Instantgram.Me Turns Your Instagram Photos Into Magnets, Calls The Whole Fridge Into Question

These days, you can get your Instagram photos printed onto just about anything. There are companies that print out Post-it-sized Instagrams, Instagrams on Canvas, Instagrams on wood and fiberglass, and everything in between.

Today, Instantgram.me is joining those ranks with its new Instagram magnet-making business. The service offers 9 magnets, all 5cm x 5cm, for $17.00 with free worldwide shipping.

The prices aren’t necessarily a steal, but magnets are actually smart uses for Instagram pictures. Let’s face it: our Instagrams aren’t always worthy of a spot on our walls, or even printing in the first place. But magnets are cute and funny, and they’re usually holding up pictures of our loved ones anyways. Instantgram has just lopped one in with the other.

The company also sells non-magnet prints of your Instagram photos in a product called Squares. You can either get a 24-set of 5? x 5? prints, or a 48-count set of 2.5? x 2.5? prints again for $17. The beauty of it is, with both magnets and squares, you can choose duplicates of certain pictures thanks to an easy-to-understand interface. This turns your Instagram photos into those cute little elementary-school pocket pictures you used to pass out to your friends.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that an entire ecosystem has sprouted up around Instagram, an app that generated no revenue for the majority of its lifetime, before getting acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. There are countless services that are based on Instagram, from printing services to Instagram clones and back again.

We have yet to see any of these services or apps break away from the crowd into household-name territory, but that isn’t to say it’s not going to happen.

Instantgram, like CanvasPop and Prinstagram and Kanvess and InstaThis and Instacanvas, has a good a shot as any. But perhaps not so great a name.

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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Pandora Surpasses 200 Million Registered Users, 140 Million Access Via Mobile

Pandora has just announced that its online streaming radio has quite a few listeners. In fact, the company has surpassed 200 million registered users in the U.S. That’s up from 100 million registered users in July of 2011, meaning that around half of Pandora’s users have come over in the past two years, despite the fact that Pandora launched all the way back in 2005.

Slow and steady wins the race, eh?

Of those 200 million registered users, over 140 million of them have tuned in to Pandora via mobile, which just goes to show how crucial it is to have a mobile presence, no matter the business. Pandora users have also given over 25 billion thumbs, to help personalize their stations, and on average Pandora streams around 200 million songs before 10am each morning.

Perhaps more interesting than user growth is Pandora’s ability to spread new music to a huge userbase. Pandora mentioned this morning that the company has played more than 100,000 unique artists and over 1 million unique songs just last month.

Here’s what Pandora founder Tim Westerngren had to say:

We started this company to help people discover and enjoy music they love, and to help artists reach and grow their audiences. Only in our wildest dreams did we imagine what it would become. It is now clear that radio is changing, and that’s great news for music fans and for the tens of thousands of working artists who now have a home on the air.

Growth in registered users is surely something to be excited about, but what’s most important to a service like Pandora is monthly active users. At the end of March, Pandora boasted 69.5 million monthly active users, which is up from 59.9 million in December of 2012.

In fact, the company has shown steady growth in MAU over the past couple years.

Pandora Radio is an internet radio service, recommendation service, and the custodian of the Music Genome Project. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on approval or disapproval of individual songs, which Pandora takes into account for future selections. While listening, users are offered the ability to buy the songs or albums at various online retailers. As part of the Music Genome Project, over...

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Newsana Combines Reddit's Community With Expert-Driven Curation To Create A Better Way To Consume The News

During their time with Journalists For Human Rights, Canada’s largest media development NGO, Ben Peterson and Jonathan Wong helped train local journalists in sub-saharan Africa on how best to report on human rights, governance (or lack thereof) and uphold the fourth estate. To help them teach these aspiring reporters, the friends looked for the best examples of Human Rights journalism. But all they found was a fire hose of news content, and the Herculean struggle of to find the best stories amidst all the noise.

Peterson tells us that this challenge quickly led them to ask, “wouldn’t it be great if we could get a group of Human Rights experts to find the best articles for us?” The answer to this question took shape in a platform called, Newsana, which the founders are officially launching today. Founded in early 2012 as an answer to the challenge of finding the best Human Rights news content, Peterson and Wong soon realized that their expert-driven crowdsourcing solution could be used for any topic.

