I think this is brilliant. Even the press details seem perfectly crafted, with one article referencing Evan's "supermodel girlfriend."
Snapchat can win here based on brand alone. The hardware features are a plus, but they're going to sell a lifestyle. Think GoPro + Versace. Commenters here are caught up in the tech. It's not the tech. Get a few celebrities in these, people will buy them and barely use the recording features. They're cheaper than Ray-Bans and I bet you and half of your friends own a pair of those.
Snapchat can assemble an AR powerhouse from the ground up with brand goodwill. Evan and his team have figured out the best market strategy to do so. Google is not "cool" and could never attempt to pull this off.
I have tremendous respect for Evan Spiegel right now. Bold move. Amazingly positioned. I wish them the best of luck. Dare I say, it has the scent of Jobs to it - the vision, the risk ("we make sunglasses now!") and definitely the "cool-factor." Don't misinterpret - this isn't the iPhone, not yet anyway, but I think they're on to something very big.
This product is about branding. But not about SnapChat's branding. And at $129/pop, certainly not about Versace's either. Branding is about putting the innate and immutable truth about the product in the forefront.
What is the immutable truth about Spectacles? To get there, we will take my obligatory tour of the immutable truth about "Glass". Glass started out as evil empire all the way. Visually, Glass looks the headgear the Cardassian Commanders wore while fighting side-by-side with other races in The Dominion. Got that? The Evilest of Evil Empires. Add to that, the subtle design aspects that tried to make Glass as invisible as possible to passersby. Though noticeable to the trained eye, Glass was certainly not prominent in the visual hierarchy of the average person. And if you were in the room with someone wearing Glass, you never knew if they were recording you. Glass is covert and voyeuristic, and that's what people hated about Glass.
So, back to what the "Spectacles" brand is. It's basis is in fun. A serious design effort to make them look fashionable. Perhaps not everyone's taste, but you can tell they didn't use a stock frame out of the catalog of a Chinese sunglass factory. Combine the shape with some goofy (or "ironic" in hipster parlance) color/pattern options, Spectacles come off as an every day stylish person's accessory. Add to that, the LEDs around the camera light up when recording, so you know when the wearer has chosen to record. They are right out in the open with their intent, not slithering around in the shadows like some Glasshole.
He is like Jobs in the sense that he didn't invent Snapchat and he didn't code it. Maybe he articulated the philosophy of it being an anti-Kodak moment app.
The article quotes someone saying Evan's the "best product visionary" they had ever met. Give a smart kid a hot app, millions in funding and thus more smart minds, and great things can happen. But let's not overly romanticize it.
I am impressed by Snapchat's evolution, Stories etc but all that is somewhat obvious iterations on someone else's initial idea.
Snapchat is fun and sexy for a variety of reasons, none of which correlate well with people wearing clunky glasses. Spectacles aren't cool and won't be. It's a head-mounted camera. It needs to be more sleek, more expensive, and have some novel features to be considered a status symbol.
Hey Amy - just a couple of rando thoughts from 35,000 LAX-JFK:
- A rising trend we see with Millennials are the really extreme forms of experiential exercise like Tough Mudder (a sort of filthy triathalon), the Color Run and even things like Hot Power Yoga, veganism etc. Millennials will often post “N.B.D.” on their social media after doing it , as in No Big Deal, also known as the “humble brag”.....wondering if Spidey could get into that in some way....he’s super athletic, bendy, strong, intense....and it’s all NBD to him, of course.
- EDM (electronic dance music) is the defining music for Millennials. Wondering if there’s an EDM angle somewhere with Spidey? His movements are beautiful, would be awesome with a killer DJ behind it
- Snapchat just launched a “story” functionality, which is sort of “day in the life of me” told in a series of snapchats that expire after 24 hours. It has a very VIP quality about it, since invitation only. Getting invited into Spidey’s Snapchat circle would be huge, and very buzzworthy and cool.
You're essentially saying that if Evan Spiegel had released Google Glass, it would have been successful because Evan is cool and Google is not. First, Evan isn't that cool - he tried to cut out and leave penniless his frat brother that actually came up with the idea for Snapchat [1]. While that may be a Jobs or Zuckerberg-type move, it certainly doesn't make him cool.
Second, Glass failed largely because of the invasive techno-snob feel to it - something that Spectacles has not overcome. It's one thing to have an iPhone in your pocket; it's quite another to shove your camera and microphone enabled face computer into the lives of literally everyone you interact with.
Glass could have taken the GoPro market, except GoPro did it better.
These are positioned more for celebrity events, where everyone understands they could be on camera. The film crew are celebrities too now, or celebrities start filming their interactions, so a big bright pair of these tells everyone 'hey I'm filming!' like a big camera would.
At private parties, I imagine it's largely the same thing, except that everyone there can only post onto Snapchat where it's lost to the sands of time.
The overtness and ephemeralness fixes both of the problems people had with 'glassholes'
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.
Kanye did one of his popup stores near my house recently. Line of teenagers two blocks long waiting to buy $400 T-shirts. If it's cool, they'll find the $.
Cell phones aren't subsidized, they are just financed over 2 years (with the payment often hidden in your monthly cell phone bill). If the price of the glasses is a problem (I doubt it is), they could be financed the same way "Just give us $11/month for a year and you can have them today!"
The phone-sized early termination fees put the lie to it being any sort of subsidy.
(for "subsidy" to be a reasonable description of the flow of funds, the phone company would probably have to be losing money on the most expensive phones; of course they aren't. They provide the phone up front with a minimal payment, but they have structured the monthly fees to more than cover their costs for doing this.)
