 | |
| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2011 |
| Headquarters | , USA |
| Parent | Snap Inc. (2014–present) |
Scan is a mobile app development company headquartered in Provo, Utah, United States. The company was founded in January 2011 by Garrett Gee together with his college friends Ben Turley and Kirk Ouimet. [1] The company, owned and operated by Scan, Inc, [2] was acquired by Snapchat in 2014 for $54 million. [3]
Scan builds products and services related to 'scannable' items such as QR codes. [4] Scan's products consist of mobile applications that consumers use for reading a variety of physical codes such as QR codes, NFC, and machine-recognizable images (Computer Vision). [5] Scan's website allows for the creation of QR codes as well as targeted codes that link to web destinations such as social network profiles, websites, and Scan-hosted personal pages. [6] As of June 2013, Scan had raised $1.7M in seed investment [7] from Google Ventures, The Social+Capital Partnership, Ludlow Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Troy Carter, Shervin Pishevar, Charles River Ventures, and Vikas Gupta. [8]
The company launched its iOS application in February 2011 and had received over 1 million installs three months later. [7] After a year and a half, the application had been downloaded 10 million times. [5] As of December 2012, Scan reported 25 million downloads on the iOS and Android platforms. [4] In 2014 Scan was purchased by Snapchat for $54 million and the Scan app developed into Snapcode. [9] [10]
Garrett Gee, while attending Bringham Young University (BYU), developed the app alongside fellow students Kirk Ouimet and Ben Turley. The first iOS application was launched in a student competition at BYU in 2012. [11]
In 2013 Garrett appeared on the show Shark Tank to pitch the app as a possible investment. The sharks of the show decided not to invest in his app. [12]
In March 2012, Scan had 9 employees. [13]
Scan's reported revenue model relies on advertising revenue from scanned "1D" barcodes that lead users to affiliate links and advertising. In May 2012, Gee claimed that the affiliate and advertising revenue had topped $1,000 per day. [14]
In early 2012, Scan had released support for scanning QR codes, 1D barcodes, and offered connections to these technologies in the form of websites, shopping carts, social media actions, and lead generation pages. In February, Scan launched Scan Pages; mobile optimized, hosted sites for businesses and individuals that are linked to QR codes. [15] In May 2012, Scan launched a "Scan-to-gram" which allowed users to create QR codes that linked to their Instagram profiles. [14] In December 2012, Scan launched version 2.0 of its apps, which also supported scanning of QR, UPC, EAN, and ISBN codes. [16]
The Scan website was overhauled in August 2013, making it easier to create QR codes and related materials.
A Sony executive who was on the board of Snapchat as well as emails stolen during the Sony Pictures hack leaked the information that Snapchat had paid $50 million to acquire Scan. Snapchat's Snapcode feature is powered by Scan's technology. [17] Later reports gave a value of $54 million, with $30 million in cash and the rest in equity in Snapchat. [18]
Quip is a collaborative productivity software suite for mobile and the Web. It allows groups of people to create and edit documents and spreadsheets as a group, typically for business purposes.
Bitly is a URL shortening service and a link management platform. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email. Bitly makes money by charging for access to aggregate data created as a result of many people using the shortened URLs.
Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students, in particular Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters, be organized by hashtags, and be associated with a location via geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tags and locations, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed. A Meta-operated image-centric social media platform, it is available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and the web. Users can take photos and edit them using built-in filters and other tools, then share them on other social media platforms like Facebook. It supports 32 languages including English, Spanish, French, Korean, and Japanese.
LevelUp is an American mobile ordering and mobile payments platform created by Boston, Massachusetts–based start-up SCVNGR. On July 25, 2018, it was announced that LevelUp would be acquired for US$390 million by Grubhub, an online food delivery platform.
