Snapchat is the only camera-first platform, and Snapchat’s cameras are now used by more than 190 million people around the world. The result is Snapchat being one of the most visually rich platforms for almost every breaking news event, as users increasingly share the world around them through public Stories. That’s why today I’m excited to announce that samdesk has partnered with Snap Inc. to tap into their new Snap Kit API! With this partnership and API our platform has access to real-time publicly shared content to find early signals and the most amazing Snaps around breaking news events.

Our team has been closely monitoring and benchmarking Snaps over the last five months (since the launch of Snap Maps on the web). In many cases we’re finding a unique and direct POV on Snapchat that no other platform has – Snapchat is fast, raw and in the moment. Secondly, and most promising for our system, we’ve noticed that Snaps are increasingly providing the first mention of a potential news event or major disruption. The combination of speed with rich visuals makes Snapchat an incredible data source for anyone who relies on fast and accurate information. For samdesk clients, our real-time knowledge engine is able to detect and alert our users to breaking news that much faster and with an extremely valuable perspective, the eyewitness at the scene. Effectively our AI engine has nearly doubled its data input to detect news at speeds we didn’t think could be any faster than the current status quo.

Starting from July 17, 2018, a select group of samdesk clients will see Snaps baked right into our alerts followed by a swift and complete rollout within the next two weeks (or if you log into samdesk, you can see live examples; Leicester Square Stabbing, Montreal Fire, New Delhi Flooding). Snapchat brings a lot of unique content that our AI and Data teams are training our detection and verification models on. These efforts, combined with our user feedback, ensure our models are learning quickly, resulting in more and more samdesk alerts containing neatly packaged Snapchat UGC.

We’re extremely excited to be partnering with Snap and be amongst the first to get our hands on the new Snap Kit API. Snap is clearly focused on building a platform that stands the test of time and cares deeply about its users, their experience, privacy, and now its developer ecosystem. We’re thrilled with the progress so far and happy to see how well Snapchat fits in with our product, our partners, and how much it complements our current data feeds.

Expect to see a lot of “breaking” Snaps in the news everywhere over the coming months!