Except they charge me the same rate if I already have my device as the person in the long-term contract, just without the early termination fee. If they have structured the locked-in person's contract to cover hardware costs then they have structured mine for that as well, despite the fact that I didn't get hardware from them. Therefore, I am paying part of the hardware costs for the people who buy phones from the provider; i.e. I am subsidizing them.
Furthermore, early termination fees are constant for all contracts. The person who got the $150 phone has the same termination fee as the person who got the $600 phone. Thus again, someone is subsidizing someone else.
I'm pretty sure that people using paid for hardware are just more profitable than people that are still paying for hardware. But they make income on all the people.
And the fees aren't necessarily the same for cheaper phones:
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?
All the young 20 something year olds that I know are still not dropping $120 on sun glasses unless they are young college graduated professionals. Most are not. And I'm a 28 year old professional that wears $10 knock offs.
I'm with you on the idea that "cool" and "lifestyle" sell, especially when they're backed by celebs. That said, Snapchat isn't a lifestyle product, it's an app. Moving from pocket to face is a monumental transition with monumental challenges, but certainly one worth trying. My money says the glasses never become mass adopted but maybe Snapchat - sorry, Snap - learns a few things along the way that set it up for success with Hardware Product #2.
And hardware product #2 could be an interface with even less friction.
Remember Memoto? — The lifelogging camera that clips on your shirt; it looks like they're called Narrative now [0].
If Snapchat owns the camera hardware they have total control over analytics. They could become the platform for sharing daily moments. At some point, that's what Facebook was, except there was always an app layer in-between.
The trendy end of fashion always looks ridiculous after it falls out of style. Snapchat still has the trendiness that Google and Facebook lost long ago. If you think otherwise, find a few 20 year olds (outside of tech) and ask them what they think of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Snapchat.
Facebook probably can still use Instagram's brand, so that is an edge over Google. If they can do it soon enough while resisting branding the hardware as "Facebook" is another matter. That also means they probably have to already be close to releasing a finished product.
The larger question to me is who will have the stamina to thrive in the post-smartphone era? Snapchat may be able to break to ice and get a lot of people to wear something weird and clunky. By generation two or three, what happens if Apple, Magic Leap, or someone else is able to produce a more refined & seamless wearable? To "win" Snapchat will have to produce an incredibly robust AR headset that no one thinks twice about wearing all day long.
Other commenters are correct, the article reads like a shameless press release.
The price is quite right. The design remains to be tested in real environments with real people. Let's not forget the reactions to Google Glass. Framing (pun intended) of the intended use will be everything
No, they look ridiculous. If anyone walked up to me wearing those I'd have to really restrain myself from ripping them off their face and stepping on them. At the very least they'd get a laugh.
It doesn't look ridiculous to the audience its catered to. Thick frames are in style & its symmetrical. A typical snapchat user would not be concerned by most of the things mentioned on this thread, except that these glasses fit a certain lifestyle these users are aspiring to. I.e what you could be doing with these glasses on you as opposed to anything to do with the glasses themselves.
I guess the only way to find whos right is to wait a few months to see what its uptake is like
As part of the audience it's catered to, it absolutely looks ridiculous. The question is, is it useful/interesting/popular/trendy enough to warrant that ridiculousness? It'll depend on how they market it.
My opinion is that Snapchat is pretty good already, so why would I need this? Hence my analysis is that it would be difficult for Snap to market this product effectively without cannibalizing their existing product, so it's interesting to see whether they will make the queen's gambit.
Does the typical snapchat user hang out on HN? When I think of snapchats core audience I think 18 year olds who are "super social" and care a lot about fashion and "new stuff".
Yes. To the average person I know who looks at HN, their first reaction is "EW what's wrong with this webpage, it's gross!" this even includes some devs I've met...
Their audience still has tons of 20-somethings [0], and a lot of topics on HN are catered toward startups, which are (like it or not) biased toward 20- and 30-somethings.
Yeah, my guess is it will be similar to the Apple Watch. Somewhat popular for a little while with people working in tech or tech-media, but completely non-existent in the 'real world'.
I hardly know any people who still have a traditional watch, yet alone a smart watch, so #2 watchmaker doesn't mean much to me ;) I haven't seen many Apple Watches yet in the wild (may be 2 or 3) might have to do with the fact that I'm from Germany (Berlin). A lot of iPhones here though. I know, anecdotal evidence etc...
You are underestimating the popularity of the Apple Watch. Sure, it's nowhere near as ubiquitous as the iPhone, but it's by no means limited to tech circles. Part of the problem is that many people that might be ineterested in one were not able to justify the price. With the new price drop on the series 1 I suspect the market share will inrease significantly. Others meanwhile were waiting for the second generation because they didn't want to be on the bleeding edge. The series 2 is sold out everywhere and has a 3-5 week lead time, about the same as the iPhone.
The Spectables are a godsend for parents with little children and pet owners, as clearly demonstrated in the leaked promo video. Absolutely brilliant. I can't wait to see the endless stream of babies, toddlers, cats and dogs on Snap, Face or Twit. And cakes, don't forget the cakes! It will be like heaven, but Heaven 2.0! Snap will IPO so hard.
Take a long, deep breath. Then take a few steps backwards, so you can take the scene in with a slightly broader perspective. Now hark back to how many times someone has been breathlessly been compared to Steve Jobs and how many times the person who has made that comparison has ended up looking silly. Let's give Evan a few years before we start fanboying him.
