Instagram today announced a new milestone of 100 million monthly active users.

Just a month ago, Instagram surpassed 90 million MAU, but before that, the company only reported registered users not monthly actives. Some had speculated that Instagram might have lost users or seen growth slow after a controversy related to its data use policy, but there hasn’t been any data to indicate that has been the case. Instagram seems to be continuing to gain app downloads, sign-ups, active users and engagement.

Facebook reached 100 million monthly active users in August 2008 – four and a half years after it was founded. Instagram began in October 2010, and has risen very quickly, in part because of the virality of Facebook, plus the new infrastructure and resources that come along with being owned by the social network.

Instagram is currently the No. 3 top Android app and the No. 17 top free iOS app in the U.S., according to AppData. Earlier this month, Instagram launched its image feed on the web so that users can browse the service without using the mobile app.

In a blog post about the 100-million user achievement, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom reflected on starting the company and his vision for how photos can help people connect. He wrote:

“Images have the ability to connect people from all backgrounds, languages and cultures. They connect us to aid workers halfway across the world in Sudan, to entrepreneurs in San Francisco and even to events in our own backyards. Instagram, as a tool to inspire and connect, is only as powerful as the community it is made of. For this reason, we feel extremely lucky to have the chance to build this with all of you. So from our team to the hundred million people who call Instagram home, we say thank you. Thank you for sharing your world and inspiring us all to do the same.”

Instagram is encouraging users to share photos with the hashtag #InstagramMeansToMe to commemorate the milestone.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

From just two guys at rented desks to a $715 million sale to Facebook, a second wind on Android and a mess of privacy scares, Instagram today announced 100 million people use it every month to share the way they see the world. The startup hedged its bets by being acquired just as it expanded beyond iOS, but despite what it could have sold for now, there’s no disputing Instagram’s success.

In a heartfelt blog post that smooths over the rough patches, co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom explains the journey to building an app that’s created “a world more connected and understood through photographs.”

The untold story is that Instagram made a tough decision right after its April 3rd launch on Android. Before that it had 30 million installs on iOS. Whether it would succeed outside of the design-focused iPhone was a gamble. It could have flopped, attrition could have set in, and it was still small enough to be vulnerable to competitors. So despite racking up 1 million new users in the first 12 hours, there was a lot to lose. $1 billion (at the time) in cash and stock from Facebook for a company with just 13 employees was too good to pass up, so it sold.

If Systrom had foreseen what would happen next, he may have held out longer. The Android app maintained its sprint, and the iPhone version continued to pick up steam. Even without much help from Facebook, and in fact despite Facebook’s own competitor Camera, the Instagram juggernaut could not be stopped.

At over three times as many users now as when it sold, and seemingly beyond quick disruption, would Instagram have sold for $2 billion or even $3 billion today? Would anyone have been willing to pay that? Remember this was when fervor was frothy for the coming Facebook IPO. Social companies still saw going public as a lucrative option.

But Systrom chose to become a made-man (and make made-men out of many of his employees), rather than roll the dice. He chose greater impact by aligning with the world’s premier social network over total control. He still runs Instagram somewhat independently from Facebook, so he may be getting to have his cake and eat it too.

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams last week wrote that there are three reasons to sell your company, and any one will suffice: If the offer captures your potential upside, eliminates imminent threat, or if you want to. With one of the best exits in startup history on the table, insurance against failure on Android and competition from Facebook itself, plus a desire to connect the world just like Zuck, Systrom had all three, whether or not 100 million users was just 10 months away.

Here’s the full blog post from Kevin:

Instagram’s first office had few redeeming qualities—and insulation was not one of them. There were only two of us, so we rented desks in a co-working space on a pier over San Francisco Bay. At night, it was common to find us working in winter jackets huddled over our laptops where the air was so cold we could see our breath. It was October 2010 when we launched Instagram, and San Francisco had dealt us a particularly unforgiving and chilly fall.

One night soon after launch, about a half-mile away, Giants Stadium was full of fans cheering on their team in a race for the NLCS against the Philadelphia Phillies. You see, having so little insulation in the office had an unintended consequence of being able to hear the crowd roar every time someone hit a long ball out towards McCovey Cove. Back in the office, we’d lift our heads up from code with every eruption of the fans, wondering who was at bat, what had happened, and whether the ball had made it or not. We never knew, but that wasn’t the point.

