Remember the days when Facebook tried to buy Snapchat for $3bn? Three years on, the social app is reportedly shooting for a valuation of up to $35bn in its IPO next year. Still, Facebook hasn’t given up on getting a piece of Snapchat’s action: if it can’t buy it, it can build bits of it, or alternatively buy something like it. On the latter front, TechCrunch claims that Facebook tried to buy Korean Snapchat-like app Snow, but was rebuffed. The app has been downloaded 80m times so far, adding 10m more a month according to the report, making it one of 2016’s two social-app crazes (the other being Musical.ly). “It’s true that Snow is receiving love calls from various companies,” said a spokesperson for Snow’s parent company Naver, wearing their bidding-war-ignition hat. Naver is also the parent of now-public social app Line, which sunk $45m into Snow in September. Meanwhile, on the ‘build bits of it’ side of things, Facebook has been launching and testing a range of Snapchat-cloning features across its suite of apps, from Instagram Stories to digital masks and disappearing posts in its main app.
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,…