LMAO right? These are literally shitty-looking sunglasses with a ten second loop camera on them that's only usable with Snapchat. These will be handed out at fancy NYC/LA/SF parties where people will play with them for a minute or so before putting them back down and going on their phones.
Try to understand the essence of the problem and the whole thing makes perfect sense.
Problem: many spontaneous moments are missed because the phone is not immediately accessible. The phone is in the pocket and it takes seconds to dig out the phone and switch to the camera app, and by that time I missed the moment.
Solution: put a camera at line of sight. Make it super simple to capture.
When you phrase it as a camera you mount to your head, it sounds super creepy. The sunglass is a natural vehicle for the camera since most people have sunglasses and wear them when it is sunny outside. It allows for validation testing of the idea, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a prescription version if the demand is there.
> Solution: put a camera at line of sight. Make it super simple to capture.
But these are sunglasses which are unlikely to be worn much indoors. So one might still have to fumble in a bag for the glasses, don them to put the camera in line of sight and then take a snap.
What really irks me is the overloading of the term 'spectacles'. These are absolutely not spectacles as commonly understood: "lenses to help a person's sight". But henceforth, any time anyone wants to search for spectacles they'll have to include terms to exclude Snapchat's gadget.
Surely they could have saved some of the money they spent on buying spectacles.com and invented a unique name. Snapticles? ( Google lists four hits for that word right now ).
A Spectacle is also a performance or something worth watching. One could say many moments in our lives are spectacles that few people see, and recording those would help us share.
Why not just enjoy the spontaneous moment rather than fiddling with a phone or press a button on the glasses. The odds of looking back through all your archived 10 second video and reliving the spontaneous moment is pretty nill.
Because thats not how narcissism works. Social media is everyone's highlight reel; enjoying the moment to yourself doesn't create envy or FOMO in your social circles.
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 revolutionary technology / something cool. No one is going to buy these.
Yes, Chrome is extremely popular among that age group, but many popular things aren't cool. For example, the Big Bang Theory is something very popular but even the fans wouldn't say it's cool.
In fact many things are cool in part because they are not overly popular, and often decrease in coolness as they become popular.
Gmail and Chrome were indeed innovative once, and perhaps you could argue they were cool back then, but today they are just a commodity - people (especially in that age group) just take them for granted, "it's what we use." They aren't cool.
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.
I think the glasses are stupid, but then again, I thought the whole idea behind snapchat was stupid to begin with, yet here we are.
Obviously my finger is not on the pulse of today's youth. I don't think the kids today will be too inclined to shell out $130 for these gimmicky things, but my judgement on such matters is demonstrably terrible.
Not a kid, but I absolutely love the idea of a camera at eye level that can capture what I'm seeing. Many times I've missed random animal sightings or funny moments because I didn't have a camera at the ready (and sometimes it takes a while to dig out the phone).
I thought about what could go right. It's going to be huge.
It'll be memeable instagram for commodity VR. 10 second FPV clips will become the next creative currency- the new 140 characters. It's an untrodden and instantly democratized new medium, but could only get the needed network effect if it's backed by someone with Snapchat's clout.
By the time useful AR comes to market, Snap will have all the best creative content.
The ten second limit could be helpful for social acceptance, plus these look more like Raybans and not the gargoyle glasses that Google Glass embodied.
If you check the website, you'll see they have lights built around the lens to "show friends your snapping." I imagine this was specifically built to assuage that concern.
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.
Not sure how it's brilliant. Secondly, it still suffers from that fact that literally everyone is creeped out by a rando staring at them with two cameras. At least a phone is halfway obvious when in use.
Maybe the main market will eventually be little kids. This is obviously a toy after all, and who would ever be creeped out when ot is used in that context.
I'm guessing you haven't been the obvious standout (in terms of being different, not amazing) in a crowd.
I live in Thailand and having occasional locals who literally eye-ball fuck you without blinking because it's so novel for them to see a foreigner, I can tell you that someone just staring at you is creepy, regardless of their age.
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.
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.
Yes, that's why it's different. People aren't ready to commit to wearing technology on their face. This is more like a costume or a party game, something to try out briefly in a friendly situation rather than commit to as a serious part of your look. It would be more popular if it were cheaper, but at least people can pass it around.
It reminds me of the difference between Google Cardboard and real VR in the level of commitment required.
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.
I guess it's a matter of what "want" means. People might want it in a few moments, and some see it as obvious but the actual people are not "in the mood" right now. Basically, what you just said (I only read the first sentence before typing heh).
I think this is significantly better than what Google did with Google Glass.
It's better because it focuses on the one thing that is really easy to do well. It does not try to do everything at once. It doesn't try to give you apps in your glasses and everything under the sun. This is the right approach to products. Do one thing but do that well.
Before you criticize me think back to the original iPhone, it didn't start with an App Store and everything under the sun like the iwatch did. And yet the iPhone is an icon and the watch is no big deal.
It also doesn't look nearly as dorky as Google Glass did. Google Glass had the problem where it was trying to be an all-purpose life-enhancing thing that people would wear all the time, so it was trying to be both invisible and distinctive. This doesn't need to pretend to be something that you can forget you're wearing or something that you can pair with any type of outfit -- it has a strong sense of style, and it's easier to work cameras into a design that is loud than a design that is quiet.
These glasses are going to be a huge hit thanks to their style. The main userbase of snapchat are product-hungy 12-25 year olds without much conviction; they'll jump at the chance to get a product that looks cool and represents their favourite timesink. I am very impressed with this move because it gives Snapchat a supplement to ad-based revenue. I hope this makes them a lot of money.
I do think it will be a lot more successful than most here think.
