Snow (stylized in

all caps In typography, text or font in all caps (short for "all capitals") contains capital letters without any lowercase letters. For example: All-caps text can be seen in legal documents, advertisements, newspaper headlines, and the titles on book co ...

) is an image messaging and

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms, such as Text (literary theory), writing, Sound, audio, images, animations, or video, into a single presentation. T ...

mobile application created by Camp Mobile, a subsidiary of

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...

n internet search giant

Naver Corporation Naver Corporation () is a South Korean internet conglomerate headquartered in Seongnam that operates the search engine Naver. Naver established itself as an early pioneer in the use of user-generated content through the creation of the online ...

. It features virtual stickers using

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR), also known as mixed reality (MR), is a technology that overlays real-time 3D computer graphics, 3D-rendered computer graphics onto a portion of the real world through a display, such as a handheld device or head-mounted ...

and

photographic filter In photography and cinematography, a filter is a camera accessory consisting of an optical filter that can be inserted into the optical path. The filter can be of a square or oblong shape and mounted in a holder accessory, or, more commonly, a ...

s. Pictures and messages sent through Snow are only accessible for a short time.

Background

Snow was launched in September 2015 by Camp Mobile. The company collaborated with different Korean artists. In 2016, the app spun off into its own company, named as Snow Corp. In 2018, Snow Corp raised $50M from

SoftBank is a Japanese multinational Investment company, investment holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, that focuses on investment management. The group primarily invests in companies operating in technology that offer goods and services ...

and Sequoia China. It is reported that it plans to use the investment to develop its augmented reality and facial recognition technologies.

Features

Snow allows users to take pictures or videos (of a maximum duration of 5 minutes) and choose from 1,300 stickers and 50 filters. They can also send them as messages that destroy themselves in 48 hours. Videos could also be saved as

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

files. According to ''

Business Insider ''Business Insider'' (stylized in all caps: BUSINESS INSIDER; known from 2021 to 2023 as INSIDER) is a New York City–based multinational financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Inside ...

'', the app functions as a clone of

Snapchat Snapchat is an American multimedia social media and instant messaging app and service developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal features of the app are that pictures and messages, known as "snaps", are usually availa ...

References

External links

*
SNOW Corp. website
Naver Corporation Instant messaging Image-sharing websites South Korean social networking websites Android (operating system) software IOS software {{Mobile-software-stub