subject: What Urged Facebook To Acquire Instagram App? [print this page] Mark Zuckerberg was out of his mind this weekend? And did he just start a new Internet bubble in the field of mobile apps? Co-founder of Facebook has indeed confirmed the purchase of photo sharing service Instagram for a billion dollars, a sum probably never seen before for a start-up of just two years and nine employees.
A billion dollars is also twice the estimated value of Instagram, assessed just a week earlier by a group of venture capitalists on the occasion of an injection of $ 50 million. It sounds crazy, considering that Instagram generates no income and still do not know how to monetize its 50 million users. But it is also the price of the first mobile-based social network. Unlike Instagram, indeed, Facebook was designed for the internet on computer and mobile applications have so far not convinced it. The New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg had already attempted in 2011 to buy Instagram. But the two co-founders, Kevin and Mike Krieger Synstrom, then had preferred to keep their independence.
In fact, the similarity between the two social networks is striking. Because Facebook has also seen its audience explode through the sharing of photos of its members. Instagram displays a growth rate even higher, it could indeed have 100 million users in a few months, as compared to Facebook which took four years to reach this level. Instagram set its pace high since it has just launched a version for the Android platform which can only multiply the success achieved on the iPhone.
Zuckerberg understood that Instagram could be even bigger than Facebook and by making such an offer, it prevents it from falling into the hands of Google or Apple.
What is Instagram
Instagram is an application and there is free on the App Store, the virtual store of Apple iPhone programs, from 6 October 2010. The idea behind the application is relatively simple: take a picture and share it with your friends, who can comment and put one of their favorites. To find and keep in touch with friends and acquaintances, Instangram has a search system based on Twitter and Facebook: just enter their account credentials and the application prepares a list of people who know that already use it.
Why Facebook Opted For It
The social network has based its success on the ability for users to share, online, entire photo albums with your friends. Each day approximately 250 million new photos are uploaded to Facebook, but since there is this possibility, things have remained essentially unchanged: you can add the tags to identify people who appear in photos, comments, and little else. There are, however, effective ways to customise the images and add artistic effects such as those offered by Instagram. This acquisition will allow the social network using solutions similar to those of the application, no patent issues, even in its system for the management of photo files.
Other likeness, as with Google's video sharing site, Facebook promises to preserve the independence of Instagram and enable sharing of photos on competing networks like Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare. On his Facebook profile, where it says about the operation, Zuckerberg does indeed forward no economic motive, the desire simply to "learn from the experience of Instagram" and "offer the best photo sharing experience. Altruistic goals still almost cost him a billion dollars.
