It’s the dawn of a new day at Snapchat. For one: it’s not Snapchat anymore.
As first reported by the Wall Street Journal late Friday, the company known formerly as Snapchat has been renamed Snap, Inc.
There’s more news than that, of course: the company is set to release sunglasses that record video, called Spectacles, sometime this fall. Spectacles will possess a 115 degree angle lens with which the wearer can record up to half a minute of video. Not surprisingly, video recorded with Spectacles can be posted directly to the Snapchat app.
The accessory will come in black, teal, and coral, and will be priced at $129.99.
Now, what does this news exactly mean? For one, it is increasingly clear that Snap is trying to take the fight directly to Facebook, which has bet a good deal on Oculus VR after snapping it up for $2 billion in 2014. This move shows that Snap is confident enough that it can play in the hardware space and not just in its app.
In releasing Spectacles, Snap seems to be trying to remove a friction point to make its app a little more user-friendly. Evan Siegal, Snap’s 26 year-old CEO, told Wall Street Journal that if you’re shooting video or photos with a phone, you’re putting “a wall in front of your face” that the company is looking to remove.
Now, let’s face it: far fewer people use Snapchat vs. Facebook. In fact, the comparison is pretty stark for now: 150 million vs. over 1.1 billion at last count. That being said, Snapchat growth has exploded for certain younger demographics, and it’s become the de facto app for sharing more personal and/or “disposable” pieces of content.
The question is: will Spectacles build upon Snapchat’s cool factor? At first glance, they appear to be a product that looks more polished than Google Glass did when it hit the market, but there’s a huge question if consumers are ready for wearable video recording devices like this.
Either way, one thing is certain: Snap believes it can compete with the big boys, and it’s looking to show it has multiple ways of making money before potentially going public. This is a big move in the history of one of the social media world’s top platforms.