Snapchat loses $40m on flop Spectacles




Snapchat SpectaclesImage copyright
Getty Images



The company behind Snapchat has taken a $40m (£30m) hit to its finances after its video-recording sunglasses failed to sell as well as hoped.

Snap launched Spectacles in September 2016, originally selling them only through pop-up vending machines.

Pressing a button on the glasses records a short video that can be shared on the Snapchat messaging app.

But on Tuesday the company revealed costs of $40m (£30m) due to "excess inventory" and cancelled orders.


Media playback is unsupported on your device



Media captionWATCH: Rory tries Snap Spectacles

Chief executive Evan Spiegel has previously said 150,000 units have been sold.

The company's latest earnings report pinned the cost on "excess inventory reserves and inventory purchase commitment cancellation charges".

Critics said the $129 glasses were too expensive and the picture quality of recorded videos was poor.







Image copyright
Getty Images



Image caption

Snap Spectacles were sold in vending machines and online

"They were a fun gimmick for some people, but not compelling enough for a lot of people to get involved," said Stuart Miles from technology news website Pocket-lint.

"Snap is a social-media company that is experimenting with merchandise and hardware. They're new to manufacturing, and they must have got their projections wrong.

"It never caught on in the way they were hoping."


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cable-laying drone wires up remote Welsh village

Image
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption WATCH: Are drones the answer to providing high-speed broadband access to rural communities? A drone has helped bring superfast broadband services to an isolated Welsh village. Cable company Openreach used the drone to avoid having to lay cable across "challenging" terrain that included woods, a river and steep hills. The drone was flown across a section of forest near Pontfadog, Wrexham, to help sling wires between telegraph poles. The community's 20 homes now have access to ultrafast broadband that can run at speeds of up to 1Gbps. Video buffer "It's a bit different to connecting an apartment block in London, that's for sure," said Openreach chief engineer Andy Whale. "If we tried running the cable through woods it was also very likely we'd get it caught up in branches and other natural obstructions, so we figured the best option was to fly it in over the top of the tree canopy and...
Read more

AWS launches translation services | TechCrunch

Image
Taking to yet another front the battle with Google, Apple and Microsoft for dominance in speech recognition and natural language processing, Amazon announced a new translation service as part of its AWS extravaganza. As part of Amazon Web Services, Translate will provide text translations for supported languages (Google and Microsoft have been offering these services for years). Amazon is pitching the new translate service as a way for businesses to expand products and services using its text translation tool. In a deep dive into how the service works, Amazon explained that the technology was based on language pairing models represented in neural networks. The model consists of an encoder component which reads sentences from the source language and creates a representation that captures the meaning of the text provided. The model also has a decoder component that formulates a semantic representation used to generate a translation of the text from the source language to the tar...
Read more

Facebook and Twitter to co-operate in Brexit probe

Image
Image copyright Getty Images Facebook and Twitter have agreed to share information with the UK government about possible Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Facebook said it hoped to be able to respond to questions from the Electoral Commission by mid-December. The Commission is investigating activity in the period leading up to the Brexit vote. Twitter said it hoped to share its own findings "in the coming weeks". The BBC understands that Google is also cooperating with the Electoral Commission's request. The US is conducting a similar investigation into potential Russian meddling in the presidential election. The two social media giants were responding to a letter from Damian Collins, chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, also requesting information about Russian-linked account activity in the build-up to the EU referendum. Facebook's policy director Simon Milner said the firm was "considering how we can bes...
Read more