The co-founders joined forces with a team of developers and social media experts and spent the next seven months building out the platform. Informed by the rise and fall of sites like Digg, Newsana looks to combine the best of community-based, social news sites (a la Reddit) with expert-driven curation. Unlike others of its ilk, the platform is looking to become an exclusive online community targeted at those who are “passionate about learning and discussing news and ideas,” Peterson says.

Those looking to help curate the news and have a particular area of expertise they’re interested can apply to become members of the platform. Newsana then screens these “experts,” and once accepted, allows them to choose the content they want to share and discuss. Members can vote on their favorite stories of the day, and Newsana uses its algorithms to post top stories across 35 categories (at launch), including Business, Arts and Entertainment, Lifestyle, Media, Politics and Technology.

Based on community activity, the top five stories in each category are then served in those verticals for anyone and everyone to consume. So, anyone can read and consume Newsana’s stop stories, but if you want to vote, pitch stories or engage others in conversation, you have to be logged in. Once accepted, members can invite 10 new people per week.

“The biggest challenge for us,” Peterson tells us, “is to keep the quality high. While we love and respect Reddit and strive for the same kind of community interaction, we don’t want to become just another social, news-sharing clone.” That’s why Newsana has opted for an invite-only system, to help it curate its community and reward constructive activity. To that end, within each vertical, the site ranks members based on their contributions, and the higher their rank, the more weight their activities are given on the site.

“We think that our ultimate value offering is to provide the most essential, quality news quicker than anywhere else,” Peterson says. While Twitter is a shotgun blast of news, as are Google news and RSS feeds, Newsana distills each category down to five critical topics, populating those categories with content chosen by experts.

At launch, the startup’s goal is to expand its member base, although the co-founders aren’t sure yet what the ideal number of contributing members will be; “we’re going to wait and see on that one,” the co-founder tells us. But, eventually, we want to have millions of experts and hundreds of thousands of topics. In the long-term, we want to become a historical guide, where you can find the most essential stories from two months ago, a year ago, or 50 years ago.

In terms of monetization, a potential stumbling block for any news aggregator, Peterson says that the company’s first priority is to build out a strong community and, once that is in place, the team “will work with them on the best way to monetize.” When pressed, the founder says that their first approach will likely center around providing native, branded content from sponsors — the same method Techmeme employs for its tech news aggregator.

To date, Newsana has raised $500K in seed financing from a group of Canadian angel investors, including Gary Slaight (President and CEO, Slaight Communications), Prem Watsa (Chairman and CEO Fairfax Financial Holdings) and Mohammad Al Zaibak (President and CEO, Canadian Development and Marketing Corp).

Going forward, in the next couple of weeks, Newsana plans to release an iOS app and begin offering an email newsletter with notifications to allow users to consume news in weekly email digests. The team will also look to take design and UX cues from popular newsreaders like Flipboard as it looks to build out Newsana’s mobile footprint.

“Over 70 percent of individuals online feel overwhelmed with the information available to them,” Peterson says. “Newsana was designed to solve this problem for our members because they don’t have to filter through all the noise and chatter to access the relevant content they want. We like to think of Newsana as the ‘News Nirvana’.”

For more, find Newsana at home here.

Newsana is an online community of experts and thought leaders who share, discuss and work together to choose the five most essential news stories and ideas of the day on the topics of their expertise. The community’s efforts coalesce a current and historical guide to the best news and ideas on a growing array of popular and important issues.

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AppGratis Was Indeed Pulled By Apple, But “Reports Of [Its] Death Are Greatly Exaggerated”

iOS App Discovery Service AppGratis just confirmed that it was indeed pulled from the App Store on Friday. At the time, commentators were left wondering what was wrong with AppGratis’ app. Founder and CEO Simon Dawlat wrote a long blog post explaining the full story.

“AppGratis is very much up and running,” Dawlat said. “The reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,” he continued. While there have been other incidents, the App Store review team never went so far. For example, Apple said in October 2012 that AppGratis was spamming the App Store because it had released different localized apps for each country instead of a single app with multiple localizations. As a reminder, AppGratis helps App Store users discover new apps, provides a short description and makes paid apps free for a day.

