 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2013 in Copenhagen, Denmark [1] |
| Founders |
|
| Headquarters | Milan, Italy |
| Products | |
| Subsidiaries | Evernote Corporation |
| Website | bendingspoons |
Bending Spoons S.p.A. is an Italian technology company, founded in 2013 and based in Milan. The company is known primarily for mobile applications that it develops or acquires. [2]
On 17 April 2020, the Italian government released a statement on its website announcing that Bending Spoons had been selected to design and develop Italy's official COVID-19 contact tracing app, Immuni. [3] [4] The app was released on 1 June 2020. [5] It was initially released in four regions, then countrywide. [6]
The app did not receive significant adoption and successfully tracked less than 1% of the total confirmed positive cases reported during the period it was active. [7] The most commonly cited reason for not using the app was the lack of perceived effectiveness. [8]
Immuni was decommissioned on December 31, 2022. [9]
In September 2022, Bending Spoons acquired FiLMiC [10] and converted its video-recording app FiLMiC Pro to a subscription revenue model. [11] In December 2023, the original FiLMiC team were laid off, and development of FiLMiC Pro was continued in-house by Bending Spoons. [12]
In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote. [13] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023. [14] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff and announced it would relocate to Europe to be closer to Bending Spoons' headquarters. [15]
Bending Spoons made a series of acquisitions in 2024. In January, it acquired the assets of New York City-based mobile app developer Mosaic Group from IAC Inc.; subsequently, Mosaic's entire workforce of 330 staff members was laid off, as they were not part of the acquisition. [16] [17] Also that month, Bending Spoons acquired Meetup, a social media platform for organizing in-person and virtual activities. [18] [19] In April, the company announced that it would acquire Hopin, owner of the popular live streaming studio StreamYard. [20] Later in July, the company announced it had acquired digital publishing platform Issuu. [21] Also in July, the company agreed to acquire the Dutch file transfer service WeTransfer, then announced in September they were laying off 75% of the company's workforce. [22] [23] In November, the company agreed to acquire video platform company Brightcove for $233 million. [24]
Meetup is a social media platform for hosting and organizing in-person and virtual activities, gatherings, and events for people and communities of similar interests, hobbies, and professions. It was founded in 2002 by Scott Heiferman and four others. The company was acquired by WeWork in 2017 and remains headquartered in New York City. WeWork sold it to AlleyCorp, an early stage NY-focused venture fund and incubator, in March 2020. In January 2024, Bending Spoons acquired Meetup. Since the acquisition, group owner fees have doubled, member fees have been instituted, and service quality has dropped, resulting in many groups closing or going elsewhere.
Ask.com is an internet-based business with a question answering format initiated during 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California.
IAC Inc. is an American holding company that owns brands across 100 countries, mostly in media and Internet. The company originated in 1996 as HSN Inc. as the holding company of Home Shopping Network and USA Network before changing its name to USA Networks, Inc. in 1999 and its television assets were sold to Vivendi in 2002. Those are now owned today by NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast.
Answers.com, formerly known as WikiAnswers, is an Internet-based knowledge exchange. The Answers.com domain name was purchased by entrepreneurs Bill Gross and Henrik Jones at idealab in 1996. The domain name was acquired by NetShepard and subsequently sold to GuruNet and then AFCV Holdings. The website is now the primary product of the Answers Corporation. It has tens of millions of user-generated questions and answers, and provides a website where registered users can interact with one another.
Expedia Group, Inc. is an American travel technology company that owns and operates travel fare aggregators and travel metasearch engines, including Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, Hotwire.com, Orbitz, Ebookers, CheapTickets, CarRentals.com, Expedia Cruises, Wotif, and Trivago. Over 3 million lodging facilities and flights on over 500 airlines are bookable on the company's websites. It has 16,500 employees, and its headquarters are located in Seattle, Washington.
Vimeo, Inc. is an American video hosting, sharing, and services provider headquartered in New York City. Vimeo focuses on the delivery of high-definition video across a range of devices. Vimeo's business model is through software as a service (SaaS). They derive revenue by providing subscription plans for businesses and content creators. Vimeo provides its subscribers with tools for video creation, editing, and broadcasting, enterprise software solutions, as well as the means for video professionals to connect with clients and other professionals. As of December 2021, the site has 260 million users, with around 1.6 million subscribers to its services.