While we may only have had a few thousand people around the world using Instagram that night, we had a sense that maybe through Instagram we could tune in to what was happening just a few steps away. With a few quick commands at his terminal, my co-founder Mike’s screen filled with images of the game: the bullpen, dugout, concession stands, cheering fans and a panoramic view from somewhere up high. In a matter of hours, the people in that stadium had recorded moments in time through Instagram and allowed us to tune into an event while we sat a half a mile away, working—winter coats and all.

For the first time, we understood why Instagram was going to be different. We understood the power of images to connect people to what was happening in the world around them. And, although Instagram had a fraction of the user base it does today, that night we saw a preview of what Instagram would enable at a much larger scale down the road.

Now, nearly two and a half years later, over 100 million people use Instagram every month. It’s easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company, but I think the truth is that it’s an accomplishment for our community. Now, more than ever, people are capturing the world in real-time using Instagram—sharing images from the farthest corners of the globe. What we see as a result is a world more connected and understood through photographs.

Of the 100 million people on Instagram, there are stories that awe us: stories like Kathryn Mahoney’s (@nineteenfiftyone). Kathryn is an aid worker for the United Nations in the most remote refugee camp in Southern Sudan. She shares vivid photos of the day-to-day life of the people who live in Yida as well as the struggles and triumphs of the UN’s work there. From thousands of miles away, Kathryn reminds us of the power of images to educate and inspire.

There are love stories that move us, like the story of Cory (@withhearts) and Bethany (@bethanyolson) who began following each other a year and a half ago at the suggestion of a mutual photographer friend. After trading likes on photos, meeting for coffee, and finally joining up for a photowalk, a mutual interest in photography turned into dating. To this day, they still go on photography adventures and explore the world together with Instagram in tow.

And there are inspiring stories of small businesses and artisans. Mission Bicycle (@missionbicycle), a small, independent manufacture in san Francisco, has amassed nearly 50,000 followers as they share the photos from their daily work of making beautiful bicycles by hand. Similarly, Sightglass Coffee (@sightglass) shares photos from their harvesting grounds in El Salvador and Ethiopia to remind us that even a local business has global connections.

Images have the ability to connect people from all backgrounds, languages and cultures. They connect us to aid workers halfway across the world in Sudan, to entrepreneurs in San Francisco and even to events in our own backyards. Instagram, as a tool to inspire and connect, is only as powerful as the community it is made of. For this reason, we feel extremely lucky to have the chance to build this with all of you. So from our team to the hundred million people who call Instagram home, we say thank you. Thank you for sharing your world and inspiring us all to do the same.

Kevin Systrom

Co-founder, Instagram

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The US Department of State and mobile startup biNu just announced that they’re working together in a public-private partnership.

It’s not, perhaps, the most obvious partnership, but biNu says that its app platform for feature phones and lower-end smartphones is already used by an audience of 4 million people, largely in emerging economies. That’s an audience that the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs wants to reach, so it will be using biNu to distribute its English-language learning materials, such as e-books, audio, and games.

The organizations already teamed up in October to distribute the State Department’s game Trace Word Soup, and since then they say that 1.4 million games have been played in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere.

“Today we have moved closer to meeting the global demand for English language learning,” said Ann Stock, the State Department’s assistant secretary for educational and cultural affairs, in a press release.

biNu recently raised a $4.3 million Series A from Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, 500 Startups, and others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Let’s say you’re a video publisher who wants all the world to have access to your content… But translating videos into multiple languages is time-consuming and expensive — that is, unless you’ve got a team of volunteers to do it for you. One of the most efficient ways to tackle the problem is by crowdsourcing subtitles, which is why translation startup Amara has raised $1 million from Mozilla and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Amara, previously known as Universal Subtitles, was created as an open-source platform to allow anyone to crowdsource transcriptions and translations of video content. Its technology has been used by volunteers to translate and create subtitles for more than 170,000 videos, including President Barack Obama’s message to Sudan and the KONY 2012 video, which was available in more than 35 languages in four days.

With the funding, the Amara team will be releasing an enterprise version of the platform, which its customers can use within their own organizations — whether it be to collaborate on subtitle creations in-house, or to open up translation to outside volunteers. And with flexible APIs, the system is designed to work with publishers’ existing content management systems and publishing workflows, according to Amara co-founder and executive director Nicholas Reville.

