For the past several months, nabbing a pair of Snapchat Spectacles meant waiting patiently in an hours-long line for your turn at a bright yellow vending machine. But no longer. On Monday, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, began shipping its video-equipped sunglasses to U.S. customers for $130 at Spectacles.com.
On the heels of the wider Spectacles launch, Snap has shut down the pop-up vending machines — “Snapbots,” the company calls them — through which it had exclusively sold Spectacles, including the semi-permanent storefront it launched New York City in late November. But the shutdown is not permanent. “Snapbots will continue to land in surprising locations around the U.S. following a brief ‘nap,'” a Snap spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The timing is conspicuous, to say the least. Earlier this month, Snap filed an initial public offering with a valuation estimated between $25 billion and $30 billion, making it the highest U.S. tech IPO since Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, Ltd. debuted at $168 billion in 2014. But in the intervening weeks, the company has been dogged by concerns about revenue. Last year, Snap recorded a net loss of half a billion dollars ($514.6 million). And in its IPO filing, Snap noted that it “[expects] to incur operating losses in the future, and may never achieve or maintain profitability.”
Unsurprisingly, Snap is searching for a new revenue driver, and Snapchat’s audience of 158 million global active daily users make for a great start. “It’s about us figuring out if it fits into people’s lives and seeing how they like [products like Spectacles],” Snap CEO Evan Spiegal told The Wall Street Journal. “Response has been positive since November’s launch so we’re now happy to be able to make Spectacles more readily available — especially for those in the U.S. who have not been able to make it to a Snapbot.”
That said, Snap doesn’t expect to turn a profit on Spectacles right away. In its recent S-1 filing for its initial public offering, Snap revealed that it is pouring investment into inventory, marketing, and distribution for the $130 video-equipped glasses. “The launch of Spectacles […] has not generated significant revenue for us,” the company admitted in its IPO filing. “We expect to experience production and operating costs related to Spectacle that will exceed the related revenue in the near future.”
Spectacles ordered online are expected to ship in the next two weeks. They are available alongside optional $50 charging cases and $10 charging cords, which were previously available on Amazon.
Article originally published on 02-19-2017. Updated on 02-20-2017 by Kyle Wiggers: Added news that Snapchat Spectacles are now available for purchase online.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?