There is no better time than the present to build an app. If it can get popular, some larger company is going to buy it for a lot more than you ever invested in it. Instagram may be the biggest success story of them all, but popular mobile app Socialcam is no slouch.
Autodesk, creators of fine visual effects and game development software, just announced their acquisition of Socialcam for $60 million. If you aren’t familiar with Socialcam, it’s a simple video recording and editing software that allows people to easily share their creations with friends. A review on the app store from TechCrunch that says it’s “Instagram for video” is not far from the truth.
So what does Autodesk, a company that develops sophisticated software for movies and games, want to do with a simple social app like Socialcam? It’s all about branching out with Autodesk wanting to offer their services to everyday people alongside the industry professionals. In a post on the Socialcam blog, the team describes it best:
If you haven’t heard of Autodesk, that’s probably because the company is best known for its professional tools for design and visualization. But their mission is to help everybody imagine, design and create a better world. Autodesk has a proven track record of acquiring and scaling fast-growing, early stage consumer businesses while staying true to their core audience and vision. Recently, with products like SketchBook and Pixlr, they’re making their award winning technology accessible to millions of people around the world through intuitive web, mobile and social platforms. We fit in right there–helping people around the world capture, create, view and share video in real time, wherever they are. We hope you’re as excited as we are about the good things in store for Socialcam as a result of this news!
The team promises that Socialcam won’t change one bit and they’ll only be improving from here on out. Considering that Autodesk has some impressive video editing software of their own, it wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to think it would find its way into Socialcam at some point in the future. The concept of being able to produce a professional film on your phone is a pretty exciting concept.
So now that Instagram and Socialcam have been bought up, what else is next? I’m personally waiting until somebody creates the “Instagram of music” that gets bought up by a company like Spotify. You can’t apply a sepia tone to a deep bass track, but that doesn’t preclude developers from trying.
If you want to try out Socialcam and find out for yourself why it’s worth $60 million, check out the app on both iOS and Android.
