Let’s not forget that Instagram was sold for “only” a billion dollars or so. So would would Snapchat turn down three times that amount?

Why did Snapchat turn down three billion dollars?

One of Snapchat’s investors, Institutional Venture Partners, is quite explicit that it invested in a zero-revenue company because its “growth and engagement metrics are off the charts,” and because it is used largely by the young.

It’s been an interesting week. Aside from officially launching BakingPixel today, we’re also compiling the most interesting and popular posts from this week for you.

Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 review: Unapologetically content-driven

People buy the Kindle to consume content. It is no surprise that Amazon makes it the focus of the Kindle Fire HDX.

Why an 80% market share might only represent half of smartphone users

Charles Arthur explains on The Guardian why an 80% market share might only represent half of smartphone users.

Thoughts on the Google Nexus 7 from the perspective of a longtime iOS user

This pretty much sums up my experience when I switched from my iPhone 5 to a Nexus 4. There are pros and cons, but it takes a while to get used to the change, for better or worse.

Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won

Charles Arthur reports on The Guardian how Google maps lost to Apple maps when everyone thought it had won.

Bill Gates: Here’s My Plan to Improve Our World — And How You Can Help

Bill Gates shares on Wired his plan to improve the world. The article is a very good read. Take the time to go through it. And then sit down and reflect upon yourself.

Tired of a fat wallet? Coin lets you hold all your cards in a single, connected card

Aside from the cheeky, and possibly misleading name, Coin is a product that could go a long way to helping us solve the issue of fat wallets. After all, why carry so many pieces of plastic when you can just carry one? It’ll have additional hurdles in countries where security chips are implemented in cards, instead of just relying on the magnetic stripe. The good news is that the folks behind Coin are already aware of this and working to offer support for chip and pin future versions.

The Google Books decision is good for authors and readers

Not everybody is going to be a fan of a judge’s recent decision to approve Google’s book-scanning activities, however an author has penned a short article on why he thinks that the ruling is a good one.

Next Up for Evernote: Learning Your Habits

This is something all apps should strive towards. Having an app that knows my habit well will make it very hard for me to want to switch to a different app. This will be great for user retention.

If you’re an owner of a Nexus 4, 7, or 10, and are impatient, the good news is that Google has released the official factory images for those devices. Do bear in mind that the downside of flashing these factory images, instead of waiting for an over-the-air (OTA) update from Google, is that your device will be erased.

This is also a sad reminder that the older Galaxy Nexus won’t be part of this party. Not officially anyways.

Android 4.4 images for the Nexus 7s, Nexus 4, and Nexus 10 now available

The one device that won’t be joining the KitKat party is the Galaxy Nexus. The official excuse is that the Galaxy Nexus is over 18 months old, but the real reason is that Texas Instruments, the company that made the SoC in the Galaxy Nexus, quit the smartphone business about a year ago. Official support for the chip has dried up, so there won’t be a KitKat port for anything with a TI OMAP processor. A lack of official support has never stopped the modding community before, though, so if you have a Galaxy Nexus and really want KitKat, some Googling should be able to turn something up.

Not everybody is going to be a fan of a judge’s recent decision to approve Google’s book-scanning activities, however an author has penned a short article on why he thinks that the ruling is a good one.

The Google Books decision is good for authors and readers

You’d think this process would have been improved with the advent of search engines and digitized text, but it hasn’t. Millions upon millions of books have been published over the past couple of centuries yet precious few are completely searchable. Each year in the US alone, about 350,000 books are published. While you can find a book’s title you can’t search inside the actual book without either buying or borrowing it.

Far better would be to make a book completely searchable so whenever a user looks for a term and comes to your book, she can buy it. Otherwise it sits on a dusty library shelf or on a server somewhere, unloved and unread, like they do at NYU’s Bobst Library and other libraries across the country. It’s a colossal waste, each book a ripple in an ocean of information, very difficult to get to.

PetaPixel reports that SmugMug’s Camera Awesome app is finally available on Android.

For Android fanboys offended that it took 20 more months to bring Camera Awesome to Android than iOS, you might want to give SmugMug a pass on this one.

Both apps actually went into development at the same time, but the fact that Android is fragmented across so many different devices with varying screen sizes and capabilities caused serious headaches for the design team.

“It turned out to be so much more difficult than iOS,” CEO Don MacAskill told CNET. “The plethora of devices is a real pain. Earlier versions of Android had some serious issues around memory management, so taking and editing photos was basically the thing you couldn’t do without jumping through all kinds of hoops.”

The trouble developers face due to Android’s fragmentation.

For the moment, the topic of privacy will always come up during the discussion of Google Glass. Privacy issues aside, if Google continues to improve Glass, it could become a very useful tool to photographers.

You can view more examples of photos taken with Google Glass by Trey Ratcliff on Google+.

These Astonishing Images Convinced Us That Google Glass Will Change Photography Forever

What Glass does is allow hands-free photos to be taken — thus removing all the shake and wobble of hand-held photography. It’s probably one of the defining advances Glass will make in photography: Humans can hold their heads almost perfectly still while taking a picture; we can’t do that with our hands.