The company was surprised when Apple pulled the app over the weekend. The App Store review team approved the iPad app a week ago — AppGratis was about to promote its iPad launch, but it’s now futile. For now, the service will continue to function for existing users. AppGratis’ website and newsletter aren’t affected. But don’t expect to download the app again in the App Store or to get an update notification.

On Monday, AllThingsD reported that Apple banned the app for violating two developer guidelines and not respecting the general philosophy of the App Store.

Dawlat confirms that Apple pulled the app because of the two guidelines:

2.25: Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.

5.6: Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.

This time around, it is much harder to fix the app — Dawlat doesn’t outline possible changes. His announcement is a way to shed light on the issue with Apple, and probably to make the review team change its mind. He promises more announcements soon.

Over the past couple of months, AppGratis made a series of key announcements. In January, it has raised $13.5 million. It crossed the 10 million-user mark in February with apps seeing up to 1 million downloads in a day. And now it has 12 million users.

In other words, AppGratis has grown a lot in a very short period of time. Selected apps now skyrocket to the first ranks of the App Store. Developers then have to share their revenue with AppGratis during and after the deal. Apple could see the service as a way to promote an app in the Top Apps section.

Arguably, it is because AppGratis became big that Apple started looking into it. Yet, the news that AppGratis was pulled from the App Store was very sudden. Dawlat even says in the middle of his post: “and as I’m about to push the ‘publish’ button on this story, I’m still in absolute shock as to what is happening to us.”

Premium app discovery network spanning 120 countries, 10 million iOS users, delivering 100 million app installs yearly. AppGratis is the best way to get your app downloaded by millions of people, no incentives attached. The company has a staff of 40 and is headquartered in Paris, France.

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Tumblr Overhauls Its Android App With Path-Like Interface, Brings “Take A Photo” Back To The Desktop

Today, Tumblr launched a new version of its Android app. Its interface is the design you’re seeing in many apps lately, mostly made popular by Path.

Yes, Tumblr has gone Holo with its UI. That aside, the app feels way more responsive, letting you scroll through all of the cat photos and emo shots of your pals. Its pull-down-to-refresh even got a snazzier animation.

The brief note from the Tumblr Staff blog came along with an animation of the new navigation…animations:

Tumblr for Android just got a total facelift! We’ve completely redesigned the interface, added fancy post animations, made images pop, and a whole lot more. Download the update today.

Tumblr has also made it so that photos pop out in your stream more, so as to increase interaction within the app. This is something that Facebook recently announced it’s doing with its own News Feed:

It’s interesting that Tumblr attacked the Android app first, as its iOS version still has this boring old interface:

Stay tuned for the iOS version, though, since its latest major overhaul was back in November. There’s only one problem with the new interface, though. You can’t post from any page you’re on. I’d like to see the animated “post” button follow me no matter where I am on the site. Right now, you have to go back to your stream to post something.

Since it’s not all about mobile, for those who like to take “selfies,” (who doesn’t?) the company has brought back the “take a photo” functionality to the desktop site. If you just want to show all of your followers exactly how you feel right now, you can just shoot a shot and post it to your stream like this:

Sadly, that feature only works on Chrome and the latest versions of Firefox. Sorry, Safari and IE users, no selfies for you.

Happy Tumblr-ing.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is...

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Local Business Marketing Startup Circl Ties Facebook To Foot Traffic, Courtesy Of Mobile Measurement Tools

Circl a new startup helping businesses run online promotions using social media and email marketing, is launching today with already over 1,000 customers who have signed up for the platform, over 100 of which who have since gone live. Although there are plenty of competitors in this general space, what makes Circl interesting is the way it ties into mobile in order to track the success of various promotional campaigns.

Founded by Soso Sazesh and Neej Gore, who bring their own experience with both search engine marketing (SEM) and performance marketing to the new company, the two were inspired to create Circl to address a need in the local space.

“The way you do online marketing, it’s very metrics focused. It’s focused on ROI,” explains Sazesh. “And when you look at what’s available for local businesses, it’s very expensive – you have to give away 75 percent of what you’re selling with certain companies – or you run promotions on Facebook and Twitter, or on your email marketing lists, and you don’t know what’s actually driving people in,” he says.

