's detection of gravitational waves -MIT's improvements in lithium ion technology -NASA's exploratory discoveries on Mars, Mercury, Pluto, Saturn, etc. -Google -Wikipedia -Facebook -Tesla…

How does Uber always make these lists? It's a taxi app. You can hold it up as a well-done business, but you can't call it a technological breakthrough.

If you think you can't use technology to innovate on the business model, you don't understand innovation.

Re: Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles

#240
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Google learned with glass and Twitter still needs to learn: If you don't know what your product is for, your customer is unlikely to figure it out for you.

Twitter might be a bad example, given that's exactly how it rose to popularity

I think Twitter is a complicated example: it thrived when they were building a product which the developers wanted to use personally, which included embracing ideas which other developers had made for their users.

The decline started when they started building what the VCs thought would be a winning lottery ticket: that was when they started closing the service and everything became focused the pitch to advertisers without enough balance on what their users might want.

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