First off, Snapchat (Snap?) isn't Google - their brands are completely different at least among the target audience. Glasses of some sort are inevitably going to be a fashion accessory with extra functionality, and Google is just too uncool. They are the company that wants to knows everything - every interaction refreshes that impression, from Street View vans to Search.
Second, it's sold as a camera on your face, instead of a computer on your face that can do things like recording a video. Even if it's the same hardware, this does make a difference. Everyone understands pseudo-mechanical functions like "press a button to take a 10 second video". Unless the wearer is mashing a button by their face, you can assume it's off. Computers and phones? One might as well assume it's recording video if the operator has the camera pointed at you. The average HNer has a good mental model of how a computer works, but the average person sees it as a magic-infused black box.
The price point looks reasonable, I assume the goal here is strong sales for the holidays. Would expect some celebrities or whoever to be spotted wearing these in the next few months.
I'm truly curious, why would you hope it makes them a lot of money? couldn't care less about the fact if a company makes money with a new product. It's not a company that has a shot at world peace or curing all diseases, so why care?
It is important that tech growth continues for a long time. I am very concerned that ad-based revenue will not sustain forever. We need more physical goods and more faith in technology, as every other industry is stagnant. No generation will ever have it as good as those who thrived in the last half of the 20th century and it upsets me greatly.
The above three comments to me summerise what has qualified as American Innovation for the last 15-20 years.
When you are surrounded by the superficial, building things for the superficial what else can you produce other than the superficial. It is sad as hell to watch. It isn't ironic to me that Trump is going to be leading this bunch of innovators soon.
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
-Uber
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.
Actually AlphaGo is British. DeepMind was well ahead on that road when Google bought it. All the rest is American AFAIK even if other countries have similar technologies and successes for space exploration and detection of gravitational waves. If you go back more than 20 years, space exploration was USA vs USSR with an early Soviet advantage.
Also, Elon Musk came from South Africa and did not become a US citizen until 2002.. I don't know that that makes anything that Tesla or SpaceX have invented to be not completely American, but if he is considered the driving force, then .. there could be a doubt
Hey, immigration is great! Steve Jobs was also the son of an immigrant..
I don't understand. None of the above commenters mentioned anything about innovation; they just said the Spectacles looks like it'll be a successful product. Appreciating successful capitalism is half of what this forum is about.
An alternative way of thinking about this is that we're fortunate that our needs are so well provided for that we can focus on entertainment and life enrichment.
A camera at eye level is extremely useful for many reasons, snapchat is just one, excellent use case. In my own life, I have a use for that specific tool, and am glad it exists - Google Glass was never widely released. And the price is great - at $129 this seems amazingly affordable.
>An alternative way of thinking about this is that we're fortunate that our needs are so well provided for that we can focus on entertainment and life enrichment.
It's a nice way of thinking of it and hopefully it's true one day, but unless "our" means the typical HN reader, I don't think we're there yet. Consider that in the US in 2015, 43.1 million people were living in poverty (13.5% poverty rate) [1], and income inequality continues to rise [2].
The other part of my comment I didn't write because I thought it would basically be evident without spelling it out: problems like poverty and income inequality aren't solved by tech innovators.
The actual problems that do exist in the U.S and the rest of the developing world are social problems. No amount of big disruptive thinking (by tech folk) is going to solve them.
If you look at SV's attempt to solve medical problems, you start to see where regulation and oversight are necessary for the difficult problems. Then you see why large governments, large companies, and exceptionally smart people with the backing of those organizations are the ones who need to solve the problem.
On top of all that, there's so often no actual intent to solve those problems. Poverty in the US is a big problem because the people who are capable of solving it just don't care enough to. In the case of government, voters are too self interested in the short term to push for it - how many times do you see complaints about hard earned tax dollars being used for poor people?
Even when the tech people do try to solve a social problem because the public has decided to care about it, attempts are misled and ineffective. If you look at the problem of diversity, companies are tryin to solve their problems at demand side. Big companies compete for female engineers to boost their numbers and smaller companies can't match their offers. This looks good on Apple's diversity report, but the problem is disguised, not fixed. Actual solutions, like encouraging women to become interested in STEM when they're young are few and far between.
So yes, I'd like tech innovators to focus on solving non-problems with life enriching innovations (slack, twitch, twitter, facebook, steam, VR, AR, bluetooth audio, etc) then waste time on misguided attempts that are way out of range for them.
Don't assume all HN users are narcissists and politically uninterested. I for one have very personal needs that are directly connected to what is going on politically and socially in the world.
I'm not - I'm just saying that, generally speaking, most of our 'needs' (the important stuff like food, water, shelter) have been met. Everything else, mostly all that's discussed on this site, is unimportant & frivolous 'wants'.
I'm not saying this as a criticism, just explaining the comment thread.
That's a good point, but "better" is a subjective word. If an individual is capable of enjoying life while using cocaine, without regrets that outweigh their experience, then cocaine has enriched their life. Drugs are always a mixed bag, and the bad generally outweighs the good, in my opinion. Others may feel differently though, so I don't want to deprive them of their definition of life enrichment. Enrichment is not enlightenment: If anyone claims these glasses will make a person's life more enlightened, I would then be skeptical. Enriched though, I can accept. Let's first imagine some of the less valuable things people may be doing with their time, specifically in the targeted age range.
It's impossible for attractive, socially connected, young people to be creepy.
So, it's pretty brilliant for Snapchat to be making this sort of thing. Probably the devices to hit the market will be given to a very carefully curated set of people, and ubiquitous surveillance by camera-glasses will become fashionable.