Circl wants to close that gap by actually tracking the conversions from social media and email to real-world foot traffic, letting business owners know which promotions really worked. To do so, the platform allows the business to set up a promotion using Circl’s centralized dashboard, which they can then share out to Facebook, Twitter, email or elsewhere. When the customer clicks the link, they’re prompted to enter their phone number which sends the offer or deal via text to their phone.

Once in store, the customer clicks the link in the text at point-of-sale, which verifies that they’re actually there using the phone’s geo-location capabilities. But it also identifies the source of the promotion, allowing the business owner to better understand things like which channels work better than other, which promotions send more customers, how many people came in for a particular deal, and more.

By gathering this data, businesses can then improve the way they advertise, and increase conversions. However, Circl will take things a step further, too, by also making suggestions and offering optimizations out of the box.

The system uses machine learning, Sazesh tells us. It first aggregates data across its own customer base, so it understands how businesses in a particular region perform, or how businesses in that same category perform (e.g. how other local pizza places perform). Of course, for these recommendations to be powerful, Circl needs to gain significant traction. If it can achieve that, a future step may allow businesses to not only get recommendations as to how to proceed, but may also be able to compare themselves to others in their same space.

But for now, the company is focused simply on onboarding new businesses, taking advantage of the founders’ SEM experience in user acquisition efforts. The immediate priority is figuring out which channels should come next (Foursquare and Yelp are on the roadmap, Sazesh notes). The long-term goal is to be channel agnostic, and to help customers not only launch and track promotions, but also increase their presence on social media in order to better support those goals.

Pricing starts at $99 per month for up to three locations, and enterprise pricing is also available. AngelPad-backed Circl is currently raising seed funding.

Circl allows local businesses to create and distribute promotions across email, twitter, and facebook - all from one place. Circl uses location technology to track customer visits attributed to a given promotion. This allows Circl to provide deep insights and recommendations into what type of promotions perform best, on which channels, and when.

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HopStop Launches Crowd-Sourced Transit Alerts Through HopStop Live!

HopStop, the location services app that helps you navigate the wacky world of public transportation, has today unveiled its biggest product launch ever, with the release of HopStop Live!

The service is integrated with HopStop’s default iPhone app, as well as having its own standalone app called “Live!” The apps let users crowd-source information in real-time about delays to subways or trains, giving even more clarity to the morning commute.

HopStop already accounts for delays that are marked on the MTA’s web site for service disruptions, but that isn’t an all-encompassing view. Many times, trains will be delayed because of police investigations or accidents, and the corresponding delay alert doesn’t appear online for many hours after, or not at all. Still, these delays can really bork up a day, and so HopStop is letting its massive user base start calling out issues for fellow users.

Though crowd-sourcing public transit delays has been done before — most notably by Waze and NextTrain, along with some other mobile apps — HopStop brings a new level of scale to the recipe.

As of today, HopStop has announced that its userbase has surpassed 2 million monthly active users, and the app access data points for 700 transit agencies, 20,000 lines, and 750,000 stops.

Here’s what CEO Joe Meyer had to say about it:

The real-time public transportation space has attracted so much attention over the past twelve months with a countless number of new transit apps all professing to have the answer to real-time. The problem with the vast majority of these is that as impressive and headline-grabbing as their goals or claims may be –they all lack the critical ingredient for any crowd-sourced service to be useful –a big enough crowd of endemic users. Over the past nine years, HopStop has grown to be the biggest independent player in the transit routing market, and today’s launch of HopStop Live! will leverage our large user base and strong commitment to product excellence to define the future of real-time public transportation information.

The main goal is that users will build and foster mini-communities around their particular commute, keeping each other in the know about delays and service disruptions in a way that official lines of communication are too slow for.

For now, the HopStop Live! service is only available for iPhone, but the company is working on rolling it out to other major platforms in the coming months.

HopStop, a leading location-based service, provides door-to-door walking, biking and mass transit directions. HopStop’s service is currently available in 57 major cities worldwide including Boston, Chicago, London, Long Island, Los Angeles, New Jersey, New York City, Paris, San Francisco, Saint Petersburg and Washington, DC. HopStop also offers point-to-point directions and mapping services through a wide array of mobile applications, as well as advanced SMS capabilities for requesting and receiving directions on the go.

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