Instagram Bought by Facebook

Posted by Clive in Social Media

Instagram Bought by Facebook for $1 billion… Another Tech Bubble?

Instagram has announced that it has been bought by Facebook in a deal worth an incredible $1 billion. Incredible because Instagram is only 2 years old, it makes no recorded profit, it has 13 employees and it was up until this month, just an iPhone app (now it is also on Android).

Instagram allows people to take pictures on their smartphone, edit and stylize them using different filters, then share with friends on other social networking sites such as twitter and facebook.

Instagram is another company born out of the technology mecca that is California and Stanford University. It was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Kriegar in 2010 out of a love of the old ‘instant’ Polaroid snapshots.

In March 2010 Systrom acquired $500,000 of seed investment and this was followed in February 2011 by another $7 million funding round valuing Instagram at around $25 million. Another funding round occurred this month just before the Facebook announcement.

Instagram managed to raise around $50 million giving it an approx. valuation of $500 million. The Facebook acquisition doubles that valuation, not bad for a weeks investment and perhaps another pointer towards a tech bubble?

In the past few weeks Instagram has launched on the Android platform instantly giving it access to millions of new users and markets.

Facebook obviously swooped in a strategic decision to purchase the company before someone else did. What they are getting for their money is a great app, a very strong userbase that loves the product, enourmous growth potential as other phone platforms are integrated and probably the most important thing for facebook, access to the skillset of the team behind the app.

Normally when Facebook get the chequebook out it is to take the talent over to their own site and shutdown their project. This time it will have to be different. 30 million people is alot of people to upset.

Lets just hope that all of those 13 employees were offered stock as part of their renumeration.

Instagram Statistics

Photos: Instagram

Pinterest Grabs the Headlines

Posted by Sam in Social Media

Pinterest grabs the headlines following phenomenal growth.

Pinterest was recently named as one of the top 50 websites to watch by Time magazine and since then has shown that it has the potential to become a big player, adding more users than many more established sites.

So whats all the Pinterest buzz about?

Pinterest is all about sharing photos, basically an online collection of pinboards.

So it’s a great to look at, driven as it is by photos, and it’s clean design compliments it’s reason for being. It follows all the best site design like Google and Facebook and keeps things simple.

It is also causing alot of buzz because of the type of person that is using the site. The overwhelming majority of users on the site are female even though the site was the brain child of a man.

Pinterest History

Based in Silicon Valley, Pinterest has some serious backers funding it and was launched in 2010 by founders Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp.

Paul Sciarra recently stated that he was stepping down from day to day involvement in Pinterest. You can read that here: Paul Sciarra steps down from Pinterest.

The site got some major publicity in the summer of 2011 when Time magazine named it as one of its top 50 websites and it grew from about half a million users to approx. 5 million in 6 months. According to website scoring service Comscore, it hit almost 18 million users in Feb 2012.

 

Name Your Favorite Social Site

Photo: Wikipedia

Facebook Messenger App Launches

Posted by Jeff in Social Media, Technology

Facebook messenger app has launched this week for the iPhone and Android markets. What’s it all about?

Facebook messenger is a separate app from the main Facebook app that you currently use to access your profile and friends. It’s sole purpose is to get a message to one of your contacts, whether a phone contact or one that resides in Facebook.

Similar to the Blackberry messenger and perhaps gunning as a replacement for phone texting itself, the Facebook messenger app looks to plug a gap before Apple launches a similar product and Google+ gets enough traction.

Facebook messenger app delivers messages through notifications and SMS texts. The idea being that there is more chance that your message will be received quickly, there is no where for them to hide even if they are away from their phone as long as they are logged in somewhere.

You can also utilize groups to have a conversation en masse and you can utilize location data if you have it switched on to send your location or meeting point. All your messages and conversations are kept in one place so that you can see a full history of the conversation.

Facebook Messenger App Competition

Apple are rumoured to be integrating a similar facility when the new version of it’s operating system, iOS 5, is launched later this year. However, it is thought that this will be similar to their facetime application where it can only be used for messaging between Apple products. The Blackberry messenger app also has this same limitation.

Facebook messenger on the other hand is not tied to one type of phone, it can go cross platform and could give Facebook the USP that will attract it’s 750 million users to the app.

Facebook and Skype Team Up for Video Chat

Posted by James in Social Media, Technology

In a move that looks like an attempt to steal the new Google+ services thunder, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the Skype video chat will be integrated into Facebook.

