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#futureofmobile - Instagram's pivot

By Adam Tinworth on September 16, 2011 9:05 AM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Kevin Systrom
I'm at the Future of Mobile Conference in London today. First up is Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, talking about how to get a lot of users fast...

Instagram has a user base about the size of London - there's a huge opportunity in reaching a worldwide audience with truly mainstream apps. 

Started off as Burbn - an HTML5 web app that was meant to be a location-based game. Checkins were a magian word for investors two years ago. But the product was confusing, undifferentiated and slow. People outside their circle of friends were confused by it (good test of your product).

YouTube started as a video dating site! They saw unexpected behaviours - people were passing around a range of video, not just dating proposals. The same thing happened with Burbn - people were using the photos aspect more and more. The founders were keen photographers, the apps for photos weren't great...

Still a tough decision to take what you've put work into and switch to something else. But they did. And they focused on problems users have with photo apps.For example - at the time most mobile photos still looked rubbish at the time (this was just before the iPhone 4). The filter-based apps were the most popular in the store at the time, so they looked at that idea as a solution. 

The second problem they wanted to solve was speed. This would be the key to succeeding in mobile. They decided they would only send the minimum size needed to display on the iPhone 4. The 640 x 640 ristriction was a core part of their success. Also, they used asynchronous technology in the background to make sure photos could be shared to multiple networks in one go without a noticeable user delay. 

At launch, they targeted a user group who were passionate about the problems they were solving. BUT inviting influencers doesn't guarantee anything. They have to love the product. 

Other key factors:
  • Early internationalisation
  • A small team, able to be nimble
  • Single platform from the beginning - no reason you need to be on two platforms from day one.
  • Minimum viable product at each step
  • Invested in community very early
Ubelly.com has blogged the session, too. 


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London Police using Flickr to identify rioters

By Adam Tinworth on August 9, 2011 12:40 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks

London Police on flickr

Interesting. London's Metropolitan Police seems to be noting the willingness of the public to help identify rioters, and are posting CCTV grabs to their Flickr account.

[via Adam Coffer]

So far, so HDR

By Adam Tinworth on August 8, 2011 2:33 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks

Playing with my iPhone over the weekend, I decided to shoot the same scene with three different High Dynamic Range methods. One is the iPhone 4's in-built HDR, and the other with HDR apps.

This is the iPhone default:

iPhone HDR

Quite naturalistic. Nice shot.

This is Pro HDR:

iPhone Pro HDR shot

More dramatic and vivid, I'd say. A little unreal for my tastes, though.

Lastly, TrueHDR:

TrueHDR iPhone photo

This is, I think, my favourite. It's more moody and dramatic, and the HDR is a little less obvious than in the previous pic.

Cameras that are also computers. So many possibilities.

Photosynth on iPhone: panoramic reporting

By Adam Tinworth on April 19, 2011 2:03 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
photosynth app
I have a new app on my iPhone: Photosynth. Yes, a Microsoft app. Cognitive dissonance ahoy. ;-)

But it's a great tool, on that allows you to quickly and simply build rich panoramas of your environment. Hence, it's one I expect to see journalists using fairly quickly.

My collegue Stacey has been enthusiastic about Photosynth since she saw it demoed at the second news:rewired, and it crops up on her blog occasionally. You can see why. It's just such a boon for a property journalist...

However, I think it has far more application for journalists generally, as a way of getting a very vivid view of a scene or event onto the web. I looked at a fairly perfunctory video of a police raid in my neck of the woods the other morning. It would have been far more interesting as a panorama of this sort. 

Having this sort of technology right on the iPhone just makes it an even richer potential reporting tool. I did a quick test run of the app out the front of Quadrant House a few minutes ago:


Imagine that sort of thing for a demo, or a sporting event, or a disaster site.

Or, dare I say it, a royal wedding? 

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(Still) Criminalising Photographers

By Adam Tinworth on August 6, 2010 3:32 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
I finding it deeply worrying that the police are still doing this kind of thing:

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has hit out at the Metropolitan Police after photographer Carmen Valino said she was stopped from doing her job despite identifying herself as a journalist to police officers in Hackney on Saturday. Valino said she was photographing the crime scene from outside a police cordon. 'A police sergeant approached Valino telling her that she was disrupting a police investigation and to hand over her camera,' reported the London Photographers' Branch of the NUJ.
C'mon, Coalition, if you really believe in Big Society and civil liberties, turn this around. 
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Experimenting, with chair

By Adam Tinworth on May 13, 2010 5:58 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Zi8 on a chair
Trying out a little project to boost internal knowledge sharing and communication. I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow.

Video Cameras in the House

By Adam Tinworth on April 14, 2010 5:03 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Canon EOS 5D

Image via Wikipedia

I find it interesting that, while many journalists try to convince me that we should be pushing towards better and better video kit (where better = more expensive and complicated), many pros are going in the opposite direction.


Amazon will sell you one of those for £1,700. That's pretty cheap for a TV camera - and you can shoot magazine quality stills with it, too...

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Creative Commons Errors: Getting It Right

By Adam Tinworth on March 15, 2010 4:48 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
There's a good rule of thumb in life: everyone makes mistakes. 

If you subscribe to that, you tend to allow people chance to correct their mistakes, and it's in that situation that you'll discover their true character.

Take the issue of using other people's photographs in your work. This morning, I found this article in my feed reader:

danah boyd on Techcrunch
"That picture look awfully familiar, I though." Oh, yeah. Because it's one of mine. And it isn't attributed. The picture is Creative Commons licensed, so people are free to use it, but there's a requirement for attribution. 

Fair enough, I thought. Techcrunch has made a mistake. Let's give them the chance to correct. I contacted the author, Jason Kincaid, via Twitter. And this was his response:

Jason Kincaid Attributes
And sure enough, within minutes, my attribution was in place:

credit.png
And that's a model of how to do it. This is the second time I've had to do this recently, and the reaction I've got both times contrasts sharply with that sometimes displayed by the mainstream media. 

This is not hard. But it does require you seeing yourself as just one of a community of amateur and professional publishers. Why do traditional media types find that so hard?

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Kodak, Disruption and Economic Inertia

By Adam Tinworth on January 23, 2010 1:52 PM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks

From an article about Kodak's difficult decade:

Even though they talked about being in imaging and memories - their financial base was still in film, and even though they could move conceptually, they could see no way to move economically (and I suspect that many of us sitting around the Kodak board table at the time would have come to similar conclusions).creativedisruption.net, Creative Disruption, Jan 2010

Much for publishers to learn here...

Creative Commons Watch

By Adam Tinworth on January 23, 2010 10:55 AM | Comments | 0 TrackBacks
Most of my photos on Flickr are Creative Commons licensed, and I like to keep half an eye on where they appear. A couple have popped up in my in-box in recent weeks:

For some reason, my pics from the various incarnations of Le Web seem to get used more often than anything else...
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