Highlight is a location-based mobile app that notifies you when people in your social network are nearby. I was skeptical of the app engineering “serendipity” until it led to an impromptu dinner party in Tahoe over the weekend.

Today during a small event at Highlight’s offices, founder and CEO Paul Davidon demoed the new features and set out his vision for the future of communication. Highlight 1.5 pulls in elements like photo-sharing, commenting, and events from other social apps, but it still takes its own serendipity-centric approach. 

“How can you take people walking around cities and connect them in the physical world?” said Davison during his presentation. “Taken together, the photos and events features are really complimentary. The applications extend to conferences, fashion week, weddings, football games, company holiday parties, small group dinners, concerts. There are so many situations where we gather together as friends, people, part of community. Being able to see who else is there, and have real-time conversations, and have that memory of that after you leave, will create a richer experience.”

The app now has a photo icon, and you can use it to post photos and share them publicly with people in your vicinity. Davison gave the example of Fat Tuesday, when he snapped a picture of the donuts he brought to the office and watched friends and coworkers filter in for the treats.

“We want to allow people to share an experience they are having right now,” Davison said. “It’s not photo sharing in the typical sense, it’s photos plus physical space. If I am walking down the street and see something interesting, or I am standing near someone else’s photo physically, it will show up on my phone.”

The vision is that rather than emailing photos or organizing them into an album on Facebook, people will simply have access to photo albums simply by being in a particular place. The caption feature encourages communication between users, and Davison said this element is more popular than he initially expected.

Events are the other major update. Highlight events, however, do not have an official organizer or an invite list, and these are only visible to people in the immediate vicinity.

“We didn’t want to re-create services that already exist,” Davison said. “We want to create something that allows people to create shared experiences that are lightweight and fun.

“You can only start an event ‘here and now.’ You enter a title and it defaults to the current location, but that can be altered. Only people near you will get a notification.”

When Highlight went through its first update, it made the application “smarter” and more interactive. The team spent the past year rebuilding the notification backend and infrastructure to make the notifications more relevant. They also worked on extending the battery life, since the app runs in the background on phones and can be a power-drain and introduced a search function.

Davison said that these changes helped Highlight grow its user base and receive Apple’s Best of 2012.

Highlight launched in January 2012 and quickly became popular within the tech scene. It took off at the South-by-South-West conference as startup kids used it to network, meet new people, and track down their friends. Davison formerly worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital, which invested in Highlight along with SV Angel, Crunchfund, and other angel investors last March. 

Photo Credit: Highlight

Twitter’s expanded tweets party is minus one VIP guest, but several other social services seem eager to make an appearance. The Yahoo-owned Flickr, alongside the release of a new app for iPhone, threw in support for Twitter Cards this morning, bringing its newly filtered captures to tweets near you.

Flickr vice president Brett Wayn hinted about the integration in a blog post this morning. Head of product Markus Spiering confirmed to VentureBeat that the Twitter Cards update went live early this morning.

A Flickr photo as seen on Twitter

Now, when you share a photo from Flickr to Twitter (from the new iPhone app or anywhere else), that photo shows up right inside your tweet, meaning your followers can enjoy the capture without leaving Twitter. Flickr previously employed a custom integration that enabled Twitter desktop users to see photos in-line with tweets, Spiering said, but the Yahoo photo property reworked the functionality to make its photos viewable inside Twitter’s mobile apps as well.

“When you think about what a user really wants, if you use the Flickr app, you chose Flickr as your photo service, and you upload your photos to Flickr,” Spiering said. “But also you make the explicit choice to share somewhere else. As a user, your expectation probably is … that you want to have your photos look as best as possible on the destination that you share them to.”

In-tweet Flickr photos are powered by Twitter Cards, also known as expanded tweets. Third-party partners can work with the information network to put their content inside your tweets for instant gratification. A smattering of companies, most recently Pinterest, have worked with Twitter to get their content in front of more people. But not Instagram. The hot photo-sharing app collected its square, stylized shots and went home.

With both Twitter and Flickr now offering their members photo filters, some could now see the companies as competitors. Flickr, however, desperately needs support from the hipper, more popular Twitter if the veteran photo-sharing service is to make a comeback. It also appreciates its relationship with Twitter, Spiering told me.

“For the mobile launch, it was important to us that we fully embrace Twitter’s platform and capabilities to provide the best photo-sharing experience for Flickr users,” he said.

Flickr also made adjustments to how its photos are viewed on Facebook. Now, photos shared from Flickr to Facebook are shown in full and look as if they were directly uploaded to Facebook, Spiering explained.

Photo credit: dirkdallas/Flickr

Embroiled in a photo turf war with Twitter, Instagram’s deadly weapon of choice is a revamped iOS application that allows users to snap better, more stylized shots.

