SUMMARY: A startup no longer, Instagram boasts 700 million monthly active users and counting. As it grows, the free, photo-sharing mobile app is grappling with how to innovate and stay relevant, as well as how to foster a safe community. But with 95 million uploads a day, monitoring is a tall order. Judy Woodruff reports from California.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): The rapid rise of one of the world's biggest social media networks, Instagram.
It's building up steam, with 700 million people now using it each month, and it just took four months to pick up its latest 100 million new accounts.
But along the way, the company has faced concerns over how it can be used, and even some criticism for the way it essentially copied ideas from its rival, Snapchat.
Judy Woodruff recently got an inside look during her trip to Silicon Valley.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): One of the first things that greets you inside Instagram is, no surprise, a place to take pictures. The free photo-sharing mobile app was born in 2010 with its first post, a foot in a flip-flop alongside a stray dog.
Turns out it was taken in Mexico by co-founder Kevin Systrom.
KEVIN SYSTROM, CEO and Co-Founder, Instagram: It's a mixture of teams. So, we have got design teams, we have got partnership teams, we have got a community team, and then a bunch of engineers. We don't really have an organization.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Systrom showed us around Instagram's new offices in Menlo Park, California, designed to accommodate an ever-expanding staff.
You moved here six months ago; is that right?
KEVIN SYSTROM: Yes, six months ago, we moved from the original campus. And we designed this entire experience inside here to be cleaner, and a little bit more Instagrammy. So we have got the hip wood walls, and the polished concrete floors. It's very start-uppy, but it's in an Instagram way.
JUDY WOODRUFF: A start-up no longer, Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for a cool billion dollars. Then, the company had 13 employees. Now it has more than 600 to keep up with a rapidly growing user base, 700 million monthly active users and counting, 80 percent of them outside the United States.
How do you explain the phenomenal, rapid growth of this?
KEVIN SYSTROM: On Instagram, very early on, you would post an image, and anyone anywhere in the world could see that image, and understand what you were trying to say without speaking your language.
So, we like to say that Instagram was one of the first truly international networks in the world. And I think that's what's allowed it to scale to the hundreds of millions of people that use it every day today.
SUMMARY: In the 30 years since Steve Case co-founded AOL, the global tech landscape has seen immense growth and change. What new developments wait in the near future, and what does the rapidly expanding online world mean for human life? Case explores those issues in his new book, “The Third Wave.” Case joins Judy Woodruff to discuss his vision of the future.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Back in 1985, when Steve Case co-founded America Online, only 3 percent of Americans were actually online. Fast-forward some 30 years, and we can see the global change brought about by the Internet and an ever-growing array of devices and social media.
So, what is next?
Well, we get a glimpse from Steve Case himself. He is the author of a new book, “The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future.”
Steve Case, it is good to see you.
STEVE CASE, Author, “The Third Wave”: It’s good to see you again.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So you borrowed that term the third wave from the futurist Alvin Toffler.
STEVE CASE: Yes.
When I was in college in the 1980, I read Toffler “Third Wave.” It completely mesmerized me inspired me. I spent the last almost four decades pursuing some of the ideas he talked about.
So, when I was writing a book, I wanted to pay respect to him. I open the book with talking about my experience reading Toffler. And I hope others will similarly be inspired by my book, and because the future once again is going to change, and the path forward is going to be different than what we saw in the last two waves. And that’s what I was trying to lay out in this book.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, in a thumbnail, first wave was the creation of the Internet, which you were involved in. Second wave was building on that, you describe, social media devices and so forth.
What is the next wave?
STEVE CASE: It’s really integrating the Internet seamlessly throughout our lives.
And there is a lot of things that haven’t changed that much in the first wave or the second wave. How we learn, our kids learn is about the same. How we stay healthy is about the same. How we manage energy is about the same. Even how we think about food is about the same.
And work itself is starting to change in the third wave because of the freelance economy, what some call the gig economy. So, I think it’s important for everybody, not just businesspeople or technologists, to understand what is happening next. And that is what I try to lay out in this book with sort of a — a little bit of a road map forward and a little bit of a playbook in terms of how you can think about orchestrating your career and your life, and how you think about maybe your kids and even your grandkids. What world are they going to be inheriting?
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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