Instagram: 18 Months + Some Luck = $1 Billion

I came upon an interesting Inc.com article about Instagram and it's rapid rise to success. The start-up, was just over a year and a half old when it sold for $1 Billion to Facebook and here are some interesting highlights:

- Instagram had zero revenue when it was sold
- The app took only eight weeks to build
- After two and a half months, the app was downloaded one million times
- There were 12 employees at the time of sale
- Founder, Kevin Systrom, studied and worked in Silicon Valley (Stanford, Twitter, Google)
- Kevin randomly met his first investors at another start-up company's cocktail party, got $500k and quit his job to focus on Instagram

Here's the part that I like the best. The first interation of Instagram was called "Burbn" and it was similar to what Foursquare is today. There were a ton of features and if there's one thing you should keep in mind in product development it's that if you can't explain what your thing does in one line, it's probably too complicated.

runtastic PRO App Review

Ok, so I was on the track & field team in high school back in the day but long distance running was never my cup of tea. I started off running cross-country simply because it was the first event of the year when I was a freshman and I turned out to become a sprint hurdler. Fast forward to now, where I am starting to run again, although the motivational effort is gargantuan. I'm a numbers guy so I want to see progression and I started off by just timing my runs and figuring out the distance with Google Maps.

Then came along the Google Play 25 Billion Download Sale where the runtastic PRO app was available for $0.25. Not much risk at that price so I gave it a shot.

Marvel Comics Android App

Being a huge Marvel fan (I am a proud owner of X-Men issues #1-50 from the '90s), I downloaded the newly released Marvel Comics Android App. In the past I tried to read documents on my Android and although doable, the experience was not great. I had to scroll across every line when I made the text big enough to be legible and this proved to be a turn off (also, images in ppt didn't show up for me). In the spirit of trying new things, I got this app and it was nice to see that there were a few free issues for me to test out, one of which was Astonishing X-Men #1, cool.