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Nokia’s Smart Devices Chief On Instagram, Android, Phablets & The Continued Lack Of A 41MP PureView Lumia

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Nokia has added another device to its burgeoning Lumia portfolio of smartphones today, with the introduction of the Lumia 925: a sleek, PureView-branded handset that will be its first flagship on T-Mobile U.S. At today’s London launch, Nokia executive VP of smart devices, Jo Harlow, sat down with TechCrunch to field a few questions.

TC: Despite all the focus on your camera technologies with the flagship Lumia devices, Windows Phone still lacks Instagram. How much of a blocker is that, what are you doing to get round it and why is it proving so difficult to get this app? 

Harlow: Obviously our goal is to brings great apps to the Windows Phone platform. We have a huge amount of respect for Instagram and we continue to work in that direction and in particular with Microsoft, and with apps like Hipstamatic and the ability to share your pictures on Instagram. But the importance of Hipstamatic isn’t Instagram really — it is the great capabilities that Hipstamatic brings and the community that Oggl represents because they’re a community of people who love photography. And so I think in inspiring that world of consumers then that brings attration from others as well.

I would characterise the competition in Android as more of a spec race than anything else… it’s open but that doesn’t make you first.

We worked very closely with Hipstamatic and shared our portfolio with them, we’ve shared our imaging APIs with them, and that’s where we’d like to work with the developers who can bring even more greate experience to our imaging story.

TC: Are you going to be helping to usher in more new camera apps like Oggl or make more of your own new imaging apps? 

Harlow: The first thing we’ve done is make our imaging APIs accessible to developers — whether they’re developing imaging specific apps or in other ways could use the camera in their app — that they could get all the way to the performance of the camera itself. If you look at what’s happened with photography with mobile devices and just how we use pictures you see that what is today is unlikely to be just what is in the future. It’s constantly evolving — now hundreds of millions of pictures are uploaded every day just to social networks. Yes there are imaging specific apps, and there will be more imaging specific apps and communities in the future, but all communities have a deep relationship with pictures because that’s part of the social fabric of our lives these days. And I dont think that changes, that only gets bigger and bigger.

TC: Is the original 808 PureView 41MP  technology a bit of a unicorn now with the Lumias? Or are you working toward it with each iteration of the devices? Or is this something that you think you might never have because you’re going for thinner devices?

Harlow: I can’t comment about our portfolio coming in the future, but what I will say about the PureView technology that we developed that uses a 41MP sensor is that it delivers a consumer experience in terms of zooming after you’ve taken the photo. That is a phenomenal experience. That’s something that we think is very interesting to continue to pursue.

TC: So you’re not ruling it out?

Harlow: I’m not ruling it out.

TC: You talk about how you have been able to differentiate on Windows Phone — with hardware design, camera technology and so on — but why couldn’t you have done that on the Android platform? The reality is that Android is dominant, and Windows Phone is very far behind.

Harlow: The dominance of Android is led by Samsung. I think you can see the difficulty that others have in standing out from Samsung even when they have really good devices. I think first of all it comes down to partnership and the partnership that we’ve had with Microsoft in terms of bringing new experiences to the platform as well as our own differentiating experiences. We did not believe we could have that level of partnership with Android — and that’s a key difference.

TC: But Android is open. You can do what you want… 

Harlow: To a certain degree yes. But I think I would characterise the competition in Android as more of a spec race than anything else and so there is one partner who is the development partner for any new release of Android and everyone else come some time later, so it’s open but that doesn’t make you first and that doesn’t make you necessarily the most competitive.

TC: I know you can’t comment on future roadmap, but what could Nokia bring to a phablet device, i.e. a larger form factor smartphone, if it decided to play in that space?

Harlow: I think the word is ‘experiences’ because as we are investing in great experiences on our smartphone range it’s logical to think that those experiences we would look to take into other types of form factors and make them compatible with each other. Obviously what we would want in any portfolio is that there’s some consistency in the experience that consumers have of a Nokia product.

Facebook Home Hits 500K Downloads In Five Days, Pales In Comparison To Instagram’s Android Shift

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It would appear that Facebook Home has just surpassed 500k downloads on Google Play since launching on the platform five days ago on April 16. The app’s Google Play listing notes the milestone, and Ben Evans confirmed on Twitter.

