Snap Brings Camera Into Focus as Social Messaging Tool

“Not every company has that compelling pitch that they can offer, so it’s really tough to say whether this will get things going for other companies thinking about IPO-ing”, Nieva said. It’s clear that the messaging market is huge, but competition is a huge area of concern.

“At some point, the stock has to collide with the fundamentals”, Cordwell tells CNNTech, referring to Snap’s actual business growth. Facebook at its IPO had 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users. Though just six months old, Instagram Stories has almost as many users as Snapchat. Twitter now trades near 15.80 as the company grapples with slowing user growth.

Analyst Brian Wieser from Pivotal Research said it was a “promising early stage company with significant opportunity ahead of itself” but was “significantly overvalued given the likely scale of its long-term opportunity and the risks associated with executing against that opportunity”. Many are either dropped, or repurposed into other projects, so even if Snap has indeed been working on a camera drone, there’s no guarantee that it will actually release it. The glasses come in three colours and initially, as part of Snap’s promotion could be purchased through vending machines dubbed Snapbots.

Snapchat’s success has forced larger tech services like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to clone its features, with mixed success.

But some analysts believed the company had been significantly overvalued.

FPX tries to reflect the performance of the IPOX Global Composite Index, which is comprised of the top 100 companies ranked quarterly by market capitalization. They also said that Snapchat’s targeting tools aren’t as sophisticated as Facebook’s are, so advertisers are still seeing the platform as an experiment, especially because the return on their investments isn’t clear immediately.

However, high interest led some to speculate that the company would raise its share price. Snap’s senior vice president of engineering Timothy Sehn, chief strategy officer Imran Khan and chairman Michael Lynton also notched up big paydays.

But for all the fanfare, many questions remain about what pressures Snap may face now that public investors’ money is on the line and all its financials must be laid bare in quarterly reports.