For EyeEm, one of those indispensable features has just hovered into view, namely the ability to see EyeEm photos embedded in tweets, rather than having to click through to the website or app:

Awesome! You can now see photos from EyeEm directly in your Twitter feed eyeem.com/p/1350842

— EyeEm (@EyeEm) November 15, 2012

On reflection, it’s quite surprising the year-old EyeEm managed to hit a million downloads while its service lacked that feature. I know it may seem first-world-problems small, but the feature’s absence made EyeEm seem clunky in comparison to Instagram’s slickness. It also put the brakes on virality – if you’ve had to click away from Twitter to view a shot linked to in a tweet, you’re less likely to retweet it.

So this should also help the company with its intriguing attempt to make money, the most recent of which involves teaming up with brands such as Red Bull and Lufthansa to send members on ‘photo missions’ to go take relevant shots.

After all, if you’re counting on your platform’s content going viral, it helps if people can see and share it as easily as possible.

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There are two features I’m keen to try out, although – indeed, because – I already have them. One is ‘gesture typing’, which I already use through Swype’s implementation, and the other is the photo filter functionality in the camera app.

By all accounts, and judging by the screenshots and videos people have posted, gesture typing really is like Swype. In fact, it looks so similar that I’m quite surprised it’s not Swype – has Nuance done a quiet deal with Google? If not, I’d expect a lawsuit at some point.

(Side note: Check out The Verge’s video on the creation of the new Nexus devices. I was particularly amused by Hugo Barra’s response to the suggestion that gesture typing is like Swype. “Whether it’s like Swype or not, I think, is less interesting, uh…”.)

But Swype is one service. The photo filter thing is another ballgame altogether.

(EDIT: Yes, there were already filters in Android but they were very basic. The newer ones, from what I have seen, veer into retro territory.)

It’s hard to look at photo filter functionality and surmise that Google is taking the wind out of any particular company’s sails. Indeed, the obviousness of the feature, along with the relative ease of implementation, is one reason why there are so many photo filter apps out there.

But, as Android 4.2 and later versions gain a bigger share of the Android installed base (as they will, given the hyper-aggressive pricing of recent Nexus devices), all those startups may find themselves in trouble.

The question is, how much of the attraction of a service such as Instagram or EyeEm is to do with that functionality, and how much is to do with the community and discovery features that flesh those apps out?

My suspicion is that it’s a case of ‘come for the filters, stay for the follows’. And, if that’s the case, then user acquisition may become something of a problem – on the Android platform, that is.

To be clear, I don’t think Google’s done anything wrong by adding photo filters to its core camera app – it’s an obvious feature. The Swype-alike feature is less obvious, but – appearance aside – it is also just an idea (yes, I’m an anti-software-patents guy). I also realise that many manufacturers put their own camera apps on their Android devices, making this less of an issue on those phones and tablets.

But this is yet another reminder that the power on any platform lies with the entity that owns or sponsors the platform. Everyone else is along for the ride until they’re no longer useful – which is why the likes of Instagram and EyeEm had better keep innovating to stay relevant.

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And now that repository is about to pay off for some of SoundCloud’s 20 million users. SoundCloud has just signed a deal with Getty Images that will make it possible for those users to license their sounds to anyone who’s willing to pay – most likely advertisers and other creatives. (Hear more about the future of SoundCloud from CEO Alex Ljung at our RoadMap conference on November 5th in San Francisco).

“SoundCloud’s partnership with Getty Images Music creates a powerful offering to our community of professional and casual creators,” Ljung said in a statement. “Now through Getty Images Music, songwriters and audio creators can broaden their exposure and potentially monetize sounds they’ve shared on SoundCloud.”

The system will be quite straightforward: each user will be able to install a ‘license’ button from Getty Images Music on their SoundCloud players, for tracks that they want to monetize. Those who want to license the track just click the button and send a request.

Beyond that, depending on how much contact information the SoundCloud user has provided, and whether or not they’ve already sent a tax form to Getty, it will take between a few days and a few weeks for the track to become available.

Getty’s rate card details how usage in web or mobile advertising will cost $350, inclusion in corporate marketing will cost $1500, and so on. The creator gets “35 percent of the upfront licensee fee plus 50 percent of Getty Images’ share, as publisher, of any backend performance royalties”.