Based on the number of vlogs I see on YouTube shot with DSLRs, I don't think many people care about being filmed.
I probably show up in hundreds of videos from bike commuting over the Brooklyn Bridge. It doesn't matter. I'm guessing 99.99% of the videos go unwatched anyway.
I don't know much about vlogging, but I assume that the controversy would increase views/shares/revenue, and as a result, you'd want to keep the controversial segments in.
Probably not, but that doesn't help the CEO's case on whether he has a handle on what the young'ins (I suppose you'd call them) think is creepy or not.
Maybe it is, but I don't think it's clear at this point. People certainly aren't going to wear this all the time, but I could definitely see it getting worn for many specific occasions. I see the niche it as something closer to a GoPro for things that aren't extreme sports. I already get random snapchats from friends and coworkers in their early to mid 20s who are dancing at a club, doing whatever it is people do at music festivals, running around in the park, or whatever. It's awkward to pull out a phone and start taking video when you're in a club, but people do it anyway because these are social experiences that people want to document and want to share with their friends. If there is a hands free, less annoying way to do that without looking like a dweeb, I could totally see a large demographic doing it. These aren't the types of events where people are creeped out by there randomly being cameras -- clubs often have semi-official photographers who will go around taking pictures anywyay. I think most people in their early twenties (or younger) are generally very used to cameras being present in these types of situations.
>It's awkward to pull out a phone and start taking video when you're in a club
From my perspective, that's a feature not a problem. It's obvious what you're doing, and of you try to photograph something really inappropriate, I can always slap the phone out of your hand. With snapchat (or google glass) style specs, I essentially need to attack your face to stop you filming, a far more aggressive action. I'd love to be able to bank on people knowing when not to film, but theres always one shitbag at every emergancy callout trying to get a really gnarly shot of someone elses broken arm so they can get dank internet points from their friends.
Comments like this always remind me of when camera phones were controversial and had to make a loud clicking noise when they took pictures so everyone knew it was happening. Fast forward 10-15 years and do you really know whether that person using their phone across from you on the bus isn't recording you?
Uh, yep? If you're using your phone for reading or some such, it is perhaps at a 45 degree angle to the horizontal, or even less. If you're sneaking a creep shot, the angle is much greater. You can always tell when someone is clicking a picture.
Not only that, but phones know where you are and start making noise! I was in Tokyo and saw a cute father and baby and wanted to take a photo on the train, but the phone made a loud "click!" even in silent mode, and I looked like a perv.
At least the Japanese were too polite to say anything.
I obviously don't agree with you based on my previous comment but I could be wrong. I will say this though that we all vastly underestimate what people want to do and share with each other. This is the company that spawned the self deleting video. I thought that was the dumbest idea ever. My point is privacy is something they thought of and this isn't as dumb as it looks.
This product could evolve to become more than meets the eye. No pun intended.
Teenagers right now have a different attitude about how their camera interacts with the world, by virtue of having been raised in a perpetually-filmable world. For a teenager, everyone they know has had a camera with them pretty much as long as they can remember. They've already got a camera pointed at them all the time. It only takes a few seconds to start filming something with your phone.
People who are 30 are going to be weirded out by this. People who are 18 are not. They already have the assumption that anything they do in public might be filmed and shared on social media. And they want to be able to quickly film anything they're doing in public and put it on social media.
Agree to an extent. Personally, being aware that this only records for 10 seconds and requires a tap to activate, I can feel pretty confident nothing is recording.
Then again, even if I know someone is pointing an empty gun at me, I'm still of the mindset "don't point that at me!"
Sorry, I have to disagree with you here. Google Glass never achieved mass adoption amongst consumers due to the simple fact that they weren't fashionable, imo. Excluding SV, many people saw them as ugly and creepy.
Really? Pretty sure we walk in and out of several hundred (thousand?) camera FOVs every day. Google Glass didn't succeed because you looked like a total dork wearing it. These are a bit silly, but they also acknowledge that they're a bit silly. Google was just classically out of touch, as always.
Don't buy this do one thing and well for a second.
Using your own example:
Before the iPhone, you had seperate:
GPS
Camera
Flashlight
MP3 Player
and many other things
With the iPhone, you got all of these and a nice compact package that you could carry with you at all times. Thats not to say feature creep can't be a problem, but more that sticking to hard and fast rules like 'do one thing but do that well' is largely an oversimplification of the world to make the world more comprehendible to those that don't want to look at the real nuance of products/markets etc.
Also, in the now famous introductory presentation of the iPhone, Jobs even spoofed the audience that there were 3 products he was about to release, spinning them all into 1 item.
It didn't have GPS and I think no flashlight, but it did have a camera, could play MP3s (and Video) and even supported geotagging for photos (though not GPS based)
I disagree. It's better because the marketing doesn't suggest that it's anything more than a toy. There's no expectation that you're going to reorient your lifestyle around the Spectacles, but it was implied that you would be filming your entire life 24/7 with Google Glass.
As a productivity device it's weak, but as a toy it looks pretty fun and I'm amazed at the sea of people screaming about what a stupid idea it is and how it'll never catch on. If I had disposable income I could certainly see myself buying one and playing with it.
Of course, Glass took significant heat over the fact that it had a camera that you can record people without them knowing (except that it was quite obvious when Glass was 'on'). This thing appeals to have two cameras, and given that it just does video recording, it might be able to be on significantly longer.
I wonder if it has any privacy safeguards, like a red led indicating recording in progress?
I think the privacy safeguard here is that they're nothing but a camera, so if you're interacting with somebody who's wearing them you can assume you're being filmed.
