US media on Tuesday reported that Snapchat Inc was valued at US$10 billion based on funding pumped into the startup by a powerhouse Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
The valuation came from a move by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to invest US$20 million in the mobile app, according to the Wall Street Journal and technology news Web site Recode.
A US$10 billion valuation for Snapchat was a hot topic last month after unconfirmed reports that Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) was considering investing in the mobile-messaging startup.
Snapchat rocketed to popularity, especially among teenagers, after the initial version of the app was released in September 2011.
Created by then-Stanford University students, the app allows users to send text messages and photographs that disappear seconds after being viewed.
The Los Angeles-based company last year rejected a buyout offer from social network giant Facebook Inc, judging the US$3 billion offer too low, US media reports have said.
Snapchat has yet to unveil a business model. Even though advertising is not an option, marketers have been experimenting with ways to reach the application’s user base, EMarketer Inc analyst Debra Aho Williamson said.
US fast food chain Taco Bell, for example, has been sending out doodle-enhanced ephemeral photos using Snapchat’s Stories feature, which makes posts available for 24 hours.
Snapchat has also been courted by other investors and would-be buyers, including a group led by Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd’s (騰訊).
Snapchat, led by chief executive officer Evan Spiegel, is the third-most popular app among millennials, after Facebook and its Instagram photo app, and is used by 33 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds in the US, according to ComScore Inc.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to