The Facebook-owned entity today released a new version of its popular application for iOS, and a more subtly upgraded version for Android. Version 3.2 for iOS gives photo-sharers a completely refreshed camera experience, a new monochrome filter called “Willow,” an enhanced blur tool, larger images in the feed, and design tweaks throughout. Android users, meanwhile, simply get the new Willow filter.

The most significant changes to Instagram’s iOS app are to the camera, or the primary tool people use to shoot and filter their square captures on the photo social network. The Instagram team has entirely changed how the camera experience looks, feels, and functions.

Instagram’s new camera

“The camera has been the core part of the Instagram experience since the day we launched and as a result, we’ve made significant improvements to its look and speed,” the Instagram team said in a blog post.

Instagram users on iOS will find a giant blue Instagram shutter button now beckons them to take their shot. Alongside the button, application users will find a little window that offers up a preview of the most recent photo stored in their camera roll. In addition, the camera screen has been improved to make it a simpler, faster process to select from photos saved in the camera roll. There’s also a new grid guide available for shooting live captures; the grid is also included on the next scale and crop screen (pictured below).

Tilt-shift, the popular blurring effect included in the camera experience, should be noticeably improved in the new iOS app, Instagram said. The application now renders images in a new way so that depth of field is far more realistic and accurate.

The new Willow filter, introduced for both Android and iOS users today, is a monochrome effect with a hint of purple and is said to be ideal for “portraits, still life, and architecture photographs with contrast.”

Meet Willow, Instagram’s newest filter

The updates come as Instagram and former pal Twitter duke it out over your shared photos. Instagram recently dropped support for Twitter Cards, breaking the functionality that shows its filtered captures in-line with tweets. Instagram creator Kevin Systrom said the controversial decision was about driving people back to Instagram for a better experience, but the action has been viewed as an aggressive maneuver designed to do harm to a new foe.

Twitter, for its part, is about to introduce its own photo filters. The information network’s photo-altering features are expected to appear before the end of the year, according to a report that surfaced over the weekend. Hopefully, Twitter’s filters are a bit more enticing than the effects we’ve seen in images posted by Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey in recent days. Otherwise, it would appear that Twitter is bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Instagram 3.2 for iOS and version 3.3 for Android are available now on the App Store and Google Play respectively.

Photo credit: fotoyong/Flickr

To post a quote, video, link, chat, text, photo, or audio? That’s not the question on Photoset, an all-new single purpose iOS application from mini-blog company Tumblr.

Thursday, the 5-year-old social network that caters to creatives released the iPhone and iPad application Photoset for making and sharing sets of photos — and nothing more.

Photoset allows the iOS owner to easily snap or add a bunch of photos to a set, alter the layout of the shots, append a caption, and upload and share the high-resolution sets publicly to followers or privately to friends.

“Photos are extremely important to us, and we love the power a set of photos has to tell a story even richer than the sum of its parts,” the company said in a blog post.

You can use standalone, photo-only application with or without a Tumblr blog. The user that wants to immediately share a finished photo collage on their Tumblr site can select that as option in the creation process. Otherwise, you can upload the set to photoset.com and share the URL via email or Twitter.

Photoset from Tumblr hits at the center of a mobile photo movement dominated by single-purpose apps that help users enhance and share photos with ease. The app seems like an appropriate tangent for Tumblr as it should not only appease the service’s existing users with more instant photo-sharing tools but also help the company reach new audiences.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Popular photo sharing and editing app EyeEm has today relaunched into version 3.0 on iOS and Android with a live discovery tool in what is arguably, the first of its kind.

The new, keystone feature is a personalised feed of other users’ photos based on location and trending topics worldwide. It also presents content you might like, by remembering what types of photos are personally viewed most.

“Anytime you contribute a pic or navigate through – the app learns a bit more about you. The more you use it, the better it gets in recommending content and engaging users. That’s when it gets more fun and interesting,” co-founder and CEO Florian Meissner explains – when you travel, whether it’s in your city or in another country, the app changes with you.

“If there’s an amazing ice creamery where people take lots of pictures on EyeEm, then we’d recommend it to you if you’re in that location,” Meissner says.

“There’s this contextual layer which are your interests, so what sports you’re into, what conferences you’re attending. If you’re a foodie you could discover the cool, new restaurant around the corner if people have taken pictures there.”

The new EyeEm comes on the back of the company’s one-year anniversary celebration. “The discovery tool was our vision from the get go. Many photo apps have rushed into creating crazy, new filters since the rise of Instagram, but the photo editing space was never our goal,” Meissner says.

“We’re realising our vision of what is possible through smartphone photography, to offer people alternative, relevant images of the world around them, sorted and tailored to their interests and lifestyle,” he adds. “It’s something genuinely unique in this space, and we’re now looking forward to more content from our global community.”