Glass's problem was that it was a device that you were supposed to wear all the time, and a camera.
I would think that's a software limit not a hardware limit. I'm sure once these are out somebody will either jailbreak them or they'll come with no security to begin with.
What happened to google glass is textbook: Exec walks into R&D lab and falls in love with alpha stage project, utters the words: we should release this to the public, stat! and failure ensues.
Glass as a AR demonstrator is doing quite well as a beta product for enterprise. Augmedix comes to mind.
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.
There will be a lot of friction associated with being filmed and recorded all the time, as will probably be the case not with this generation of tools but in maybe 5 years
Pictures are only 1ms. Nobody had problems with it. More would make you a journalist and trigger people privacy alarm completely. The snapchat lockin is "bad" in theory, but snapchat is leveraging its market/brand/whatever and to their audience it's a no brainer.
Why? You need to seriously question the motives behind such a launch. IMHO:
[1]Snapshot is an online multimedia application.
[2]The infrastructure required to move from online to hardware requires significant investment (beyond the $1.8B they recently raised) - that of which I don't believe Snapchat can fund without a serious re-monetiziation strategy beyond Ads. It is only a matter of time before FB makes the move into Snapchat's market more than they already are.
[3]This is an unproven market. Google tried it and didn't succeed. A better play - let someone else test the market a bit more and then move in with a solid Ad monetization strategy around the Spectacles.
[4]Why Hardware?! Seriously? I believe Evan is overplaying his hands with so much VC capital coming his way.
1.8B...? not sure what you are talking about. In China, the molds for the frame don't cost more than 30kUSD (and thats on the high end). Not sure what the lenses do on the glasses so I'll hold off on an estimate. PCBs and off the shelf components have 0 overhead other than buying in MOQs which is inconsequential for snapchat.
An investment of more than a billion for a wireless camera? Are you kidding? You could probably launch a product like this for $100.000 if you keep it lean.
In terms of "hardware" Spectacles are almost a textbook example of what plenty of people with $0 funding do, tweak/private label a product from china and sell it on Amazon. Look at the range of "camera sunglasses" on Alibaba for starters.
The only difference with these are product design & software, two things that are core businesses for Snapchat. In terms of manufacturing, that custom Snapchat backpack would probably be trickier to get manufactured than this..
The fact that a product with less functionality than a $25 set of camera sunglasses on Alibaba is being compared to Google Glass really shows what a great PR/strategy move this has been for Snapchat.
If Snapchat is able to sell this product to only 5% of their 150M userbase that's 7.5M * $130 = 1B in revenue. Then they diversify their future product line somehow and keep selling to the other 95% of their users. Forget a re-monetization strategy for ads - ads make a product worse and it is refreshing that there may be another way for VC-backed companies to monetize.
The <5% who are mega influencers on one of the most influential social networks on earth, as opposed to the <5% comprised of the dorkiest people on earth (not that I have anything against dorks, seeing as I myself am somewhat dorky).
You couldn't even wear Glass in Silicon Valley, land of graphic tees and dad jeans. I could imagine seeing these anywhere from Santa Monica to NYC or Lake Tahoe to Macchu Pichu.
Quadcopters, 'hover boards' are a good example. Lots of people age 13-30 buying them, and that's people can't save money. Buying stuff they don't need and would not use - only to look cool.
Devils advocate here. You overlooking quite a few things. Realistically, let's break some things down:
Background: Google Glass
Cost: $1,500 for early adopters (irrelevant)
Cost to Manufacture: ~$100 USD
Sale Price: $299
Margin: ~33% (low)? Probably. Yes!
Yes with economies of scale...blah....blah...blah...
Let's assume (I'll use the 150M, but I don't want to):
A. 5% of their 150M userbase that's 7.5M * $130 = $1B USD
B. 5% of their 150M userbase that's 7.5M * $89 = $668M USD
C. 5% of their 150M userbase that's 7.5M * $50 = $375M USD
Let's play with some more numbers because I think 5% is super generous. Why? Yes, Snapchat's demographic is 18-24 yr olds but as you may know, new users over 35 is growing at 2X. Personally, I am under the impression that this means Snapchat is losing it's appeal with their current demographic.
A. 1% of their 150M userbase that's 1.5M * $130 = $195M USD
B. 2.5% of their 150M userbase that's 3.75M * $89 = $334M USD
C. 3% of their 150M userbase that's 4.5M * $50 = $225M USD
$1B seems a bit off from your calculations. We haven't even factored in COGS, manufacturing costs, etc. Not to mention their margins will be extremely low until they square away manufacturing which could take several years.
> Diversify their future product line...
I highly doubt it is going to happen.
> Forget a remonetization strategy for ads...
I agree! I didn't say it was the best idea, but snapchat will need to go all in or not. They can't put a toe in and decide the market isn't ready or they need to raise more capital - it will send the wrong message to investors.
Again, I am operating under the assumption that Snapchat is trying to become a brand.
You say 'realistically' but you're speculating that they are losing appeal and that they won't try and sell another product.
The only thing to realize is they have a $100+ device that is compelling to their 150M user base. That's a great sign. I think that the manufacturing chain for 'cheap shit electronics toys' is developed enough in 2016 to make good margins.
Yeah and you know what userbase that is? Product hungry 15 year olds whose identity is tied to superficial shit just like this. Apple should have taught us something: People do not care about what they're buying, they just care that it's the 'cool' thing.
Even thought I'm not "inb4" Glass comparisons this really does hit a market that I think is untapped. I used to have a "flipcam". It was before I had a phone with the ability to take HD video and before a GoPro was a choice for me because of cost (I still don't have a GoPro).
