Those of you on Twitter would have seen the news first, but in case you didn’t:
- Facebook buys Instagram photo sharing network for $1bn
- Why Microsoft spent $1 billion on AOL’s patentsÂ
The first one is cool and shows you how the social media sector can pay for itself when an app is released free. Instagram allows you to takes pics and automatically upload them up to Twitter, Facebook and do fancy effects on them. The native Facebook iPhone app was clunky to use with pics.
There are also 13 guys in Instagram now all worth almost $100m (CEO got most). The general comment is that the Android release last week had a big impact on the deal and also their powerful RESTful API and OAuth 2 (just like the SureVoIP API, but we weren’t first 🙂 ).
The scary news is that the newly owned Microsoft patents are so powerful. They just bought one for SSL, you know, the thing that allows you to go to https:// for your bank and the whole web.
There’s a lot of other mobile patents in that list too. Food for thought as to what damage they can do in the future like create a Microsoft tax for many things and kill a lot of mobile innovation and there’s even some in there about VoIP!