Evan Spiegel on maps, Minis, and the future of Snapchat

On Thurssday Snap held its second-ever partner summit as a virtual event, announcing a new suite of products and developer tools for Snapchat. The inaugural event was one of the more memorable tech productions I’ve been to — a high-energy keynote from CEO Evan Spiegel in front of giant vertical screens on a converted Hollywood sound stage, at which he introduced the company’s games platform. And so I was disappointed when, along with every other big gathering planned for this year, the event was scaled down to a video chat.

But if the scale of the event was much smaller, the announcements arguably signaled even more ambition. Snap has had a good year, buoyed — like every other social app — by a lockdown that kept people indoors for...

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