This story has nothing to do with music, but everything to do with the growing fears outside the Silicon Valley fishbowl that the apps bubble may be heading for a messy pop at some point. Snapchat is the app for sharing photos and videos that self-destruct a few seconds after being viewed by the recipient – see numerous scare-stories about teenage sexting in the media in recent months. The company raised $13.5m in Series A funding in February this year at a valuation of $70m, and is thought to now have around 5m daily active users. But now it’s being tipped for a new funding round: a monster one of $100m that would value Snapchat at around $700m. And from what we’ve seen this weekend, much of the coverage has taken the news at face value: essentially ‘Well, if it’s raising $100m, that must be an accurate reflection of its growth’ rather than ‘What is going on?! Which VCs think a currently-hot-among-teens social app is worth $700m?!’ But of course, the funding is as much about the expectation that someone – Facebook for example – will panic-buy Snapchat for an inflated amount in an effort to stay cool with The Kids.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…