Instagram was called 'Burbn'
Instagram was founded in the year 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and was later acquired by Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms. Originally released for iOS in October of 2010, Instagram instantly blew up in popularity, having one million registered users in only two months, 10 million in one year, and 1 billion by June 2018. Kevin and Mike began developing the app in San Francisco initially as Burbn, but then realised it was too similar to Foursquare, which led them to refocus it's function to photo-sharing, renaming it to Instagram, which means "instant camera or telegram". On March 5, 2010, Kevin closed a $500,000 seed funding round with Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz which propelled the project into completion, allowing Mike to post the first ever Instagram post at South Beach Harbor Pier 38, 4 months later.
Meet Mike and Kevin
Mike Krieger, born March 4, 1986, is a Brazilian-American entrepreneur and software engineer who moved to California in 2004 to study at Stanford University where he met Kevin Systrom. Kevin, born December 30, 1983, is also an American computer programmer and entrepreneur who officially became Instagram's first CEO, with Mike working in the company as CTO. Kevin came up with the idea of creating Burbn, while on a vacation in Mexico with his girlfriend who was unwilling to post her photos because they didn't look good enough taking pictures from the iPhone 4 camera. Systrom thought that the solution to this was to use filters, to hide the qualitative inferiority of photos, leading him to develop the X-Pro II filter which is still being used on Instagram today.
The Art of Photo-Sharing
Burbn was designed by Mike and Kevin as an HTML 5 check-in service, that allowed users to check into locations, make plans in the future, earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures and much more. After recalling their studies at the Mayfield Fellows Program, the duo realised that Burbn contained too many features and was becoming more complicated than ever before which was what the users didn't want. They decided to get rid of a lot of features and trimmed it down specifically to photo-sharing with the use of filters, leading to it's re-branding as Instagram. A month after officially launching Instagram, it instantly exploded, growing up to 1 million users after a year, and 10 million users in two years.
Facebook's Acquisition of Instagram
As of April 2012, Instagram was being downloaded more than one million times in less than one day which caught the attention of the giant social media company Facebook. Bought for over $1 billion in cash and stock, Facebook acquired Instagram on September 6, 2012 just before the company's scheduled initial public offering (IPO). Mark Zuckerberg told users that Facebook is committed to building and growing Instagram independently, allowing Systrom to continue to lead Instagram, at the same time granting him unlimited resources from a juggernaut partnership with Facebook. In an interview, Kevin stated that Instagram will be the future of sharing and communication in today's social media world.
An Era of Influencers and Celebrities
During the early days, most of the engineering and user experience were developed by Krieger, recalling that when Instagram went down at 3:30 in the morning, he had to stressfully revive the site in a completely drunken state. Instagram today has over one billion users and contributes over $20 billion to Meta Platform's annual revenue, a crazy change to when it was bought by Facebook for $1 billion with only 13 employees. In 2014, Kevin Systrom was listed in the Forbes 30 "Under 30" list under Social/Mobile category, and has an estimated networth of $1.3 billion as of 2022. Instagram has been able to help businesses through the promotion of commercial products and services, and has given birth to an entire new generation of celebrities and influencers.
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