Facebook Acquires Instagram : What Next?
By Shiwangi Peswani | April 15, 2012
All the Silicon Valley capitalists have restarted working on the potential of young and small companies after Facebook’s acquisition of 13 person startup Instagram for 1 Billion USD. As I said in my last post that Instagram’s sale out with such a huge amount was big news for everyone, it had a great impact over the young and budding companies. This news has actually boosted up their confidence to do well in the internet market.
This is actually the biggest ever deal cracked by Facebook. Before Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg acquired some downslide companies like ‘Friendster’ and location based service ‘Gowalla’. Mark stated this in one his updates on Facebook that this is the first time her has acquired a company with so many users. (I guess I stated in my previous write up that Instagram has acclaimed more than 50 million users in a short span of 2 years.)
Anyways this deal has opened a new world of possibilities, especially for the young and prospective companies. The small companies with a staff around two dozen and a startup of two or more years might now be dreaming to get in the shopping list of Facebook.
Instagram was doing great as a mobile phone application and MarK Zuckerberg actually doled out this amount to be the leading social networking on mobile network.
What I feel is that Facebook instead must pay attention to compete with the heavy-duty advertising campaign of Google. Google is providing the best analytics and many other awesome offers for its advertisers whereas the Facebook advertisers are kind of perturbed with the nastiest experience there. It would have been better for Facebook if they would have been invested in some information providing service for the customers.
However the bidders have started guessing that which company will be the next acquisition of facebook. Who do you think will be the next one?
The speculations include some familiar names and prevailing start-ups like- Pinterest, Tumblr, Evernote, Dropbox, Spotify and Pinger.
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Let us discuss these prospects in detail and see which start up has the maximum chances of getting into bid :
What Next Facebook May Acquire After Instagram?
What is Pinterest
This is a startup and being used by the bloggers mostly. Pinterest provides a pinboard where the bloggers can assemble their contents and images. These pins then can be shared through the social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc. Users follow each other and re-pin each other’s pins. Pinterest has a very user friendly interface and has gained tremendous growth in last six months.
Evaluation
The Company was evaluated worth $200 Million in October 2011 which is now raised to $ 1 Billion.
Key facts
The user database which was 2 million around 6 months back is now grown to 19 millions.
Founders
Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra are the founders.
Tumblr
What is Tumblr
Tumblr is a micro-blogging service allowing media posts such as short captions and pictures. It is bigger as compared to Pinterest and Instgram on almost every metric.
Evaluation
Tumblr was evaluated worth $800 million in September 2011.
Key facts
Tumblr has a high level of engagement and according to the stats given by the site, users create about 14 original posts every month.
Founders
Union square Capital and Spark Capital were the two initial investors of Tumblr. David Karp is the founder.
Evernote
What is Evernote
This is software and a mobile app which enables a user to take notes. The user can also save the photos, WebPages and text in Evernote. The best part about this software is that the user can access these note from anywhere. I think this app deserves to be in the shopping list of Mark Zuckerberg. This software however would be a great asset to a company looking for something to boost up their cloud capabilities.
Evaluation
Till last summer the speculations were highly saying that Evernote would touch $1 Billion, though it did not made it.
Key facts
Evernote is quite popular application between 26 million users.
Founders
Stepan Pachikov is the leader at Evernote. He has worked in the Apple Newton in handwriting-recognition technology. The board of Evernote was set by Max Levchin, Payapal cofounder and Esther Dyson in 2006.
Dropbox
What is Dropbox
This is a service used widely by internet users to share and store files. It helps users in sharing any kind of files. Dropbox must be te first acquisition by the companies lacking behind in cloud based services.
Evaluation
In October 2011 Dropbox was evaluated worth $4 billion.
Key facts
According to the stats given by the company, Dropbox is used to share 1 billion files in every 3 days.
Founder
Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston are the founders of Dropbox. Both of them attended MIT but Arash Ferdowsi dropped out.
Pinger
What is Pinger
Pinger is a talk and text service which works without support of any wireless carriers. When you sigup in Pinger, it provides a telephone number which you can use to connect the public networks. This is a great service and I feel is worth getting enlisted in the high acquisition bids. The best part I like about Pinger is that it works across both the leading platforms Android and iOS. I feel that it could be an attractive as well as useful buy for the telecom companies like Verizon or AT&T.
Evaluation
I tried to locate it but the company did not reveal its valuation decided in funding last year. I would like to know if anybody would like to share.
Key facts
The aspect which can take it to the bid list according to me is that this app is one of the top five apps installed on Apple iOS.
Founders
Greg Woock is the CEO of Pinger. He is a representative from T-Venture and also works for Virgin Group.
Spotify
What is Spotify
Spotify is an online music service which offers free accounts. User can play specific songs with Spotify without getting any premium subscriptions. Do you feel Spotify has a chance to get sold for a great bid? Honestly speaking, I don’t think so. Read somewhere that Google or Amazon may acquire Spotify but I don’t think they would.
Evaluation
I don’t know why but media stats say that its last evaluation was $3 billion.
Key facts
May be the huge list of visitors is a reason of such great evaluation. Spotify has 7.5 million users after it got launched in US. Spotify is already in partnership with Facebook as a streaming music service.
Founders
Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon are the founders of Spotify. Seen Parker plays an active role in Spotify board.
I have added these services in the acquisition list according to the users and the evaluation set for them. Any new add-ons are heartily welcome. Which service will be the next Instagram .