EyeEm, which has gradually expanded to a team of 15, has attracted a big following throughout Asia, Russia, Turkey, Germany, and the UK. “Our biggest users are, surprisingly, in Mexico City and Bangkok. Jakarta is also picking up a lot,” Meissner says.

With a strong, conservative grassroots campaign, Berlin-based EyeEm is expected to hit the one million user milestone within the next few months. And it’s all thanks to good old organic growth with no major funds injected into marketing and advertising campaigns. “We’ve invested heavily in our community and building relationships. So we’re seeing a very highly engaged community with these strong social connections,” Meissner says.

This story originally appeared on VentureVillage, VentureBeat’s Berlin-based syndication partner.

The popular photo app that’s responsible for flooding the internet with fuzzy, low-contrast, retro images of cats, hipsters and urban street scenes shows no sign of slowing down.

Of course we’re talking about Instagram and its iPhone-only app for sharing stylized photos. The startup attracted 12 million users in just over a year on the App Store. By early November, the small company — and we mean small; Instagram has just seven employees — grabbed another million and now boasts well over 13 million application users, co-founder Kevin Systrom shared with VentureBeat.

“We’ve always been growing fast, but I think network effects help — we’ve got millions of people who love Instagram and they spread the word for us,” Systrom said of the application’s popularity.

Most are familiar with Instagram’s quirky and bumpy ride to Internet fame. Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger initially raised funding for Burbn, which was yet another take on the mobile check-in application. That idea was scrapped, after almost a year of development, when the co-founders decided to hold on to and perfect a single feature of Burbn: mobile photo-sharing.

The first version of Instagram was created in 8 weeks and launched on the App Store on October 6, 2010. Apple soon named it App of the Week and Instagram started adding a 100,000 new users per week. Today, Instagram remains a iPhone-only application, though it does have a popular API that developers are using to bring the experience to new platforms. The service also touts celebrity users such as Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and Ryan Seacrest.

And what’s the status on that long-promised Android application? “All I can say about Android is that it will definitely happen — as for timing, we’ve got nothing to announce yet except that I’m very excited about what the team is working on,” Systrom said.

Instagram has been vocal about its early successes, so we put together a little graph (as seen below) to chart user growth over the course of its short 13-month lifespan. The dates included are based on various reports and do not accurately reflect the exact dates for each milestone, but it does provide a pretty clear picture of continued end user adoption.

A bona fide hit with iPhone owners, Instagram’s two greatest challenges will be replicating the top-notch experience for Android (where there’s already a bevy of similarly-purposed apps) and proving that it can build a real business — not just a buzzy app.

[Image via Instagram]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After the South by Southwest Interactive conference last week, you’d think the world would have its fill of mobile social networking apps. But here comes another big launch, this time of a free iPhone and Android app called Color.

If, like me, you’re starting to feel a bit of a mobile social overload, here’s a different reason to pay attention to Color: It has raised $41 million in funding. That’s an extraordinary amount for a product that hasn’t even launched yet, and it comes from Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s top firms, along with Bain Capital Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.

One more reason Color stands out: Its leadership team includes co-founder and chief executive Bill Nguyen (founder of Lala, the music service acquired in 2009 by Apple), co-founder and president Peter Pham (formerly CEO of BillShrink), and chief product officer DJ Patil (formerly chief scientist at LinkedIn).

Okay, so there’s a lot of money and an all-star team. What does the app actually do? The goal, Pham told me today, was to create a social experience that’s “native” to mobile and really takes advantage of smartphone technology rather than simply transferring a Web-based experience to the phone.

Users share photos and videos on Color, and they see all the media shared by other users at the same location and time. Photos and videos (again, not just the ones you took) from all those experiences are stored in “diaries” — users can look back at their own diaries to remember their past experiences, and they can look at friends’ diaries to see what they’ve been up to.

For example, Pham, Patil, and I had lunch across the street from Color’s Palo Alto, Calif. offices today, and as the two of them took pictures and videos during our conversation, everything showed up under a single event. Then we could look at the diaries of their co-workers and see what was happening back at the Color office.

The obvious points of reference are photo-sharing apps like Instagram, but with a focus on location rather than personal identity or networks. On Color, the content you see isn’t delivered based on who you follow, as it is on Instagram, but rather where you are. That approach can lead to serendipitous discoveries — so if another Color user had been taking photos in the same restaurant, Pham, Patil, and I would have seen their photos too. You could also compare Color to location-based apps like Foursquare, but in Color, photos are the central experience, rather than a sidebar to check-ins.

