Meerkat (app)

Meerkat was developed by Life On Air, Inc., a team led by founder and CEO Ben Rubin. The back-end that powered the app was developed over the course of two years for a previous video product of theirs. The company raised $12 million in venture capital funding from Greylock Partners in March 2015. On October 4, 2016, The app was withdrawn from the App Store and Play Store, and all associated services stopped. The Meerkat website now redirects to the creator's new app, Houseparty. According to the creators, the new app, which "has been in development for 10 months, and moves away from public broadcasts in favour of private chats." ==Twitter reaction==

In March 2015, weeks after the release of Meerkat, Twitter cut off Meerkat's access to its social graph, then announced the acquisition of the competing app Periscope. Twitter publicly launched Periscope on March 26, 2015. Apart from providing the similar functionality of live-streaming to users' Twitter followers, Periscope also gives users an option to let anyone play the stream back. ==References==