 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2013 in Copenhagen, Denmark [1] |
| Founder |
|
| Headquarters | Milan, Italy |
| Products |
|
| Subsidiaries | Evernote Corporation |
| Website | bendingspoons |
Bending Spoons S.p.A. is a technology company, founded in 2013 and based in Milan, Italy. The company is known primarily for mobile apps that it develops or acquires. [3]
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. [4] [5] The app was released on 1 June 2020. [6] It was initially released in four regions, then countrywide. [7]
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. [8] The most commonly cited reason for not using the app was the lack of perceived effectiveness. [9]
Immuni was decommissioned on December 31, 2022. [10]
In September 2022, Bending Spoons acquired FiLMiC [11] and converted its video-recording app FiLMiC Pro to a subscription revenue model. [12] In December 2023, the original FiLMiC team were laid off, and development of FiLMiC Pro was continued in-house by Bending Spoons. [13]
In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote. [14] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023. [15] 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. [16]
In January 2024, Bending Spoons acquired Mosaic Group, a mobile app developer. The acquisition also involved the layoff of all 330 existing staff. [17]
Also in January 2024, Bending Spoons acquired Meetup, a social media platform for organizing in-person and virtual activities. [18] [19]
In April 2024, Bending Spoons announced that it would acquire Hopin, owner of the popular live streaming studio StreamYard. [20]
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 announced it will acquire Meetup.
Evernote is a note-taking and task-management application developed by the Evernote Corporation. It is intended for archiving and creating notes with embedded photos, audio, and saved web content. Notes are stored in virtual "notebooks" and can be tagged, annotated, edited, searched, and exported.
Amazon Prime Video, or simply Prime Video, is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming and rental service of Amazon offered both as a stand-alone service and as part of Amazon's Prime subscription. The service primarily distributes films and television series produced by Amazon MGM Studios or licensed to Amazon, as Amazon Originals, with the service also hosting content from other providers, content add-ons, live sporting events, and video rental and purchasing services.
Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 615 million monthly active users, including 239 million paying subscribers, as of March 2024. Spotify is listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts.
WhatsApp is an instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by technology conglomerate Meta. It allows users to send text, voice messages and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. WhatsApp's client application runs on mobile devices, and can be accessed from computers. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to sign up. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client.
Pocket, previously known as Read It Later, is a social bookmarking service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks. Released in 2007, the service was originally only for desktop and laptop computers and is now available for macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Kobo eReaders, and web browsers.
Instapaper is a social bookmarking service that allows web content to be saved so it can be "read later" on a different device, such as an e-reader, smartphone, or tablet. The service was founded in 2008 by Marco Arment. In April 2013, Arment sold a majority stake to Betaworks and by mid 2016 Pinterest acquired the company. In July 2018, ownership of Instapaper was transferred from Pinterest to a newly formed company Instant Paper, Inc. The transition was completed on August 6, 2018.
ecobee is a Canadian founded home automation company that makes smart thermostats, temperature and occupancy sensors, smart light switches, smart cameras, and contact sensors. They were acquired by the American company Generac Holdings in 2021.
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.
YouTube Premium is a subscription service offered by the American video platform YouTube. The service provides ad-free access to content across the service, as well as access to premium YouTube Originals programming produced in collaboration with the site's creators, downloading videos and background playback of videos on mobile devices, and access to the music streaming service, YouTube Music. It has over 100 million subscribers.
Roberto Speranza is an Italian politician of the Chamber of Deputies who served as national secretary of Article One. From 5 September 2019 until 22 October 2022, he has been serving as Minister of Health in the government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and was later confirmed by Prime Minister Mario Draghi. During his tenure, he had to face the COVID-19 pandemic, which deeply affected Italy.
Notion is a freemium productivity and note-taking web application developed by Notion Labs, Inc. It offers organizational tools including task management, project tracking, to-do lists, and bookmarking. Additional offline features are offered by desktop and mobile applications available for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Users can create custom templates, embed videos and web content, and collaborate with others in real-time.
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.
TraceTogether was a digital system implemented by the Government of Singapore to facilitate contact tracing efforts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. The main goal was a quick identification of persons who may have come into close contact with anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19. The system helps in identifying contacts such as strangers encountered in public one would not otherwise be able to identify or remember. Together with SafeEntry, it allows the identification of specific locations where a spread between close contacts may occur.
The (Google/Apple) Exposure Notification System (GAEN) is a framework and protocol specification developed by Apple Inc. and Google to facilitate digital contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. When used by health authorities, it augments more traditional contact tracing techniques by automatically logging close approaches among notification system users using Android or iOS smartphones. Exposure Notification is a decentralized reporting protocol built on a combination of Bluetooth Low Energy technology and privacy-preserving cryptography. It is an opt-in feature within COVID-19 apps developed and published by authorized health authorities. Unveiled on April 10, 2020, it was made available on iOS on May 20, 2020 as part of the iOS 13.5 update and on December 14, 2020 as part of the iOS 12.5 update for older iPhones. On Android, it was added to devices via a Google Play Services update, supporting all versions since Android Marshmallow.
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.
Nearby Share was a functionality developed by Google that allows data to be transferred between devices via Bluetooth, Wi-FI Direct or Internet. In 2024, it was merged into Samsung's Quick Share. It was available for Android, ChromeOS and Microsoft's Windows. It was first released on August 4, 2020.
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.
