How to Scale a Billion Dollar Startup Like Instagram

Instagram, the photo-sharing startup co-founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger that was acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars, is an amazing story for many reasons.

However, despite the recent outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the reasons it was able to scale so fast was by using keeping things simple in-house and taking advantage of connecting to resources outside.

In April (2012) after the Facebook acquisition, Mike Krieger gave a talk on "Scaling Instagram" to give some perspective on the back-end and engineering while growing so fast and having to make adjustments while going at full-speed.

Perhaps this sums it up best:

"The cleanest solution with the fewest moving parts as possible."

Note: if you are on Instagram, connect with me @akifmalik or see some of my photos here

Luminate | Making Images Dynamic and Creating Depth

Luminate (formerly Pixazza) is giving online images dynamic effect and creating depth. Unlike your typical static image, Luminate provides ways for images to be linked to all kinds of information and interaction, which given how many images exist, opens up a trillion possibilities for publishers. Some of its backers include the cool guys at CMEA Capital and Google Ventures.