Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel isn't one to typically tease future products, but he did hint that Snapchat has bigger ambitions for e-commerce during a talk at a conference on Monday.
Snapchat ($SNAP) has "pretty cool products coming on the e-commerce side that we’re excited about," Spiegel said onstage at Morgan Stanley's Tech, Media, and Telecom industry conference in San Francisco.
One year ago, Snapchat opened its own in-app store where users can buy physical products, like Snapchat and Bitmoji-branded t-shirts, coffee mugs, and plushies. But Spiegel hinted on Monday that Snapchat's virtual store could be a prelude to something bigger.
“I think we’ll be able to take a lot of learnings from our e-commerce store and maybe apply them more broadly to the product," he said.
Snap has a history of experimenting with new features on its own before opening them up to outside users. For example, Snap ran its own company-themed TV show during the early days of its Discover media platform. Now dozens of media companies around the world publish content to Discover every day. Snap also made the first agumented reality lenses for its app, like the iconic puppy dog filter, before allowing brands and outside developers to make their own lenses.
In the e-commerce space, Snap has already experimented with a few brands to help people buy products like limited-editon Nike ($NKE) sneakers. Snapchat stores a user's credit card information once they make a purchase in the app, which makes it easier for that user to buy something again later.
A bigger push into e-commerce could potentially dovetail nicely with Snap's growing popularity among direct response advertisers. These advertisers usually buy digital ads with the goal of driving an immediate response from the viewer, whether it be downloading an app or making a purchase.
Aside from e-commerce, Spiegel revealed that Snapchat's long-awaited Android redesign will be released by the end of 2019 — the first firm committment he's made publicly to any timeline for the release. Snap has already started testing the new app, which is supposed to be faster and easier to use, with a small percentage of users, per Spiegel.
Investors are banking on the new and improved Android version of Snapchat to help revive user growth, particiularly in markets outside the U.S. where Snapchat has ceded ground to competitors like WhatsApp.
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
