Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom took the stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing to talk about the photosharing startup’s international efforts and how it plans to deal with the onslaught of clones, including over ten Chinese copycats.
During the talk Systrom revealed that the startup has now hit the 12 million user milestone, with 100K weekly downloads coming just from China, impressively. The app sees around one download per second worldwide, with that rate increasing on the weekends. “The amount of interest people have [in Asia] is huge,” Systrom said, “Japan is our second largest market.”
It seems like the international appeal of Instagram wasn’t that unexpected; The app was translated into 10 different languages four weeks after its launch, with two of those languages being simplified versions of Chinese.
Systrom also confirmed that the company was in contact with Chinese companies like Weibo, in order to better tailor the social app to the uniqueness of a market that has little access to Twitter and Facebook.
Again, these user engagement numbers are made even more poignant by the fact that Instagram still only available on iOS, with a promised Android version still in the works.
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 , Foursquare and Posterous.[2] The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above.
Instagram, in an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, confines photos into a square shape. This is in contrast to the…