A picture’s worth a billion dollars

Talk about capturing the perfect moment! Facebook has announced that it will buy Instagram, the popular photo sharing phone app, for US$1 billion.

Instagram was only launched in October 2010 but already has 30 million users who upload 5 million photos a day to various social networks.

Facebook says it will continue to develop Instagram as a separate brand, allowing it to post to rival sites.

It’s a rags-to-riches story for Instagram’s 13 employees – echoing the dotcom days. And Instagram isn’t the only app to make it big in recent years.

So is this the shape of things to come or is a dotcom-style bust about to come into frame? Only time will tell. But if you look through the lens of history, maybe you can already see the big picture.