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Influencer Luka Sabbat sued for not shilling Spectacles on Instagram
Luka Sabbat, a social media influencer with 1.4 million Instagram followers, is being sued for failure to, well, influence. According to a lawsuit filed by PR Consulting Inc., Sabbat breached a $60,000 contract he signed to promote Snap Spectacles on -- wait for it -- Instagram. The public relations agency said that, as part of the deal, he was supposed to post three Instagram Stories and one picture on his account. But, as it turns out, Sabbat didn't fulfill his end of the deal: PR Consulting Inc. claims he only made one Instagram story and that the post he put up on his feed wasn't submitted to it for approval.
Snap heads to trendy east London to peddle those unsold Spectacles
What do you do when hype around your quirky hardware play dies, leaving you with hundreds of thousands of unsold units? You open an experience and retail store in a trendy part of east London and hope to catch a few late adopters cruising by, of course. That's exactly what Snap is doing this weekend, opening of a store dedicated to peddling Spectacles in the hipster haven that is Shoreditch's Boxpark. It's no transient pop-up, though, but a permanent store and Snap's first in Europe.
Snapchat reportedly has 'hundreds of thousands' of unsold Spectacles
Sure, they were a hot commodity when they first dropped, but almost a year later and Snapchat has "hundreds of thousands" of pairs of Spectacles sitting in Chinese warehouses. The news, via The Information, comes after CEO Evan Spiegel boasted that sales of the video-recording sunglasses had topped 150,000. Apparently execs were so enthused by how popular Spectacles were in their limited run, that the company ordered more and is left holding the bag now that demand has waned.
FrontRow is the latest wearable livestreaming camera
The latest wearable camera to hit the market comes from mesh WiFi product maker Ubiquiti Networks. The FrontRow camera is a small device that can be worn on a lanyard around the neck or clipped on and it can snap photographs and livestream video.
Skip the line and grab a Uniqlo jacket from a vending machine
You can get Best Buy products, Snapchat Spectacles and Instagram likes from a vending machine these days. You can even get a car. Now, Uniqlo wants to add its clothing to the myriad of items you can snag from a machine. The retailer is planning to install 10 apparel-spouting vending machines in markets across the US over the next two months. Locations will include airports and shopping malls in New York, Houston and Oakland, among other cities.
What Snap's IPO tells us about Spectacles' future
When Snap Inc. officially filed its IPO last week, we finally got our clearest look yet at its operations. In addition to learning that its co-founders will be donating as many as 13,000,000 shares of their stock to a philanthropic organization the company quietly set up, we also found out just how much Snap paid for its acquisitions of Bitstrips and Vurb.
Snapchat's Spectacles are a low-risk move into wearables
There's no question that Snapchat (now known as Snap Inc) is an experimental company. Some of those experiments fail wildly and insult its users at the same time, but the company has been extremely successful at introducing new ways of thinking about mobile messaging. Despite a tradition of pushing the envelope, it was still surprising to see Snapchat introduce Spectacles, its first hardware product. The $130 dollar glasses are designed to let you record 10 seconds of video at a time and sync it to your phone to post on Snapchat. Despite a limited initial launch, Spectacles actually represents the beginning of a pretty audacious goal for Snapchat: find the formula for a face wearable that people won't hate. The slow rollout suggests the company knows it needs to start small and slow. But Snapchat is in a unique position to find some traction here -- the company's young users are already comfortable recording and sharing everything around them. Even more importantly, they're used to being recorded and shared by their friends. In groups where people are initially using Spectacles, there likely won't be a big backlash to being filmed.