Amara is already working with some major publishers — including news organizations like PBS NewsHour and Al Jazeera, as well as educational video providers such as Khan Academy — to make their content more accessible to a broader audience.

While Amara is focused on making content accessible to viewers around the world, there are other benefits to having subtitles for online videos: Doing so can improve SEO, and it makes them available to those who are hard of hearing as well. That’s important particularly as Congress passed a law last year requiring publishers to have subtitles on videos that appear online. All of which is why Amara believes it’s in a nice spot, as publishers will soon need tools to provide those subtitles.

Amara, which was formed as part of an open source project within the Participatory Culture Foundation. It now has a team of about 20 working at the startup, which it expects to roll out to at least 10 more customers over the coming months.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

American UN Ambassador Susan Rice gave an unprecedented livestreamed townhall at Twitter HQ today, “a very interesting and exciting day” due to the at the time impending speech of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. The talk was replete with questions from Twitter users and had its own hashtag #askambrice.

Rice began the townhall praising Twitter for leading the charge and redefining the media landscape in these unique times.

“You are doing amazing work. I hope you have the satisfaction of knowing that it’s having real time real impact in parts of the world as far flung as Zimbabwe, where I just learned you have 66,000 users, to of course the Middle East and so many other parts of the world.

You should be very proud. An American and as a policymaker, I am very proud of you and proud to be here.”

Rice went to address Twitter user concerns about the genocide in Sudan, the brutal actions of the Lord’s Resistance Army, the value of the UN, President Obama’s commitment to technology and entrepreneurship as well as the possibility of Hosni’s resignation (“We support democracy in Egypt”).

While the entire video is fascinating to watch (Craigslist co-founder Craig Newmark makes a brief but hilarious appearance), the most intriguing part for me at least was when Rice was asked a question about how foreign governments viewed Facebook and Twitter.

“It’s impossible to escape the recognition that Twitter and Facebook and other forms of social media have had an enormous impact on the emergence and coalescence of these social movements, and governments are increasingly cognizant of their power and their importance. Different ones have responded differently, some have tried to suppress free expression, others have recognized that that’s futile and some have done both.

It’s an extrodinary moment. As I sought to allude to in my opening comments the power of this technology and the power of social networking to channel and champion public sentitment has been more evident in the last few weeks than ever before. We can only begin to speculate what its impact will be elsewhere throughout the world.”

The outcome of today’s events in Tahrir Square is still “to be continued,” and the scope of influence of Twitter and Facebook on the protests in Egypt, Tunisa, Yemen and now Syria is subject to endless debate.

But Rice is right, there’s no denying that social media has a powerful effect on social movements, but as to its exact magnitude we can only begin to speculate, fittingly, hopefully, on Twitter.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

2010 was a big year for Opera’s mobile browser, Opera Mini. The browser’s iPhone app was approved, saw one million downloads in the first day and since the mobile browser has been growing like gangbusters. Today, Opera released its state of the mobile report showing that Opera finished the year off with additional growth.

In December 2010, Opera Mini had over 85.5 million users, a 6.8% increase from November 2010 and an 84.7% increase in unique users since December 2009. Opera Mini users viewed over 46.7 billion pages in December 2010, which is a 4.6% percent increase since November, and a 125.5% increase in page views since December 2009.

In December 2010, Opera Mini users generated over 706 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since November, the data consumed went up by 4.3%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 6.5 petabytes of data in December.

With the holiday shopping season in full swing in December, Opera took a look at traffic to e-commerce giant Amazon, with percentage of Opera Mini users who accessed Amazon (per month) went from 3.8% in January 2010 to 7.4% in December.

Shoppers in the U.S. and Germany doubled their number of page views to Amazon towards the end of the year, as compared to the start of 2010, as mobile shopping heated up.

Opera also delved into usage in ten countries in Africa (South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Ghana, Sudan, Libya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Namibia), with page views in these countries increasing by 365%, unique users up 176% and data transferred up by 331%. Sudan and Zimbabwe lead the top 10 countries of the region in terms of page-view growth (4908.2 % and 2321.6 %, respectively).

And in the top 10 African countries, Facebook and Google vied for the website with the most visits. In 6 out of the top 10 countries, Facebook was number one. In the remaining 4 countries, Google was number one. YouTube, Yahoo, and Wikipedia were also highly visited in these countries.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch