Instagram is now bigger than Twitter,according to news reports which state the social media site now has 300 million users.
The latest news gives an indicator of just how quickly things have the potential to move if suppliers tap into the right areas – and understand the current zeitgeist better than the competition.
This is true in all walks of life but it’s never been quicker than in the age of the smartphone. Simply put – the internet plus pictures on the move for the whole world’s population equals change with a rapidity never previously witnessed in history.
All this begs the question as to where the next big changes will come and why – and what the future will look like. One thing’s for sure, it almost always come out of the blue in a direction we weren’t all anticipating.
The Apple watch and other wearable technology may be one avenue, bendable digital screen technology another. But, whatever happens, we are just around the corner from change like we’ve never seen before. This is inevitable as almost all the people of the world are now hooked up online and mobile. We just don’t know what it will look like yet.
This brings with it countless opportunities for the entrepreneurs amongst us who also like to be completely mobile on their lives.
Millions of people who are good enough at it now trade for a living. And this can be accomplished from anywhere you have coverage – at more or less any time of day. So for example, with the Tradefair trading platform on your smartphone, tablet or phablet, you have the ability to trade more than 3,200 world financial markets. This is immense and the sky’s the limit if you know what you’re doing.
And as Instagram, more than any other single development of the last couple of years, has now shown us – the change can be, well, almost instant!
by BrentOzar
Instagram has now passed Twitter. This leaves Twitter, with a ‘mere’ 284 million users (a figure not far short of the entire population of the USA – to give you some idea of the scale) accessing its network every month, on average.
Of course Facebook trounces them both as things stand with around 1.35 billion users each month. Facebook purchased the Instagram business two years ago for approximately $1 billion in a combination of cash and Facebook stock. Not long before it was bought out, Instagram had 13 employees and was operating out of a conference room in California’s Silicon Valley.
Instagram is unique in that it enables users to see what is happening across the world right now.
It was established by its co-founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systromas recently as October 2010, and its growth has been phenomenal. By February of last year, Instagram had already reached more than100 million monthly users.
But like all other such creative web-based start-ups, it has run into problems of inadequate revenue streams to match its rapid growth. This has seen the company introduce advertising via its “sponsored posts” enabling brands to communicate with the ever-growing number of Instagram users.
Interestingly, the big success stories of the recent years haven’t been huge tech stories in their own right; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram in particular have been based more on a realisation of the possibilities – and the creativity and determination to see those ideas through – as opposed to any great technological breakthroughs.
This should be a lesson to all budding entrepreneurs out there – the tech is enabling, but it’s the ideas based on the possibilities that new technology offers that reap the biggest rewards of all.
