Snapchat is in talks with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba for a round of financing that may value the company at $10 billion, sources told Bloomberg.
Talks are ongoing and the terms of the funding may change, one of the sources said.
If the funding is completed, Snapchat would join an elite group of technology startups, including Airbnb and Dropbox, valued at or above $10 billion.
People send more than 700 million disappearing “snaps” a day and more than 500 million stories are viewed daily.
Tablet sales crashing?
Best Buy chief executive officer Hubert Joly has told Re/code that the company has seen a revival in PC sales in the company’s first quarter.
Joly puts attributes the growth in PC sales at least in part to Microsoft’s decision to stop supporting Windows XP, and says tablet sales have dropped off.
“The tablets boomed and are now crashing,” he says.
“The volume has really gone down in the last several months.”
He says the issue facing tablets is that once you have a tablet of a certain generation, it’s not clear that you have to move to the next gen.
Twitter acquires Madbits
Madbits, a deep-learning-based computer vision startup, has been purchased by Twitter.
Details of the acquisition are unknown, but Madbits confirmed the purchase in a statement on its website.
Over the past year the company has been building visual intelligence technology that “automatically understands, organizes and extracts relevant information from raw media”.
Overnight
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 31.75 to 16,880.36. The Australian dollar is currently trading at US93 cents.
Kye began his career at a Fairfax daily on the North-West Coast of Tasmania. He has since taken his belongings, and keen interest in technology, to Melbourne. He has a bachelor of Arts majoring in Political Science from the University of Tasmania and a Graduate Diploma in Journalism from RMIT University.
