David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh man, yeah. It’s super interesting to think about when they say Snap is a camera company. Well, like Kodak was a camera company and then like today, is Apple a camera company? Sony and Samsung make the actual-actual Lenses that go in there. So, are they the #1 “camera” manufacturer in the world? You know, I’d be a little bit more skeptical Snap is saying they’re a camera company and except that they have, they actually do the full stack in making the hardware now of Spectacles and realistically, those are probably OEM’d in by the same folks that make the actual Lenses and the actual sensors that are in smartphones. But as you continue to extrapolate that, so let’s look at Apple as a camera company. We crossed over from like pure optics-based cameras into hybrid optics and software-based cameras like several years ago in the smartphone generation, there was such tiny little Lenses and sensors and they’re so close to each other. There’s not a lot of like actual physics that would produce high quality images and we have to do a lot of really tricky faking and kind of like post production and software that the user is never exposed to. And that’s suddenly with the iPhone 7 Plus become extremely visible with the fact that there’s two Lenses, that they never expose the fact that you’re switching from wide to telephoto. There’s just this smooth slider into 2x. And the thing that it’s really doing there is like it’s always in real time compositing a mashup of the two Lenses and doing a lot of really advanced computation on the fly, not just for portrait mode but always to be taking advantage of both of those Lenses. I think that's actually a great analogy to what Lenses in Snapchat are doing, right? Like that is augmented reality. And that requires a lot of processing power. Augmented reality thus far and virtual reality have been these really clunky things that nobody wants that cost a lot of money that it's unclear what you do with them, you know. But Snapchat just makes that really easy. It’s just all behind the scenes. And as we learn, we’ll talk about this in a minute, it’s costing them a lot in hosting fees and technology resources to be able to do that. Yeah, totally. To close on that, I think when they say they’re a camera company, the world has moved to a place now where a camera is not just a physical thing. A camera is a full hardware/software services stack and that starts when you think about what a “camera” is that way and the fact that maybe it's a hardware or software services network stack, that starts to lend a lot more credibility to “Oh, I see Snapchat is really the full stack of the modern camera.”…

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