Facebook Buys Photo Sharing App Instagram for $1B

Posted by unlocker under News on Thursday May 3, 2012

Social media titan Facebook bought the highly popular photo sharing app Instagram
Mark Zuckerberg spread the news using his created social media. In his own Facebook Timeline, he announced:
I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.
For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.
We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.
That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.
We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.
These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.
This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.
We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.
Instagram was an iOS-exclusive app before and was named as iPhone app of the year in 2011 and recently announced that they passed the 30 million mark. Last week, Instagram released the Android version of the app and was downloaded a million times in 12 hours.
Instagram is a San Francisco-based company composed of 13 employees only. The success of the business with an increase of $7 million in just over a year when it had 1.75 million users was indeed very beneficial to its founders and employees.

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Apple Working on Game Console for iPhone?

Posted by unlocker under News on Wednesday Apr 25, 2012

There is a rumor that Apple is currently working on a game controller for easier playing in iPhone.
The rumor started when AnandTech released its review of the latest iPad. In the review, they highlighted one of the advantages of Android tablets is their unique feature to support wired and wireless game controllers. This is quickly followed by the statement that Apple is currently working in making a controller for its iOS devices for easier game playing.
AnandTech reported and the author said, “I know of an internal Apple project to bring a physical controller to market, but whether or not it will ever see the light of day remains to be seen. As smartphones and tablets come close to equaling the performance of current game consoles, I feel like the controller problem must be addressed.”
Although most of the games work quite well using the touch screen, there are some games that work best with physical buttons that are available in game controllers.
There are third party controllers that works with iPhone, iPod, and iPad such as iControlPad, Ion Audio’s iCade game controllers, Think Geek’s iCade 8-bitty controller etc or accessories such as Fling. These game controllers connect to iOS devices via Bluetooth.

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