The ability to have cheaper, stylish, handsfree video recording of my POV has a lot of potential. How-to videos, the "capturing memories" as noted in the article, even just easily recording benign life experiences (police stops, for instance) seamlessly and without hassle is huge.
I do hope there is a tattletale light or something so that the average user can't surreptitiously record things and otherwise easy privacy controls... and I hope it's not long before someone hacks this or they unlock the product to do more than 10 second clips...
If I were GoPro I'd be nervous.
Edit: Actually a second thought- this would be a lot better than body cams in a lot of situations (or certainly a good companion) because it would capture the officer's line of sight.
Sure. I'm sorry I wasn't clearer. I just think they should be nervous not because they would lose customers but because they could potentially lose the market segment this is going after.
If Spectales were $99 instead of $129 I think they'd be in solid impulse buy territory, too.
I am not in marketing / sales so maybe GoPro likes being at the top and making higher end cameras and it won't matter. As it is today a pair of glasses that only records 10 seconds of video won't be able to compete anyway.
Just like Google Glass users being called Glassholes, SnapChat glasses will probably be called something like SnapChads, because only white rich guys in pastel shorts and rugby shirts named Chad will use them. The aesthetic just isn't there for wide adoption.
Being someone in the AR space, I find this a smart but risky move. If they're marked right and become "cool" I'll definitely have to cop a pair (and at $130 they're almost disposable). Spectacles will make it way easier for me to post to Snapchat at parties/concerts/etc without having to break out of the moment by taking my phone out. Strategy-wise, this is a Trojan horse into the AR hardware space, which Evan has wanted to get into for years. However, they fit way better into Snap's image of being a media company vs. directly launching an AR headset.
If i were in the AR space, i'd be very excited by this. Snapchat, probably more than any other company, has the potential to make wearing technology on your face socially acceptable. Google did not, microsoft doesn't, no unknown startup does, but there's a good chance that these glasses could do it.
The site seems blocked here (China) but if I read the comments, how is it AR? What more does it do than make a picture when you tap your temple? Is there any augmenting of reality going on, because then $130 would be 'free'.
I guess I wasn't very clear with my comment. These glasses aren't in any way AR, but if people get used to wearing Snap electronics on their face, it will be natural for them to move into the AR market
It counts as AR but not AR glasses which makes this product not very interesting... You don't need the glasses as you still need to look at your phone which would give me kind of a neck ache trying to look at my phone to see what my glasses are seeing?
Welcome to real world prices. This is definitely not disposable, this sounds like a good price for VR to me and I'd be careful with them. But they're not VR and VR is a lot more expensive, so that's why nobody outside the industry has one.
Had to scroll down pretty far to get to something about valuing the AR real estate here!
Grabbing mainstream users with integrated glasses/camera then moving up market seems like some weird but logical form of disruption.
Snapchat's flagship app has been similar -> come in the bottom and substitute for texting photos to one another -> become the primary form of social media (user generated content, consumption, time in app?) for a broad set of social media users.
Disclaimer: this coming from an avid snapchatter, hoping spectacles are a big hit.
Looks like they have learned from the glasshole debacle.
1). The messaging emphasizes it's just "a toy", a low volume experiment. More playful and more humble approach makes it a smaller target for ridicule.
2.) Pricing at $149 also makes it less pretentious and more importantly, puts it in the discretionary income range of what the heck I'll give it a shot.
If this means I can go to a public performance and no longer have to try to look past the sea of upthrust arms and glare of 1000 brightly lit screens to see what I came to see then it can't come quickly enough!
Particularly since I feel it will inspire the next product which is an IR flood light that renders all digital cameras useless, since there are so many people oblivious to the fact by trying to capture the experience for themselves they're detracting from the experience for everyone else.
Letting people who need a digital memento silently get one without intruding on the experience of those of us just there to enjoy and be in the moment is a great compromise.
Good cameras (well, practically every camera now) come with IR-cutoff filter, so the IR light to "blind" the cameras would be pretty much useless.
And the IR-filter is actually a problem for those of us who like astrophotography and have to resort to modding or (expensive) special editions of cameras.
>Good cameras (well, practically every camera now) come with IR-cutoff filter
Oh well, thanks for telling me that, Dr. Zoidberg. I wonder if flooding some IR would be enough to add enough ghosting or whiteout as to make the video captured undesirable.
Another huge innovation which is more about software than hardware is the new circular video format: you can rotate your phone and the video keeps its orientation.
A significant part of the recorded video in that demo is always off screen. If you fit it to the screen, it will be circular. This doesnt really seem to solve anything.
> (Spiegel argues that rectangles are an unnecessary vestige of printing photos on sheets of paper.)
It's also the shape of nearly all screens in the world. Perhaps I'm not visionary enough, but I don't foresee a circular computer or phone screen really improving the current situation...
Snapchat has a huge opportunity in its hand which it has limited to take full advantage of: starting a revenue share program with influencers on the platform. Facebook has yet to do it and Snapchat, which is strapped with VC dollars, can attract a lot more influencers to its platform. I think the companies on the Discover are already in some sort of revenue sharing agreement with Snapchat but brining this to the massive number of young influencers unlocks huge opportunities for Snapchat.
I'm amazed the top-rated top-level comments are all so positive. We have enough people shoving cameras into devices and situations where they don't belong. At least we know what they look like now so we can ostracize anyone wearing them.
