Why won't Pinterest's IPO price much exceed its private valuation of $12 billion? It seemed to have a great product/market fit, but there's a problem, especially compared to arch-rival Instagram. It doesn't offer sufficient incremental improvements in cost dynamics or productivity. More
Tag Index / Showing 1 - 12 of 12 results for “Instagram”
Magisto’s A.I. Helps Anyone Produce Polished Video
Magisto wants to do for video what Instagram did for photos—provide intuitive tools to edit and enhance them and make them easy to share. Founded in Israel in 2009 by two experts in computer vision and artificial intelligence, Magisto enables a user to simply select photos and videos on their smartphone, choose a visual theme, and automatically create a sophisticated edited product in minutes. There's a lot of computer science on the back end making that possible. Magisto launched in January 2012 at the Consumer Electronics Show, won an app competition there, and now has 20 million registered users worldwide, up from 3 million last year. With 30 employees, the company has offices in Tel Aviv, New York, and San Francisco. Techonomy sat down with Magisto CEO Oren Boiman for a wide-ranging talk about video, social media, and how people want to express themselves. More
A Recipe for Less Waste in the Food Service Industry
Think twice before you throw out those leftovers—or maybe even take a picture. Globally, one-third of all food is wasted—1.3 billion tons of food in total. The U.S. alone trashes 40 percent of what it could consume, and much of this comes from the food service industry itself (which loses between $8 and $20 billion through food waste every year). Luckily, Andrew Shackman and his 10-year-old company, LeanPath, has found a way to change the way food service industry thinks about waste. More
In Chicago, It’s Hot to Study How People Interact Online
People who build technology want you to have the most simple—and emotionally satisfying—experience possible. That's why more and more students are studying UX, or user experience, design. There are many subtleties in how understanding how users interact with technology and how to create user-friendly products. The field of UX design is often described as how and why things work. And Chicago is becoming a hotbed for studying it. More
Dorsey Tells Entrepreneurs: Meet Customers Where They Are
An ice cream maker, a newspaper publisher, food trucks, pop-up shops, and numerous farmers’ market vendors are among the thousands of small businesses in Detroit using mobile apps invented by Jack Dorsey—namely Twitter and Square—to win customers, manage sales, and save time. In fact, Square has already helped to power $174 million in transactions for 5,500 Detroit businesses, the company claims. And at Techonomy Detroit this week Dorsey said entrepreneurs can expect more developments targeted to their businesses from him in the future. More
Innovative Retailers Use Instagram to Boost Sales
Instagram hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize mobile photo sharing—and the company is currently facing scrutiny about whether Facebook’s acquisition was in the best interest of Instagram investors. But hordes of users have turned Instagram into a profitable business opportunity, building new services on top of the existing platform. More
Instagram Offers Powerful Views of Storm
When I checked my email this morning, my mother, who lives in France, had sent me links to two Instagram photos of the blackout and flooding in lower Manhattan. Some of the most visually stunning impressions of Sandy's impact have been shared via Instagram. According to Forbes.com's Steve Bertoni, even before the storm made landfall, there were 300,026 photos shared on the mobile site under #sandy; 183,003 tagged #hurricanesandy, and 27,564 under #frankenstorm (along with 1,467 photos tagged #huricanesandy, for those whose spelling gets shaky when the wind blows). As power remains out and cell networks stay up, Bertoni predicts Instagram, along with Twitter and Facebook, may prove "one of the key links to the outside world to millions of stranded people." More
Startups That Catch Fire Too Soon Risk Early Burnout
Despite raising $41 million prior to launch, the much-hyped mobile/social/photo startup Color hit a wall once they released their app. Why? As Matthew O'Brien of The Atlantic explains, building something that people don't know they want and then making them want it is a messy process. More
Instagram Beats Twitter in Daily Mobile Users
A picture says 1000 words—or at least more than 140 characters. Instagram has beaten Twitter in daily mobile users for the first time, according toAllThingsD via an unpublished comScore report. More
The Andreessen Horowitz Effect
In the three short years since Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz set up shop as venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road, they’ve already established Andreessen Horowitz as one of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley, right up there with Accel, Benchmark, Greylock, Kleiner, and Sequoia. Some would argue that it is the top firm. They’ve raised $2.7 billion across three funds and they somehow seem to get into every deal that matters. The Andreessen Horowitz portfolio includes such marquee names as Skype, Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare, Pinterest, Airbnb, Fab, Groupon, and Zynga. More
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