And what if the user’s sounds get used in something that’s broadcast? Depending on what type of licensing that’s been chosen by the user, Getty registers the track with performing rights organizations and administers the royalties – 100 percent of the ‘writer’s share’ goes to the creator, along with 50 percent of the ‘publishing share’.

Funnily enough, I’d noted before that Getty was sniffing around the Berlin scene, but I’d assumed that the fruits of that interest would be seen first in a collaboration with an image-centric service, probably EyeEm.

SoundCloud is the pioneer and leader in what it does, i.e. being a YouTube for audio. It’s wildly popular, but its monetization strategies appear limited. Audio-player deals and those pro-account subscriptions can only take the firm so far.

Unfortunately, this is still not a new monetization strategy. SoundCloud doesn’t take a cut, nor does it require users to be paid-up members in order to take advantage of the licensing service.

That means it remains possible that SoundCloud will adopt audio advertising, which is something I feel would drive away many users – particularly as SoundCloud does not tend to offer the same kind of continuous listening experience found in the likes of Spotify.

UPDATE: I originally got the wrong end of the stick regarding SoundCloud taking a cut of the licensing fees. To misquote Obi-Wan, this was not the monetization strategy I was looking for.

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The Instagram rival now has redesigned navigation and live art filters that should keep what was already a good-looking interface competitive, but the biggest development is the addition of a ‘Discover’ feed. Based on suggested tags and other data sources, the feed recommends photos based on friends, locations and topics.

EyeEm, which is nearing a million users, is essentially now in the game of learning those users’ tastes and establishing context. Useful in itself, the Discover feed provides a window into where the company’s heading: and it’s an intriguing future to consider.

“We’re the first ones out there that put every photo on our platform into context, and slice and dice the context,” CEO Florian Meissner told me. “With every photo – where it was taken, whether it was sunny or raining, who was there and so on – we’re building superior search on top of our data cube.”

For example, right now the revamped EyeEm will recommend you photos that were taken around your current location. As the system learns your taste, Meissner suggested, the next step would be to recommend other places that are trending among people with similar tastes. The same idea could apply to topics.

And it’s not just about the user’s tastes, either. EyeEm is pulling in and correlating all sorts of data – the app’s ability to know whether a photo was taken on a rainy or sunny day involves mashing up weather information with Foursquare-derived location data. Some events can be identified and suggested as tags too, for instance where the user is at a concert.

But at the same time, the company is trying to make itself as API-agnostic as possible. Clearly rattled by the recent Twitter shenanigans, Meissner talks darkly about looming “API wars” and says EyeEm is working on its own location database to ensure independence.

So where’s this all leading? “We’re the first ones who organise and structure social photos,” Meissner told me. “We’re building a marketplace for people to acquire licenses from our users.”

Getty, which is involved in a photo hack day with EyeEm and Facebook later this month, is no doubt watching this strategy very closely.

A complementary print business could also be down the line, Meissner added, as could the sale of marketing intelligence. With EyeEm’s seed funding only likely to take the company into early next year, these monetization plans are timely.

EyeEm’s semantic twist on photo-sharing is not entirely unique – Everpix has just come out of beta with a similar idea, albeit paid-for rather than free. But the Berlin firm already has some traction in Japan, South-East Asia, Europe and the U.S., and it does also have that pretty UI.

We may finally be seeing the photo-sharing race entering a new phase, where it’s not so much about who has the best art filters, but who has the best data filters.

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The organization set up a temporary Berlin office a few weeks ago, and on Monday it announced it is to establish a permanent base next year in the Factory, a recently-opened tech office space that houses SoundCloud and several other up-and-coming Berlin startups. What’s more, Mozilla says it’s now hiring in the city.

“We are looking forward to playing a more active role in the vibrant Berlin internet community, building for the open web right where new web trends are created,” Mozilla CFO Jim Cook said in a statement.

Now, this isn’t a coup for Berlin in the same sense as London’s recent announcements of new Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft offices. The Berlin office will be one of what the organization calls ‘Mozilla Spaces’ – an office with some paid staff, but also where Mozilla’s many volunteer contributors can come to hack or just hang out. In Europe, there are two similar ‘spaces’ already being set up in London and Paris.

It’s also hard to nail down exactly what kind of product will come out of the Berlin establishment. Barbara Hueppe, who’s in charge of setting up the new team, told me it “will not have a special focus”, and that Mozilla hoped to “attract talent that will help us drive our diverse initiatives”.