Facebook Home isn’t so much of an app as a user interface for the phone, putting Facebook smack dab in the center of Android users’ smartphone experience. Users with Facebook Home can post status updates and view the newsfeed straight from the lock screen, and conduct messaging without ever being interrupted, thanks to Chat Heads.

In essence, it’s Facebook’s push past being an app like every other app and being a central force of the smartphone, a launch pad. Hopes are seriously high, as foreshadowed by Zuckerberg’s sweaty brow at the announcement, but word had originally circulated that users weren’t all that into Facebook Home around launch day.

Clearly, that’s not true as the app has garnered over 100,000 downloads a day since launch. Still, these aren’t blow-out numbers. Remember when Instagram launched on Android and hit over 1 million downloads in a day? And then hit over 5 million downloads in six days? Yeah. Those were blow-out numbers.

You also have to consider that Facebook has over a billion users, so 500K doesn’t really move the needle.

But in Facebook’s defense, the Home application is only available on select devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II, HTC One X, and the HTC One X+, along with the Facebook Phone, the HTC First.

Oh, and Facebook is now quite happy for Instagram’s success on Android after that slight $1 billion acquisition.

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

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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.




Social Data Leader Gnip Rolls Out Access To Six New Public APIs Including Reddit, Instagram And Bitly

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Gnip has found itself a sweet spot in partnering with startups who make data available via APIs. The company currently has access to Twitter and Tumblr’s firehoses, and has announced today that it will be making the publicly available data of Reddit, Instagram, bitly, Stack Overflow, Panoramio and Plurk available to its customers who rely on Gnip to do social reporting. Additionally, existing YouTube and Flickr data gets enhanced geo support.

Last November, we reported that Gnip serves up over 100B social activities per month to its customers, allowing them to track keywords, mentions and trends as it pertains to their companies and social campaigns. Its partner program is an extremely attractive offering to PR and marketing firms that need to show the proof of their work to their clients.

Gnip’s COO, Chris Moody, explained that each new source of data that Gnip provides gives its customers more insight into their own business: “Our customers care about conversations happening across the entire spectrum of social sources.”

Its “Enterprise Data Collector” pulls in all of the data from these public APIs, performs deduplication and does URL analysis after formatting them properly, even if they’re shortened.

Here’s what Gnip had to say on their blog about the new data sources and why their tools are important to companies:

A significant part of what Gnip does is make social data easier to digest by optimizing the polling of these APIs and by enriching and normalizing the data. We also normalize the data, so if you’re digesting social data from Gnip from the public API of Instagram, it will arrive appear in the same normalized format as social data from Twitter.

Reddit is an interesting usecase here, as people are going to the site more and more to complain about certain companies and products. A conversation can quickly get out of control before a company even sees what’s going on, waiting for it to bubble up to one unlucky support person. Getting those brand mentions quickly can help a business participate in a conversation before it goes south.

For Instagram, people are taking pictures of anything and everything, and attaching locations to them. For example, if McDonalds wanted to track all of the photos posted from their stores, it would be a pretty impossible thing to do without the collections and reporting capabilities of a company like Gnip. These companies can’t build out the resources fast enough to create their own in-house monitoring solutions, nor do they have the access to all of the firehoses that Gnip does.

Having said all of that, I would love to know how many servers Gnip has hosting all of this stuff.

One Year Later, Nearly Half Of Instagram’s 100 Million Users Are On Android

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Instagram has been around for what feels like forever, but it seems like just yesterday that the app migrated over to Android after being a long-time iOS exclusive. Today marks one year of Instagram’s presence on Android, and to celebrate the company shared on its blog that in just that short time almost half of its users come from Android.

Last we heard, Instagram had over 100 million active monthly users in February, growing at a rapid pace at that. The push over to Android was a huge part of that, garnering over 1 million downloads in the first 24 hours.

At the time, Instagram had around 30 million installs on iOS.

Since then, Instagram has been acquired by Facebook for $1 billion.

Both iOS and Android have maintained steady growth since that fateful April afternoon. In fact, just two weeks after the acquisition Instagram announced that it had surpassed 50 million active users, with 5 million new sign ups per week.

