Instagram + Color = Instacolor

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Friday, July 8th, 2011

If photo sharing apps Instagram and Color would mate and have a baby, it would likely look something like the Instacolor app made by tinkerer Rakshith Krishnappa.

Basically, the app aims to help Instragram users discover other users in their neighborhood, and lets you view photos posted by people around you in real time.

The app can be downloaded from the App Store now and costs $0.99.

Ever since Color launched its photo sharing app, the $41 million startup has been having a rough time. Co-founder Peter Pham left, or was fired, according to CEO Bill Nguyen, who also told the New York Times that the company is going back to the drawing board.

Their biggest challenge right now: nobody seems to be using the app.

Instagram, meanwhile, is on a roll. They’re at well over 5 million users now and roughly 100 million photos have been shared using the app to date.

Earlier this year, Instagram debuted a realtime API to let third party developers build things like Instacolor, which takes both ideas and morphs them into one app (but uses Instagram as the foundation). Krishnappa also built Gramfeed, a Web interface for Instagram, by the way.

Update: also check out Instabam.

Company: Instagram
Website: instagram.com
Launch Date: March 2010
Funding: $57.5M

Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above. In an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos into a square...

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Company: Color Labs Inc.
Website: color.com
Launch Date: August 2010
Funding: $41M

Color is advancing the post-PC revolution by inventing new applications that bring people together through proximity, social and visual presentation. Founded and led by a team of proven engineers and entrepreneurs, Color is located in Palo Alto, California. To learn more about Color please visit http://www.color.com

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