I still can't wrap my head around Facebook's billion dollar purchase of Instagram. It just got weirder when I found out that Instagram is given away for free and has never made a cent. Yes, dot-com times are here again, revenue doesn't matter, it's more important to have users than income, and everyone with a half-assed idea will try to get rich with it. I'm looking forward to the bizarre ideas we'll be seeing in the next decade. What does it say about us that our economy is most interesting when it's behaving totally irrationally?
Certainly I'm trying to come up with my billion-dollar idea. I'm starting with the principle that Instagram is a dumbed-down Photoshop that's connected to the Internet, so I'm trying to think what other popular desktop software can be simplified for the iPhone set. When you put it that way, Instagram's success is a little more understandable: This particular audience consists largely of people who have been introduced to computers through smartphones, and aren't fully versed in what they're capable of.
Instagram is to Photoshop as my app is to _______. So what desktop software goes in the blank? I was thinking of a simplified spreadsheet, but the simplified, mobile version would be a calculator. Even I'm not nerdy enough to want a calculator that posts it's results to Twitter. How about a simplified, mobile blogging platform? That would be Twitter. Original crazy ideas are hard to make.
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