Skype was recently purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 billion (although still awaiting regulator approval) and MS already have a tie-in with Facebook allowing Bing to be used for search results within FB. Microsoft also, it should be said, have a shareholding in FB.

So perhaps it was inevitable that Zuckerberg would look to take advantage of Skype’s technology and expertise at some point to bypass the huge time and expense of developing something from scratch.

From Skype’s point of view their seems to be the lure of the massive user base that Facebook now commands (Zuckerberg stated that it was now over 750 million users), Skype’s own service offers options for free but also premium services for those so inclined. Presumably this business model will be brought into facebook.

The new features were announced at a press conference today by Zuckerberg and Skype CEO Tony Bates. Zuckerberg mentioned that the launch of Google’s social service Google+ and other services had validated Facebook’s vision of the social web.

I guess the question now will be, which one of your facebook friends do you actually want to talk to?

MySpace Sold At A Big Loss By News Corp.

Posted by James in Business, Social Media

The social media website MySpace has been sold by News Corp. to the advertising firm Specific Media for an undisclosed sum, although there are suggestions that it got over $500 million less than it paid in 2005.

MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005 when it was at the height of it’s popularity and was by far the leading social network. They paid $580 million for the site and it’s millions of users.

Unfortunately for MySpace there were a couple of startups just around the corner which would rapidly steal it’s thunder, it’s advertisers and it’s users. They were Facebook and Twitter.

Speaking from a personal perspective, I looked at joining MySpace around that time but found the site messy, cluttered and confusing; I didn’t use it.

Then along came Facebook which followed Google’s clean design, it was simple, clean and effective; I signed up straight away.

That, in a nutshell was MySpace’s problem. Although it tried to reform (including recently integrating with Facebook connect) and reclaim lost ground it effectively turned into a site that was, in the public perception anyway, predominately centred around music promotion.

Job losses followed and News Corp’s CEO said financial losses at MySpace were unsustainable, hence the sale for a fraction of the purchase price. It is understood however that as part of the deal, News Corp. will take a minority stake in Specific Media.

It is unclear what plans Specific Media have for the site but it is understood that the pop star/actor Justin Timberlake now has a stake in the business and will help develop a strategy.

LinkedIn Hopes To Raise $350 million in it’s Initial IPO Offering

Posted by Clive in Business, Social Media

LinkedIn prices it’s initial share offering at $45 a share today as it looks to raise $350 million.

LinkedIn is a social network aimed at the business professional market and has built up a membership of over 100 million people in over 200 countries, more than half are outside of the US.

The initial public offering is for 7,840,000 shares which will raise $352,800,000 for the company and it’s stakeholders.

LinkedIn will begin trading on Thursday 19th May under the stock symbol ‘LNKD’ in New York and is one of the biggest tech IPO’s in recent years.

The company is part of a select group of tech companies that provide social based services such as Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and GroupOn. LinkedIn are the first to go public and many see it as a testbed for future ‘social’ offerings.

Other, less famous social tech startups that have gone public have struggled to keep their share price above the initial offering and some fear that the LinkedIn price is way above it’s value, citing that it could be another tech bubble.

It will be interesting to see how the market in the following months treat the LinkedIn share price, will they see it as overvalued for a company that made a modest profit or will they recognise the growth the company is rapidly achieving amongst its core membership of influential and monied business people.

Photo: LinkedIn

Lady Gaga Makes Twitter History…Again

Posted by Tracy in Celebrity, Social Media

Lady Gaga has made twitter history again after amassing 10,000,000 (yes that is 10 million) followers. In the world of online one-up-manship Gaga has it all sown up.

In the relatively new world of twitter you may not think it is not such a big deal but it really is some feat. If all those followers lived in one city it would be bigger than London.

Lady Gaga beat off some stiff competition to reach the landmark from that other phenomenon, Justin Bieber. Barack Obama is in third place, at the time of writing, with over 8 million followers.

Lady Gaga tweeted upon reaching the landmark,

“10millionmonsters! I’m speechless, we did it! Its an illness how I love you. Leaving London smiling.”

Lady Gaga had been in the UK to play in the Radio 1 Big Weekend music festival where she turned up fashionably late before appearing on stage, emerging from a coffin to sing ‘Born This Way’ while wearing a fake baby bump.

Other notable twitter milestones have been the first to reach 1 million followers (Ashton Kutcher) and Charlie Sheen hitting a million followers overnight.