The leading global social media and immersive tech company, Snap, has acquired the open-source databasing service, KeyDB, to help transition its immersive augmented reality platform into an open-source service. The acquisition will allow the company to enhance accessibility and support Snapchat-based technologies.
It would also enable in-house Snap developers to bring down operational costs and assist with bandwidth management while developing new immersive experiences for Snap platforms.
The company will continue to run KeyDB following the purchase and subsequently integrate internal database improvements to the latter’s services. Snap will facilitate the Pro and Enterprise versions of KeyDB and enhance the audience reach to enable developers to solve community-wide bugs and problems.
The news comes after Snap recorded a loss of roughly $360 million over the preceding quarter. The company also fell short of sales expectations at $1.06 billion instead of its $1.07 billion goal. Nevertheless, the company’s user base continued to expand, increasing 18 percent to 332 million active users in the first quarter.
Snap continues to invest in and acquire technology firms to support its growing eCommerce and immersive technology services. In March this year, it bought neurotech startup NextMind, a French firm creating human-computer interface (HCI) controllers for immersive wearables.
Last year, the company unveiled its ‘Spectacles’ AR smart glasses with a powerful software development kit (SDK) to enable designers to create exciting, immersive experiences.
Snap’s CEO and Co-Founder, Evan Spiegel, discussed the company’s open-source initiatives in an interview and supported governmental regulations of social media platforms. The company continues to focus on AR, following years of success with Snapchat’s Lens.
“We took all the tools that we were using to build AR effects ourselves and made them available to the whole world so that anyone could build augmented reality lenses and share them with the community. Now there are hundreds of thousands of developers who built over 2.5 million lenses – used by 250 million people every day on Snapchat,” he said.
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