Well I'll be completely straight and say this isn't anything new. (You've been able to buy similar video glasses from china for about 5 years now) but if it can properly integrate with the app, and slim down a LOT more. To the point the camera is unnoticeable - they could finally start making some money. Well, until the Chinese knockoffs start rolling in
For those wondering wtf are these, I don't like the styling, why do these exist...etc, well, i don't think the target market for these is hacker news viewers. I will say that they do look awesome. Way easier to use these than a go pro or hold a camera/phone. Hopefully it's not just locked down to Snapchat.
I don't understand why all these software companies are in a rush to make hardware. With the lone exception of Apple, all hardware seems to resort in a race to the bottom commoditization resulting in paper thin margins.
This article mentions Snapchat's hundreds of employees and multiple offices. This is one of the most obvious examples of the "what are they all doing?" question for me. I know it must take quite a few people to run operations at that scale, and of course they have an advertising business too, which likely explains the need for multiple offices. But it seems like Snapchat is still an extremely minimal app with only a couple of extra features being added over the years. Instagram had only 13 employees when it was acquired, so what role are most of these people in?
I like it. Seriously, "creepy" is just a word that means "I can't accept the reality doesn't work the way I'd like it".
That said, I worry about implementation. My guess is that it's going to be directly and permanently tied to Snapchat itself. Which significantly reduces the potential usefulness of this product - not everything you record is something you only want to have sent directly to Snapchat. Personally, I want files. Plain, old files. Is that so hard to understand for all those cloud-first companies?
I can't be the only one who thinks this is going to eat GoPro's lunch, am I? Sure the initial version may not be as high quality as a GoPro and the time limit isn't as good but those are easy things to fix and they have a monstrous social network (something GoPro is sorta trying to break into).
That's just a software limitation that could be bypassed if the device gets jailbroken, redirecting the creepiness from the company to a single user (who decided to jailbreak to take longer videos).
If enough people start jailbreaking their Spectacles, Snapchat good could then get rid of this limitation.
Where are those 10 second videos stored? At Snapchat, on the phone, into the glasses? That changes dramatically the privacy implications of both the glasses and Snapchat. Remember what he said: he watched videos from one year ago. Snapchat has been all about deleting everything now.
It's because it leaked out on YouTube earlier today. Probably best to get out in front of the story before everyone starts comparing it to Google Glass.
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.
Maybe Snapchat will sell some of their users' videos to porn companies (for VR porn)... There are two cameras - Obviously for VR; and given Snapchat's history as a sexting app, I think it's clear where things are heading here.
2015 revenues of $59M. Assuming an above average salary range, 1000 employees cost about $250M. If they were a public company, they'd get slaughtered on the stock markets.
Beg to differ - this might be the spin made popular by the valley's VCs and founders as a collective price gouging strategy, but it never flies in the public market. Ever wondered why the unicorns are hesitant to go IPO - they don't even buy their own spin on valuation, that's why.
I think what people are overlooking is that this device has stereo cameras by default. That means every snap likely has reasonably quality depth for each snap. With the scale of users they will likely have the largest consumer based depth capture platform in the market. That's actually a big deal for building infrastructure needed for the AR ecosystem.
I think Apple needs acquihire snapchat and promote Evan as the new Apple CEO. I have zero hate for Cook and think he is great CEO. But Evan is shaping up to have some the most modern product prowess out there. I don't know if these spectacles will be a hit, but I think his choices are in the right direction.
On the design end, I don't like the look of the camera lense.
Are they able to darken the lense glass to hide the camera a bit? Maybe they could match the black of the camera sensor to the black of the glass a little more. Otherwise it looks a lot like two cameras on your face.
They seem to want to do the opposite. I think those yellow circles around the lenses are part of the glasses. They seem to want to highlight where the cameras are.
If you consider the criticism Google Glass has received, making the camera obvious might very well be a good idea, at least for the first iteration of the product.
Goofy but clever. The kind of thing that might be a hit with a certain youthful demographic. And you need to be "cool" to pull something like this off - i.e. not Google.
What about people who wear prescription glasses, but can't wear or dislike contact lenses? Is it possible to replace the lenses with prescription ones?
This is exciting for the wearable headset market. If even a fraction of Snapchat's users get this it will normalize the space much more than Google Glass was able to. This is especially considering the young demographic Snapchat caters to, which I assume is more open to new technologies.
This is a ridiculous product... reminds me of the classic upper management/CEO "ideas". You know the kind: obsolete, neglects societal concerns (security???), nobody around to tell them it's a bad idea.
> (Why make this product, with its attendant risks, and why now? “Because it’s fun,” he says with another laugh.)
Sometimes you can look at something and just KNOW that there is not a chance that pile of junk is gonna gain traction.
This breaks the HN guideline about civility. That's the most important guideline, so please don't comment like this here. It wouldn't be hard to turn this post into a fine, substantive comment with a little cooling down and a little editing.
Snapchat can win here based on brand alone. The hardware features are a plus, but they're going to sell a lifestyle. Think GoPro + Versace. Commenters here are caught up in the tech. It's not the tech. Get a few celebrities in these, people will buy them and barely use the recording features. They're cheaper than Ray-Bans and I bet you and half of your friends own a pair of those.
Snapchat can assemble an AR powerhouse from the ground up with brand goodwill. Evan and his team have figured out the best market strategy to do so. Google is not "cool" and could never attempt to pull this off.
I have tremendous respect for Evan Spiegel right now. Bold move. Amazingly positioned. I wish them the best of luck. Dare I say, it has the scent of Jobs to it - the vision, the risk ("we make sunglasses now!") and definitely the "cool-factor." Don't misinterpret - this isn't the iPhone, not yet anyway, but I think they're on to something very big.