Eight months ago, that number climbed to 80 million, as Android entered its fifth month of availability.

The photo-sharing app is one of those “so-basic-you-hate-yourself-for-not-thinking-of-it-first” kind of success stories, but there is clearly so much strategy going on in the background. Instagram beat everyone to the game with a way to make mobile photos beautiful and share them quickly. Simple, but such a crucial problem solver and game-changer in the trajectory of mobile technology.

And taking it a step further than that, you have to remember that Instagram spent more than a year on iOS as an exclusive before opening up the Android-flavored flood gates. A year later, Instagram’s decision to include Android seems to have paid off handsomely.

Klout Users Can Now Add Bing To Their Account And Include Instagram In Their Score

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Klout, the service for measuring online influence, is boosting its integration with both Bing and Instagram today.

On the Bing side, the news follows last fall’s announcement of a strategic investment from and partnership with Microsoft. That announcement included the unveiling of a feature in Bing that would show Klout scores for select people. (And Bing continues to surface more data on that front.)

Now Klout users can add Bing to their Klout accounts. It sounds like that won’t have an immediate effect on their Klout scores, but according to the company blog post, “Bing search data will start becoming integrated into Klout’s algorithm” and “search results will eventually factor into each user’s Klout Score.”

I was a little confused about the timing of events here (perhaps because I’ve only bothered to add Twitter and Facebook to my Klout profile), but a spokesperson explained that this sort of staggered integration is normal: “Before we are able to incorporate any data into a person’s score, we need users to connect the network to Klout so we can begin to process the influence data. So, with Bing, we are now asking people to connect it to their accounts, and eventually search data will actually factor into their score.”

The spokesperson also confirmed that this is the first time Klout has integrated with a search engine.

Speaking of that staggered integration process, starting in 2011, Klout allowed users to add Instagram to their accounts, and now it’s ready to take the next step, incorporating Instagram activity into your score. So talented photographers whose photos get a big response on Instagram should see their Klout go up.

Mobli Update to iOS App Lets You Switch Between Your Smartphone’s Cameras While Recording Video

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Perpetual underdog Mobli, an app that’s a cross between Instagram and Vine, has released a new update to its iOS app in their latest effort to gain some of the photo sharing market.

The new update contains a plethora of features, such as a new aggregated feed and location-based photo filters, but the app’s most notable update is its newfound ability to switch back and forth between the front and back facing cameras of your smartphone while recording.

In practice, it works pretty well. Although there’s a one second lag when you switch between cameras, the recorded video plays back seamlessly and I imagine it could be used for some great reaction videos. It’s a very simple feature that hasn’t been implemented in any other video recording apps yet (including the stock camera apps in iOS and Android), although I would expect all of them to follow suit pretty soon.

It’s also a little like the dual camera feature that was showcased in Samsung’s Galaxy S4 event, which allowed you to use both cameras simultaneously while recording video. Somehow this simple feature of switching back and forth seems a little more practical than seeing your face boxed into a stamp next to whatever it is that you’re recording.

The update is available in the Apple App Store now.




Facebook hopes to lure Instagram, Snapchat users with prettier redesign

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Facebook is focusing on feeds, including one for photos and one for brands.

At a press conference held in Menlo Park Thursday Facebook announced a redesign for the News Feed its users see when they visit its site or use its mobile app. The new News Feed focuses on reducing clutter, making visually oriented posts like photos more prominent. It also makes filters for types of content front and center, such as dedicated feeds for posts by friends or posts by pages.

Facebook will borrow the menu format it uses on its current mobile app, which slides out from one side to allow users to navigate. Facebook asserts that this will decrease clutter on the webpage and allow users to focus on content in the News Feed. The separate feed categories (Photos, Friends, Following) will reorganize themselves based on which one users view most.

A consistent menu across Facebook’s apps and Web interface.

The Following feed, which contains posts from pages, will show “every one of the posts they make,” stated Chris Struhar, the tech lead of feeds. The prominence of this feed seems to be an attempt to quell the protests of brands that have pushed back against Facebook’s pay-to-promote posts feature. Some brands have accused Facebook of purposefully damping traffic to generate revenue this way.

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