History and Ownership

Instagram began its origins differently than what it has become today. Kevin Systrom, one of the co founders of Instagram, embarked originally on creating an app called Burbn that was designed to be a check in service for Foursqaure (UWIRE, 2012). Systrom had managed to raise half a million in funding and throw in his job to put this app to reality. Systrom soon met with Mike Krieger, who got on board the concept to make Burbn into a real business. The app features ability to check in, future check ins, earn points for hanging with friends and more. Soon afterwards it was realized that the app was to cluttered, and back to drawing board it was. Starting from scratch, they focused on one feature, the camera (Basu, 2012). After nearly a year of work and shipping the app, it became available on the app store in October 6 2010. It took only a few hours before it became the number one free photography app with over 1 million users by December of 2010. By September 2011, it had 10 millions users reaching its 150 millionth uploaded photo by then (Rakos, 2014). Over time, the app gained enough popularity to put resources into releasing new features into the app, from hastags, filters,video, high quality photo support and many other small details that the app enjoys today. As popularity grew, the app was released into the Android ecosystem, further expanding its user base to the popular platform. However, for the original owners, the success is short lived as soon after, the biggest social media player on the net, offered and bought out Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock (Rakos, 2014). FaceBook's acquisition of Instagram certainly caused controversy. Not only from consumers concerned on where FaceBook will take Instagram or whether it will be an integrated feature of FaceBook, but the biggest concern was the controversy in the change in terms of service mentioned earlier. Having the ability to claim any photo uploaded to Instagram for Facebook certainly caused an uproar (SHanklin, 2012). Presently Facebook has kept Instagram as a separate entity, a smart move that has retained its current users and encouraged new ones to join its services.