“Technology businesses in general are susceptible to hacking. That's why you have to work really, really, really hard with law enforcement, with security experts, internal and external groups, to make sure you're paying attention and addressing security concerns.”
This week's quote is by American businessman Evan Spiegel, who is the co-founder and CEO of the American social media company Snap Inc.
Evan first proposed the idea of Snapchat as a class project with his friends Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown while they were students at Stanford University in 2011.
The initial reaction to the idea of a photo-sharing app that would delete shared images was ridiculed by his peers. Everyone said, "That's a terrible idea. Not only is nobody going to use it but people who do will use it for sexting."
Evan and his friends did it anyway and today the app has approximately 150 million people using it a day.
The photo and video sharing app allows users to layer filters, text, and effects to create shareable Snaps that automatically disappear after 10 seconds. Snapchat also allows users to create Stories, which are compilations of Snaps that create a whole narrative. This idea has since been copied by Facebook and Instagram.
As businesses around the world are struggling to survive during the COVID-19 pandemic, Snap Inc. generated US$462 million of revenue in the first quarter of 2020. Evan is constantly devising new and useful ways of leveraging the premise of the app.
The app helps people stay connected to friends and family around the world, in turn, bringing people together emotionally. He witnessed this in his own living room when his son was video calling with his grandmother and using augmented reality lenses to make each other laugh. To him, that was a testament to his vision about the app when he started it as a student.
As technology businesses are susceptible to hacking, Snapchat couldn't escape it. In 2014, hackers collected the usernames and phone numbers of approximately 2.6 million users and published them to a website. Snapchat took immediate action to make the app more secure. They also listed an email address that security experts could use to contact the company "when they discover new ways to abuse our service so that we can respond quickly to address those concerns."
As an Australian technology business, we understand the importance of security and keeping the data safe. Even in the initial years when DDSN was started, our CEO Rob Wells focussed on creating systems that would keep our business and customer data safe. Over the years, as our team continuously designed and developed CMS platform, websites and apps, security still remains at the peak of what we do. All of our data is strictly within the boundaries of Australian firewalls, which keeps it safe to such an extent that even Australian government organisations trust us to keep their data securely.
Today's Quote
Who is Evan Spiegel?
Evan Thomas Spiegel is an American businessman who is the co-founder and CEO of the American social media company Snap Inc., which he created (as Snapchat Inc.) with Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown.
Spiegel took design classes at the Otis College of Art and Design while he was in high school and at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena the summer before entering Stanford.
In April 2011, while studying Product Design at Stanford, Spiegel proposed an app for his class project which his classmates ridiculed. Later that year, Evan worked with his classmates Bobby and Reggie to launch a prototype of this concept called "Picaboo", which they later renamed as Snapchat.
In 2017, Spiegel became one of the youngest public company CEOs at age 26 when Snap began trading in March and has been growing the business ever since.
At DDSN we keep security at the forefront of all our operations, to keep our business and client data secure at all times. We aim to instill this culture among the tech industry.Australia's leading website design and development agency based in Melbourne
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