Henry Soenarko // writes about music, art, advertising, photography, graphic design, Apple, Mac, computers, internet,
Social Media, motorsports, cars and day-to-day things.
Instagramwalks are a great way to meet like-minded people with the same passion: taking and sharing photos with Instagram. Last Sunday Floor Drees and Christine Fürst organized Instagramwalk010 through the city of Rotterdam (010 is the area code of Rotterdam). Around 50 participants showed up during this sunny winter day and over 600 pictures were tagged with #instagramwalk010.
After playing Birdy's hit single "Skinny Love" on radiostation 3FM, DJ Giel Beelen received some emails of girls writing: if you like Birdy, please have a look at my video. So he decided to run a contest who would become the ''Dutch Birdy". About 400 young girls sent in their video. Eight of them made it to the finals and yesterday the winner was announced: 13 year old Anna Verhoeven with her version of Laura Jansen's "Signal".
Laura Jansen was amongst the first to congratulate her by phone and on Twitter.
yes! 13 yr old @anna_verhoeven just won the Dutch Birdy contest singing one of my songs. I'm very proud :) giel.vara.nl/Live-optredens…
— Laura Jansen (@LauraJansen) January 12, 2012
As did Birdy.
Congrats to @Anna_verhoeven winning the 'Dutch Birdy' contest at #3FM in Holland with @Giel3FM. Enjoy #DWDD tonight, i'll be watching X
— Birdy (@OfficialBirdy) January 12, 2012
It's her first recording and she was hesitant to enter the contest, but her dad convinced her after putting a video on YouTube without her name and picture. As a prize her single will be released and is available in the iTunes Store as of now. Young Anna made her TV debut in the very popular Dutch show "De Wereld Draait Door". Have a look (her actual performance starts at 08 minutes 45 seconds). Shivers all over!
The quality of the contest was very high. So please check out the other finalists. You won't be disappointed.
Surfing the web and through links I get from my friends on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, I come across a lot of great content. So yesterday I decided to start a new Tumblr blog to create something of a digital scrapbook containing photographs, videos and music clips that inspire me and make me say "awesome!". Hence its name "Things That Awe Me". Just links; hardly any text, so I can update with minimal fuss.
Does that mean I will give up this Posterous blog? Hell no! My intention is to start blogging more often here. The two sites will just serve different purposes. The new Tumblr blog is more like a digital scrapbook. That's why I've chosen for a theme with infinite scrolling. It's still a work in progress. Not a lot of content yet and I want to tweak the design a little, but hereby I proudly present: "Things That Awe Me".
Have fun and I hope you'll find some inspiration too!
Cartoon by: Geek and Poke
Loving photography it may come as no surprise that my favorite app of the year is most definitely Instagram. And I'm not the only one. Instagram gained more than 15 million users in its first year by making it fun, fast and easy to share photos. Nearly 60 photos a second are shared! Not to shabby considering it is iPhone only. At LeWeb 2011 they announced an Android version is on its way. 
Photo sharing is something everybody does. Capturing moments is a natural behavior. Now there are other photo sharing apps, so what's the allure? First of all it's easy. Point, shoot, add a filter, and share. Not only on Instagram, but also on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Posterous, Tumblr, Foursquare or email. You can do this on a per photo basis. You decide which and where your photos go to. And it's fast. Did you know the app starts uploading your photo to their servers even before you started writing a caption? Pretty clever!
Then there's the variety of attractive retro photo filters which lets users improve their images with the tap of a finger. Even novice photographers take creative shots with their smart-phone cameras. The filters encourage them to take their pictures more seriously. And to be more daring! Instagram's CEO Kevin Systrom: “All Instagram did was take the creative tools that the pros have been using and put them in the hands of the masses.” To me it also had the effect that I became increasingly observant of the world around me. Always on the look-out of things to photograph. Wondering how it would look like after applying one of the filters.
The Instagram community is a very active and passionate one. In the end it's not about the photo filters, but about the social network. I have noticed more interactions (likes, comments) then for instance Flickr or photos I've posted on Facebook. I personally find it more rewarding anyway. All over the world meet-ups or Instagramwalks are organized. I recently joined a walk with 10 other IGers through my hometown The Hague, which turned out to be a lovely day.
At the moment the small team's - 6 persons only! - main focus is their app and building a community. But at LeWeb Systrom also announced the launch of decent web experience. When you view a photo on their website right now, there's not much you can really do, except tweet it or like it on Facebook. You can't even get an overview of other photos an Instagram user has taken. Having said that, there are other companies that build great stuff on Instagram's API. One of my favorites is Statigr.am which not only provides bunch of statistics like how many photos you have posted or which user you liked most, you can also watch the feed of all following or an individual user and like photos from there.
By opening itself up to other apps and services, it has the potential to slowly become the hub of our mobile photo experiences. Being named as the app of the year by Apple only helped accelerate the mobile app’s adoption. And new activations of iPhones on Christmas will definitely give Instagram another bump.
