Recently Grown Flickr Alternative, 500px, Raises $525K in Series A

Owing to the towering complaints by the Flickr users, its Toronto-based rival company, 500px, has gotten the opportunity to grow its consumer base substituting the Flickr’s consumer base. The number of users of 500px has risen from 1000 in 2009 to almost up to 85 thousand users today. Even more indicatively, around 45 thousand of these users just signed up for the service in last three months only. So after almost a rough rising since two years, now that the company is on its feet, and even startup has announced that it will be making a $525K Series A round in investment from High Line Venture Capital, Deep Creek Capital and ff Venture Capital.

Image via Wikipedia

According to one of the founders of the company, Oleg Gutsol, “The idea of making 500px arose from Evgeny [Tchebotarev] and I having difficulties with the current available platforms — there wasn’t a good service that would allow us to display our photos is a visually pleasing way and be easy to use. I think we tried every somewhat popular service online and still were not quite satisfied. So we decided to build one ourselves.” While along with the second co-founder, Ian Sobolev, Gutsol translated his Livejournal-based photo sharing community to their freshly created current site on Halloween 2009. It had very little following, if any, and today after attracting the frustrated consumers of Flickr, the website is gathering optimistic praises from everywhere.

Even the big names of the Flickr community, including Thomas Hawk, Troy Holden and Ivan Makarov have transformed their photo-sharing service. While the flocks of Flickr users make the change as the website gew 60% in just the past 30 days only. Consequently the website boasts its huge 2.5 million page views in just the last month. Even after being expanded such largely, 500px is determined to stay loyal to its initial aims, which was to allow the photographers to have larger audiences. ”We encourage young talent,” stated Gutsol Tchebotarev. He added that “It is not uncommon to see someone new joining our site and have their photo appear in our popular feed in a matter of hours.”

iPhone 4 On Its Way To Become ‘The Most Popular Camera’ Used By Flickr Community

Image via CrunchBase

It is already being greatly presumed as more and more cell phones with latest and advanced cameras are declining the sales and reason for any extra point-and-shoot cameras. Now Flickr has disclosed that iPhone 4 will soon be makings its way to turn out to be the most popular camera by the huge photo-sharer’s of Flickr community.

According to the statistics of Flickr, the trend is shown in the form of a graph, which indicates about the most or least popular cameras being used in the Flickr community. The dSLR camera model of Nikon, D90, is currently leading the charts of not only Flickr, but it also enjoys the lead role in the statistics of PCWorld's charts as well. But now the new trend, which shows the steeply growing popularity of iPhone 4, moreover it is being predicted that, considering the speed of rise of the graph, iPhone 4 might even take over Nikon D90. Analysts have predicted this time to be not far, and maybe in the very next month even.

Flicker Accused of Enforcing Its Community Rules Unethically

Only a couple days after a user has uploaded few pictures at Flickr, just like any other of its huge number of users. The pictures which showed the Egyptian police officers in a much feared state, uploaded by Hossam el-Hamalawy, well-known Egyptian blogger and human rights activist, could not believe it when he first saw the pictures ‘vanished’ one after another, from the networking site.

He later claimed that “I thought I was being hacked.” Hamalawy has been a very active user of the networking social website since 2008 and uploaded these pictures just early this month, which have been shot at the State Security Police headquarters in Nasr City.

He informed that later he finally learned through an e-mail letter sent by Flickr team; explain that the photos were removed because he, the user, did not take those images himself. The mail stated that this reason lies in violation of the site’s community rules. Hamalawy commented on this e-mail message to say “That is totally ludicrous.” Later he humbly made his point while accusing Flicker: “Flickr is full of accounts with photos that people did not take themselves.”