Patil said Color is doing a lot of work behind the scenes to make the experience as simple and automated as possible. So users never have to tell Color where they are or who they’re with — the app figures that out for itself, and it dynamically adjusts the size of a single event or location based on users’ activity. Does that mean your photos and videos could get “automatically” grouped with a completely unrelated set? There could definitely be some mistakes, Pham acknowledged, especially early on, but the app will get better based on user activity and feedback.

And instead of requiring users to become friends or followers of other users, Color just points to other accounts that users may want to check out, based on their activity. So if I’m constantly using the Color app at the same time and location as someone else, Color will figure out that I probably want to see that other users’ photos and videos.

One important point about Color: All of the content is public. Does that mean a user’s embarrassing keg stand picture will be visible to everyone? Yes, but Pham said he’s hoping to avoid those situations by being completely clear about Color’s policy. Users don’t have to wonder who can see what, or adjust a bunch of different privacy settings, because everything’s public. He added that more people are beginning to understand, “When you’re in public, you’re in public.”

I haven’t had a chance to play with the app in any meaningful way; I’ve just watched the demos from Pham and Patil. But I was pretty impressed with what I saw today. Over and above any individual feature, it’s a beautiful, responsive app, and its interface looks intuitive (and fast) enough to eliminate any technological barriers to the oversharing that Color wants to encourage.

Calling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. We’ve pretty much finalized the invite list, but have a few spots left. Request an invitation.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’ve been wondering how someone can turn a mobile photo application into a real company, well, the answer became a little clearer today with some new features from Picplz.

The company has announced an application programming interface (API) that will allow developers to build apps using Picplz photos. The company released a slideshow app, an embeddable widget for photos, and a photo feed that requires a login as examples of the kind of potential the API provides. Yes, pretty much every social networking startup releases an API, but Picplz seems to have beaten its competitors to this particular milestone. (Instagram shut down an unofficial API and said it plans to build an official one.)

(Update: Well, Picplz was ahead of Instagram by a few hours anyway.)

As my headline suggests, it doesn’t look like today’s announcement will make the San Francisco startup any money right away. But the news points to how Picplz can be more than just another mobile app.

Picplz has made another change, too: It now lets users share their photos through a Creative Commons license. This may seem like a minor addition, but it could help users feel more comfortable making Picplz the main repository for all their images. Not only will they be able to share those photos on a range of other social sites, but they can also set the terms by which those photos are republished by others. (Many of the images on VentureBeat come from Creative Commons-licensed photos that we find on Flickr.)

Finally, Picplz announced a dashboard that allows businesses like Madison Square Garden and the LA Lakers to track the number of views, likes, and comments they receive on each image. This seems like something Picplz might be able to charge for, but co-founder Dalton Caldwell told me it’s free for now:

We developed this as a direct response for what our early brand partners asked for. I am not sure whether this is the beginning of a monetization option for brands, or just another interesting reason for people to adopt picplz.

I think we would need to add quite a bit more functionality before it would be something a brand would be willing to pay for. At any rate, we will get a better idea once it gets more adoption.

Caldwell previously led music service Imeem, and he gave a memorable talk last year where he laid out all the reasons why he wouldn’t want to create another music startup — basically, the financial side just doesn’t add up. So it’s probably safe to assume that he chose his new industry with a little more care. Today’s news shows a vision that goes beyond the app, one that turns Picplz into a resource for developers, publishers, and brands.

But to be a successful platform, Picplz will probably need to be a successful consumer app too. And Instagram seems to be providing some formidable competition on that front.

Picplz recently raised a $5 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz. (Andreessen invested in an earlier version of Instagram, but he said he will take a more passive role now.)

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Instagram, the startup behind a popular iPhone application for editing and sharing photos, just announced that it has raised $7 million in funding led by Benchmark Capital.

Back in December, I heard that Instagram was raising funding from Benchmark, although the deal wasn’t closed yet. Instagram said today that Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who was formerly Facebook’s vice president of product management and has been described as a close advisor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook’s early days, is joining Instagram’s board of directors.

Instagram also unveiled some famous new angel investors, including Quora co-founder/former Facebook chief technology officer Adam D’Angelo, Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey, and Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca.

I’ve already been impressed by the speed of Instagram’s growth, and the San Francisco startup shared more numbers today — it said it now has nearly 2 million registered users who post more than 290,000 photos per day. Again, that’s less than four months after the app first launched.

Instagram launched at around the same time as two other high-profile mobile photo apps — Path and Picplz. All three companies now have high-profile backing. Andreessen Horowitz invested in Picplz (the firm also backed Instagram back when it was focused on location app Burbn, but partner Marc Andreessen said he will take a passive role in Instagram), and yesterday Path announced funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Noticeably absent from the investor lineup is Sequoia Capital, which was earlier rumored to be backing Instagram. Sequoia did end up investing in blogging service Tumblr, which is so photo-heavy that it could be seen as a photo-sharing site.