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.

MUST SEE Awesome Mashup of Top 50 Pop Songs [Video]

*Updated with "The Making Of"

So, I'm not sure how you get around all the copyright issues on YouTube but Daniel Kim has created a really awesome mashup of over 50 top pop songs from 2012.  He's actually been doing this for a few years so I've put in his previous mashups from 2011 and 2010.

Daniel must be learning from his previous tries as 2012 does seem to be the best one yet. His "making of" is quite interesting as the process he used to make the video is quite technical and if you don't know anything about audio engineering techniques, it would be close to impossible to replicate.

Check it out, they sound really good. Well done Daniel Kim!