Messenger, also known as Facebook Messenger, is an American proprietary instant messaging app and platform developed by Meta Platforms. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the company revamped its messaging service in 2010, released standalone iOS and Android apps in 2011, and released standalone Facebook Portal hardware for Messenger calling in 2018. In April 2015, Facebook launched a dedicated website interface, Messenger.com, and separated the messaging functionality from the main Facebook app, allowing users to use the web interface or download one of the standalone apps. In April 2020, Facebook released a Messenger desktop app for Windows and macOS.
Snapchat is an American multimedia instant messaging app and service developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before they become inaccessible to their recipients. The app has evolved from originally focusing on person-to-person photo sharing to presently featuring users' "Stories" of 24 hours of chronological content, along with "Discover", letting brands show ad-supported short-form content. It also allows users to store photos in a password-protected area called "my eyes only". It has also reportedly incorporated limited use of end-to-end encryption, with plans to broaden its use in the future.
AppsBuilder was an Italian cloud-based self-service app creator designed to provide users with no coding skills access to tools to build native applications and HTML5 web apps.
Kuapay is a defunct Santa Monica, California-based payment service provider that combined a digital wallet and mobile payments. The company developed one of the first foreign third-party payment apps to go live in China, and was reportedly the official mobile payments provider in Chile.
A sticker is a detailed illustration of a character that represents an emotion or action that is a mix of cartoons and Japanese smiley-like "emojis" sent through instant messaging platforms. They have more variety than emoticons and have a basis from internet "reaction face" culture due to their ability to portray body language with a facial reaction. Stickers are elaborate, character-driven emoticons and give people a lightweight means to communicate through kooky animations.
WillCall was a San Francisco-based startup company offering a mobile app for iPhone and Android devices that allowed users to gain admission to live concerts, tip artists, and purchase merchandise during a show. It was named one of the Hottest Startups of 2013 by Forbes. Since its inception, the company had become known for editorial curation, a UX driven product strategy, and social networking integration. It had been called "an Uber for nightlife — one that makes everything from attending shows to buying drinks and merchandise much easier," by TechCrunch.
Zettle by PayPal is a Swedish financial technology company founded by Jacob de Geer and Magnus Nilsson in April 2010. Launching its first app and service in 2011, the company offers a range of financial products including payments, point of sales, funding and partners applications. The company was acquired by PayPal in 2018.
The following is a timeline of the history of the photo messaging software Snapchat.
Sunrise is a discontinued electronic calendar application for mobile and desktop. The service was launched in 2013 by designers Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van. In October 2015, Microsoft announced that they had merged the Sunrise Calendar team into the larger Microsoft Outlook team where they will work closely with the Microsoft Outlook Mobile service.
Onavo, Inc. was an Israeli mobile web analytics company owned by Facebook, Inc.. The company primarily performed its activities via consumer mobile apps, including the virtual private network (VPN) service Onavo Protect, which analysed web traffic sent through the VPN to provide statistics on the usage of other apps.
Snap Inc. is a technology company, founded on September 16, 2011, by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown based in Santa Monica, California. The company developed and maintains technological products and services, namely Snapchat, Spectacles, and Bitmoji. The company was named Snapchat Inc. at its inception, but it was rebranded Snap Inc. on September 24, 2016, in order to include the Spectacles product under the company name.
Facebook Stories are short user-generated photo or video collections that can be uploaded to the user's Facebook. Facebook Stories were created on March 28, 2017. They are considered a second news feed for the social media website. It is focused around Facebook's in-app camera which allows users to add fun filters and Snapchat-like lenses to their content as well as add visual geolocation tags to their photos and videos. The content is able to be posted publicly on the Facebook app for only 24 hours or can be sent as a direct message to a Facebook friend.
Foursquare Labs Inc., commonly known as Foursquare, is a geolocation technology company and data cloud platform based in the United States. Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009, the company rose to prominence with the launch of its local search-and-discovery mobile app. The app, Foursquare City Guide, popularized the concept of real-time location sharing and checking-in.
| Products and acquisitions |  | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| People |
| ||||||||
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
