Instagram + Facebook. When Mike and I started Instagram nearly two years ago, we set out to change and improve the way the world communicates and shares.
Chris dixon: Giving up 1% of your marke... Here's The Biggest Threat To Facebook, And What Facebook Is Doing About It. Facebook Buying Instagram Makes Perfect Sense. Mark Zuckerberg announced this morning that Facebook has "agreed to acquire" Instagram for a cool $1 billion.
The tiny team that took over the mobile world will now work at Facebook. Instagram launched on Android last week, much to the chagrin of many special-snowflake iPhone users, and this news is sure to bum them out even further. But Facebook rules photos, and Instagram is the new camera. This deal makes perfect sense. Robert Scoble's answer to Instagram: What about Instagram made it worth a $1B acquisition by Facebook?
Here is why Facebook bought Instagram. You might have heard by now that Facebook has acquired Instagram for nearly a billion dollars in cash and stock.
Incredible, isn’t it? I have received text messages of awe and shock from many people in the Valley, for no one saw this coming. A few days ago it was rumored to be valued at $500 million. A few months ago it was $300 million. Its last round — just a year ago – valued the company at $100 million. Did Facebook panic? Why Facebook is buying Instagram.
Last week, mobile photo-sharing site Instagram raised $50 million from venture capitalists at a $500 million valuation. Today, the company agreed to be acquired for $1 billion by Facebook. So what happened in the intervening days? For starters, the venture capital round had been in the works for more than a month. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported the deal back on March 9.
How do I know? Instagram billion dollar valuation. From 0 To $1 Billion In Two Years: Instagram’s Rose-Tinted Ride To Glory. Even now, it’s still shocking how the remarkably low distribution costs of the web can change a founder’s fate overnight.
Many startups are duds, and most grow at a clip that’s just not fast enough to justify an interesting valuation. But once in awhile, a company comes along and just nails it. The right timing. The right market. The right place. I met Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger before they were working together. Systrom, meanwhile, had just come off of a year at Nextstop, a travel-oriented startup that had sold to Facebook in a talent acquisition.
In early 2010, Systrom was messing around with a few ideas. So Systrom, ever the connoisseur of fine whiskeys, tested an app called Burbn. Users weren’t exactly checking in all the time on Burbn. Instagram’s CEO had no formal programming training. He’s a marketer who learned to code by night. Facebook’s Instagram deal — bubble indicator or smart acquisition? Instagram's Buyout: No Bubble to See Here. Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook raised eyebrows Monday, renewing cries of a new tech bubble.
But relative to other major acquisitions, turns out it’s a pretty good deal and not the least bit inflationary. To put the acquisition in perspective I pulled together data from a selection of 30 notable internet acquisitions over the last 10 years, from Broadcast.com to OMGPop to see if Facebook/Instagram for $1 billion was as crazy as everyone thinks. (I left out companies without public purchase prices or user stats.) The spreadsheet below captures the acquisition date, dollar amounts, and ballpark counts of the users and employees at the time of acquisition. Be warned: Any of these numbers are very rough, cobbled together from Internet Archive searches, old news articles, Quora answers, and tech blogs.
Download the spreadsheet or view it on Google Docs. A startup is acquired for any combination of the technology, talent, or the user base. The User-to-Employee Ratio Methodology. With Instagram Buy, Facebook Officially Pushes M&A Strategy Beyond The ‘Acqui-hire’ Facebook helps Instagram with unique Open Graph app rollout. Facebook and Instagram have been working together for weeks on an Open Graph integration for the mobile photo sharing app, Inside Facebook has discovered.
Facebook, which announced today that it acquired Instagram for $1 billion in cash and Facebook stock, has helped Instagram roll out a Timeline application to groups of users in stages without any friction on the user side. Open Graph lets applications create “actions” that can be published automatically to Facebook. These apps compile user activity over time and share summaries of that activity on Timeline.
Note to startups: The network is all that really matters. It’s probably an understatement to say a lot of digital ink has been spilled about Facebook’s $1-billion acquisition of Instagram, a deal that sent shock waves through the startup community, the venture-capital industry and the technology sector like a boulder dropped into a swimming pool.
Many people are questioning the value of Instagram — something that appears to be just a childishly simple simple photo-sharing app — and have ascribed all kinds of motives to Facebook’s interest in it. But as Om has noted in his own posts on the acquisition, there is a lot more to Instagram than meets the eye, and the biggest lesson that I think needs to be learned is: Nothing is more important than the network. A lot of the coverage of Instagram, especially from people who don’t seem to have ever used the app, has focused on the filters that are provided for users, some of which add a 70′s-style look or an old-fashioned border or a sepia tone to a photo before it is posted.
Insta-Backlash: Twitterverse Overreacts To Facebook’s Instagram Acquisition, Users Delete Accounts. Not everyone is happy about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram this morning, it seems.
In an apparent insta-backlash, a bunch of folks are tweeting about their intentions to delete their Instagram accounts now that Facebook has tainted their trendy social network with its massive data-grabbing paws. It’s a spectacle even worse than when Instagram launched on Android, prompting all those #teamiPhone tweets. Sigh.
Some tech blogs are even posting tips and tools that help you get your data out of the service, too, like Instaport, for example. On Hacker News, a user dug up the Instagram page that lets you delete your account. Evident among the tweeters are the typical concerns that when a big company steps in, it means things will never be the same – that Facebook will shut down the service or that they’ll change it somehow – two things Facebook and Instagram have both assured users they aren’t planning on doing. Instagram becomes #1 Free App on the App Store for The First Time. I guess all of the hue and cry about quitting Instagram over its acquisition by Facebook turned out to be a bunch of hot air, because it hasn’t stopped people from downloading the app.
Instagram announced via its Twitter account that it has reached the top slot in free apps. Instagram is #1 in the @AppStore for the first time ever! Thanks everyone!