Autodesk Buys Socialcam for $60M (opens in new tab)

No, you can't.

Is Hacker News crowded out by kids these days?

Autodesk of now is a collection of products and companies that vary from CAD software to online photo editing to 3D Studio Max to Maya and a variety of video filter and processing.

Think about that for a second. They make professional grade video finishing software. Socialcam is a casual video sharing community with a variety of video finishing processes available.

Autodesk is actually a pretty cool company in the enterprise space. They're historically a CAD behemoth, but have been releasing a bunch of apps and experimenting with different business models. Their software is typically rough around the edges, but they could have something cool up their sleeves with this.

It's a big deal but not totally unknown for Autodesk. A quick look on the Play store shows they also own "Pixlr-o-matic", an image editing app. They've been experimenting with consumer-facing stuff for a while.

Looks like Autodesk may be purchasing talent. Seibel is certainly someone who could fit into Autodesk's executive succession track; Bartram has some pretty solid technical chops in video, and Luccisano has a strong Rails background.

As Autodesk reengages in multi-platform development, all three developers potentially deepen the in-house knowledge-base - I try to keep in mind that Autodesk is a mature company and has always seemed to have had a bit more of an academic culture than a typical software company (e.g. the use of Lisp in their flagship product).

I consider Adobe and Autodesk to be premium digital content creation tool company. It sort of (well, not really, but...) makes sense in that direction.

they did ok with Pixlr acquisition

I don't care if your goal is to change the world. But please, don't make it worse (spam).

But congrats to the team on the acquisition. Maybe Socialcam will die under Autodesk and everyone wins!

I agree. This is definitely not a long term business model and could only benefit if its built to sell. These people build a business out of tricking people into clicking their misleading title and video thumbnails that are populated from their Facebook Feed(almost like ads) to increase their stats and app users. People don't usually get fooled more than once, so their traffic is starting to decline. Like our president Bush once said "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again"

$60 million is a low price now?

My but we live in a world of inflation.

You do realize that $60 million is an enormous, lifechanging amount of money, right?

It would be interesting to compare success rates between people who build companies to sell and people who build companies to change the world.

I think that built-to-flip vs dent-the-universe is a gross oversimplification and a false dichotomy. Maybe they were aiming to change the world, but their funding round wasn't coming together. Or maybe they lost the faith and decided to return money to their investors, rather than go bust. Maybe one of their key team members had a personal or family issue and needed more financial stability in a hurry. Maybe they learned so much about startups that they were wishing for a reset button. Maybe some combination of all of these things and more?

Startups are a repeat game. A base hit might just be the right career move. You can swing for the homerun on your next at-bat.

Having just gone through a small acquisition myself, I can tell you that it's incredibly bittersweet to pad your bank account by means of killing your baby. Unless you've gone through the process, you have no idea the extent and complexity of thought processes and emotions you experience as a founder.

Though it should be said that a social CAM application is a funny idea.

This is a bad joke.

Hahaha! Epic!! Its one of the shittiest apps I've ever used. Oh wait, I never used it at all - It used my account by itself! (Of course I did authorize it by mistake, ONCE!!)

I don't know about their traffic but I would not be surprised if it had decined. Growth comes from paying attention to growth. But getting acquired, like raising money, is an immense drain on attention. In both cases it can put a startup in a dangerous pinch.

SocialCam will never have any long term users because they spam that crap out of everyone's Facebook wall with 15 second videos with misleading title. Doesn't matter how much traction they have now or before eventually these types of site will die down because they are abusing the system and tricking the users into watching the video. How many times do you think a user will click on a misleading video until they completely stop?

Seems pretty clear there were (are) some pretty big problems under the hood, even though they did a World class job of gaming the metrics TechCrunch, investors etc care about.

Autodesk has apps[1] which work pretty well. I think they're trying to expand into the photo-measurement space, competing with companies like E-Template[2], measuring walls, rooms, and objects by analyzing a photo.

If they could morph SocialCam into an app to take photo/video, upload to their servers to do the math, then output to their app (or another part of their ecosystem), they would provide an incredible mobile utility that would both heavily impact the photo-measurement industry, and provide a massive gain to the 3d-printing early adopters. This is the kind of disruption that photo-measurement and 3d printing need.

[1] http://www.autocadws.com/mobile [2] http://www.etemplatesystem.com/

I blocked the app a long time ago. Wasn't very impressed with the founders in that regard.

So it's ok to spam facebook as long as you are really nice ;)

SocialCam has way less users than Instagram. And as mentioned in other comments, video has a much lower user retention rate than photo.

To attract a new audience to their products?