Tuesday, April 9, 2013
These days, you can get your Instagram photos printed onto just about anything. There are companies that print out Post-it-sized Instagrams, Instagrams on Canvas, Instagrams on wood and fiberglass, and everything in between.
Today, Instantgram.me is joining those ranks with its new Instagram magnet-making business. The service offers 9 magnets, all 5cm x 5cm, for $17.00 with free worldwide shipping.
The prices aren’t necessarily a steal, but magnets are actually smart uses for Instagram pictures. Let’s face it: our Instagrams aren’t always worthy of a spot on our walls, or even printing in the first place. But magnets are cute and funny, and they’re usually holding up pictures of our loved ones anyways. Instantgram has just lopped one in with the other.
The company also sells non-magnet prints of your Instagram photos in a product called Squares. You can either get a 24-set of 5″ x 5″ prints, or a 48-count set of 2.5″ x 2.5″ prints again for $17. The beauty of it is, with both magnets and squares, you can choose duplicates of certain pictures thanks to an easy-to-understand interface. This turns your Instagram photos into those cute little elementary-school pocket pictures you used to pass out to your friends.
Perhaps more interesting is the fact that an entire ecosystem has sprouted up around Instagram, an app that generated no revenue for the majority of its lifetime, before getting acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. There are countless services that are based on Instagram, from printing services to Instagram clones and back again.
We have yet to see any of these services or apps break away from the crowd into household-name territory, but that isn’t to say it’s not going to happen.
Instantgram, like CanvasPop and Prinstagram and Kanvess and InstaThis and Instacanvas, has a good a shot as any. But perhaps not so great a name.
Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above. In an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos into a square...
