Autodesk To Buy Socialcam For $60 Million

Today Autodesk announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to purchase Socialcam for $60 million. Socialcam is best explained as “Instagram for video”. If you don’t know what Instagram is then you might as well stop reading this post.

My good friend Martyn Day posted this tweet which made  me smile.

Socialcam has no revenue. And that is not the point in the consumer world. Instagram had no revenue either. But to Facebook it was worth a billion dollars. Why? Well, one way of looking at it is to say that Facebook simply went out and bought out its competition. That logic doesn’t quite work for Autodesk buying Socialcam.

The one thing that matters in the consumer world is the consumer. And Socialcam has a lot of them. Back in April Socialcam announced that it attracted 4 million new users over a single week end.

According to this New York Times article 13 of the 16 million downloads of Socialcam’s iOS app have been in the last three months.

Autodesk’s unfolding consumer strategy has peaked my interest. The company is slowly but surely becoming a house hold name. Both my boys Russell (4) and Reuben (8) know what Autodesk is. Well, to be precise, they don’t really know Autodesk as a company. But they do know that “Autodesk” pops up every time they fire up Tinkerbox on my iPad.