Brightcove, Inc. is an American software company based in Boston, Massachusetts, that produces an online video platform. Founded in 2004 by Jeremy Allaire and Bob Mason, the company went public in 2012, and in 2024 was acquired by Bending Spoons.
Issuu, Inc. is a Danish-founded American electronic publishing platform based in Palo Alto, California, United States. The company's software converts PDFs into customizable digital publications that can be shared via links or embedded into websites.
Urbanspoon was a restaurant information and recommendation service founded in 2006 by former Jobster employees that offered its services in North America and parts of English-speaking Australasia and Europe. In January 2015, Zomato, an India-based restaurant search and discovery service, acquired Urbanspoon.
Endurance International Group, Inc. (EIG), previously named BizLand, now part of Newfold Digital, was an IT services company specializing in web hosting. The company was founded in 1997 and headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA. In 2021 Endurance International Group merged with Web.com forming a new company, Newfold Digital. It is one of the Internet's largest webhosting providers, with a global market share of 3.5% according to W3Techs. The company was structured differently from other large hosting companies such as Rackspace, GoDaddy, or 1&1 Ionos. The company has grown its hosting and related business through numerous acquisitions.
ASKfm was a Latvian question and answer network launched in June 2010 as a competitor to Formspring. After registration, the user filled out their profile and could ask questions, reply on their profile, create photo polls. Also from 2021, app users could communicate anonymously or openly in public chats or tête-à-tête in private chats. The platform had 300 million registered users as of November 2021.
WeTransfer B.V. is a Dutch internet-based computer file transfer service company that was founded in 2009 and based in Amsterdam. In 2024, the company was acquired by Bending Spoons.
Newton is an email management application for iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and ChromeOS developed by CloudMagic, Inc. The application is known for its searching capabilities, cross-platform abilities and user interface. It has been referred to as an email client better than Gmail's native app. As from September 15, 2016, CloudMagic has been renamed to Newton Mail with premium services, adding a host of new features and functions.
Match Group, Inc. is an American internet and technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, and other dating global brands. The company was owned by IAC until July 2020 when Match Group was spun off as a separate, public company. As of 2019, the company had 9.3 million subscribers, of which 4.6 million were in North America. Japan is the company's second largest market, after the United States.
COVID-19 apps include mobile-software applications for digital contact-tracing—i.e. the process of identifying persons ("contacts") who may have been in contact with an infected individual—deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVIDSafe was a digital contact tracing app released by the Australian Government on 26 April 2020 to help combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The app was intended to augment traditional contact tracing by automatically tracking encounters between users and later allowing a state or territory health authority to warn a user they have come within 1.5 metres with an infected person for 15 minutes or more. To achieve this, it used the BlueTrace and Herald protocol, originally developed by the Singaporean Government and VMWare respectively, to passively collect an anonymised registry of near contacts. The efficacy of the app was questioned over its lifetime, ultimately identifying just 2 confirmed cases by the time it was decommissioned on 16 August 2022.
COVID Tracker Ireland is a digital contact tracing app released by the Irish Government and the Health Service Executive on 7 July 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Ireland. The app uses ENS and Bluetooth technology to determine whether a user have been a close contact of someone for more than 15 minutes who tested positive for COVID-19. On 8 July, the app reached one million registered users within 36 hours after its launch, representing more than 30% of the population of Ireland and over a quarter of all smartphone users in the country. As of August 2021, over 3,030,000 people have downloaded the app.
Immuni was an open-source COVID-19 contact tracing app used for digital contact tracing in Italy, dismissed on 31 December, 2022, after a long and debated criticism for having been a failure due to the lack of trust placed by citizens. Immuni COVID-19 contact-tracing app had in fact been downloaded only by 12% of Italians between 14 and 75 years old. It makes use of the Apple/Google Exposure Notification system.
Evernote Corporation is a privately owned company headquartered in Redwood City, California that develops Evernote. Its current CEO, Francesco Patarnello, has been in his position since January 2023 following the acquisition by Bending Spoons. Evernote has domestic offices in Austin, San Diego, and Bothell, Washington. It has international offices in India, Switzerland, Chile, and Japan. As of February 2023, the company employed nearly 400 people.
SM-COVID-19 is a proprietary general-purpose digital contact tracing application that utilizes a centralized approach for COVID-19 contact tracing.
