Barely 18 months old, Instagram stole headlines with Facebook’s costly acquisition. Now, with over 50 million registered users and roughly five million more joining each week, the photo-sharing startup is here to stay. Tapping into this relatively new audience, digital platforms, brands and music personalities are creating contests around the visual social network, elevating everyday mobile phone photographers into art stars.
InstaDerby: Perfect for the photographer with a competitive spirit, new website InstaDerby challenges Instagram users to photograph and submit artistic images based on a weekly theme. From “chicken” to “robot” to this week’s “blue,” contestants snap their interpretation of the assignment, upload the photo, and then hashtag it. Entrants must then accumulate as many votes as possible by sharing the pic with their Instagram network, family and friends. The “Top 100 Stallions,” or photographers with the most votes, are featured on the InstaDerby homepage and leaderboard, and the winning Stallion is awarded an Instagram-themed prize like credits towards sites such as StickyGram, CanvasPop and InstaTees.
At the same time that contemporary culture values calm, respite, and meditation, our media-driven world is overloaded with evermore sensory provocations, from noisy online ads to cellphone chatter to earbud overflow. In response, tools that allow for sensory deprivation are now cutting through the clutter, helping users tune out the excess and tune in more fully to their stimuli of choice.
OneSense: As sound expert Julian Treasure testifies, the auditory and visual cacophony of our contemporary environment has led to a decline in listening capability—making it increasingly difficult to extract real meaning from sound. Working off this premise, designer Joe Doucet conceived a set of headphones that obscure intrusive sights and sounds, allowing wearers to focus wholly on the music at hand. The OneSense concept headphones wrap across the wearer’s eyes to prevent external sights from meddling with the music’s narrative, thus heightening the auditory experience. With its spiky, danger-red design, they’re sure to ward off unwanted intruders (but we don’t recommend them for your public transit commute).
Platforms like Etsy and eBay offer community-oriented hubs through which people can open virtual storefronts, while services like Lyst and OpenSky allow members to shop in a manner that’s similar to following people on Twitter. While certainly social, these offerings don’t necessarily facilitate transactions between people within their own social networks. An emergent crop of online marketplaces, however, seeks to give retail entrepreneurs a seamless way to market to the people they already know.
Threadflip: For those with an addiction to shopping, the burden of closet cleaning is often less about parting ways with a previously cherished item than it is about deciding how best to get rid of it. Such was the consumer insight (gleaned from his wife and her friends) that inspired engineer Manik Singh to launch Threadflip. The online bazaar simplifies the buying and selling of used clothing and accessories by synching listings with social network streams and by providing “end-to-end” service. Right after an item is purchased, Threadflip sends the seller prepaid shipping materials. Then, once the package is ready to go, the seller merely calls for a pick-up.
In this month’s edition of First Fridays, we introduce you to Kasey Fleisher Hickey, co-founder of Turntable Kitchen, a site devoted to the increasingly significant intersection of music and food. In addition to featuring recipes using local Bay Area ingredients, along with musical pairings to score each dish, Turntable Kitchen offers a subscription-based Pairings Box. The monthly delivery includes a limited edition 7-inch vinyl record, a digital mix tape, three seasonal recipes, and a special ingredient or two that can be used to produce one of the dishes featured. Read on for Kasey’s thoughts on customer retention and the other startups that she looks to for inspiration.
Invented by photographer Jamie Beck and graphic artists Kevin Burg, the cinemagraph has become the darling of the online marketing world, as evidenced by recent promotions for everything from films to fashion. More engaging than a static photo, yet more artful than the animated GIF, the cinemagraph is proving to be more than a passing fad. And, now, thanks to a number of apps, anyone can make one.
Cinemagram: Apps like Viddy and Socialcam are starting to find an audience, but video sharing has yet to attract the numbers of photo sharing. Might it be that people find videos a little too real to share? Cinemagram may be a happy medium between the two genres. The iOS app can convert a brief video clip into an even more fleeting, two-to-three-second cinemagraph, complete with flattering filters, which can be shared within a social stream. It has a long way to go before it catches up to The $1 Billion App, but with one million users after launching just six weeks ago, it seems to be on track.