But it is a very intriguing move, particularly given the strengths of the local startup community, and the current stage in Mozilla’s own development.

A good place to go mobile

The organization is in quite a transitional phase right now. Desktop Firefox is obviously still its marquee product, but Mozilla has pulled back from developing other legacy products such as Thunderbird and is instead working on a major mobile push. Firefox OS and Firefox for Android are the two main products to look out for there.

While it’s easy to see the mobile OS space as a two-horse, iOS vs Android race, there are a couple of notable up-and-coming alternatives. Jolla is one, with its deal with China’s largest mobile retail chain, the D.Phone Group, but carriers such as Telefonica have also expressed interest in the Firefox OS. Operators want an alternative to Android at the low end, and Mozilla has a lot to play for there.

Now look at the Berlin scene — it’s crawling with mobile-focused startups such as Amen, Readmill, EyeEm and Tweek.tv. To be fair, mobile is the big thing right now, so most hubs have an excess of such firms, but the long-established presence of Nokia’s geolocation squad in Berlin has led to a particular concentration of smartphone and tablet talent in the city.

Mozilla may not have concrete plans for working with Berlin’s startup scene just yet, but Hueppe assured me that “pure proximity will lead to many good ways of cross-pollination”.

If all goes well, that cross-pollination could mean new ideas for Mozilla and new opportunities for the local scene.

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It may not have Instagram’s user numbers, but what EyeEm does now have is wider platform reach. On Wednesday the Berlin firm’s Windows Phone app came out, through a close tie-in with both Microsoft and Nokia.

The release means EyeEm is now available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and the web, which makes for two more platforms than its biggest rival can manage for now.

“Since starting EyeEm, our vision has been to make photography accessible to anyone, anywhere, no matter what device they are using – to release great photos from peoples’ smartphones and onto a place where they can be appreciated by anyone,” CEO Florian Meißner said.

Instagram doesn’t have a Windows Phone app yet, but let’s be honest, that’s no biggie right now. EyeEm’s proper web service — which received a total makeover less than two weeks ago — is the real differentiator versus its biggest rival.

Why? Because EyeEm has a strong focus on discovery and semantic tagging, which means collaboratively organized, thematically arranged mega-albums.

This takes EyeEm beyond being an Instagram clone (despite its 14 pretty filters) and more into the territory of Flickr or even Pinterest. Ultimately, it could even offer a crowdsourced stock photo service.

All that’s needed are the user numbers, which EyeEm steadfastly refuses to share. I understand part of that’s down to the company waiting to see if their recent influx of Instagram refugees levels off or continues to gather speed, but still: those numbers are critical.

The service is great and many users are passionate, but now we need to know how ready that community is for future expansion.

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But there are some people who’s immediate reactions to the deal may have been a little more complicated: Instagram’s competitors.

It’s not hard to see the deal as bad news for anyone hoping to take on Instagram, which was already the leader in mobile photo apps. Hooking into Facebook’s world-crushing Death Star of a business could easily turn Kevin Systrom’s 12-person app shop into an impregnable dreadnought.

Imagine tying in the social network’s hundreds of millions of users into an already-successful service. Imagine what access to Facebook’s unending engineering resources could do for the product. It could be the end of every one of the thousands of photography apps vying for the public’s attention.

But is there a different take?

Florian Meissner of Berlin-based photo-sharing app Eyeem says that the company spent the weekend getting its new servers online, after an influx of users of the past couple of weeks — many of them fleeing Instagram.

“We started sensing something already two weeks ago,” he told me. “Users started converting to us mostly because they were unhappy about the quality on other services — and that’s really the key for us: enabling our community to decide themselves what they want to see.”

The deal has certainly upset some core Instagram fans, who feel betrayed by a service that many of them saw as the anti-Facebook. Om wrote about the backlash among a number of (Mathew’s roundup of reactions included a brilliant note from a kid who is outraged because “FACEBOOK IS STUPID AND FOR OLD PEOPLE.”

I’ve already seen quite a few people say they now want to switch away, perhaps defecting to services like Path or, indeed Eyeem. And while they may not necessarily be a significant number — certainly not by Facebook’s standards — the foot traffic may be enough to boost those smaller communities.

And of course, even if Instagram remains a separate product inside Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg says that’s something he is committed to), the road of acquisition is rarely entirely smooth. Imagine all those meetings, all that administrative overhead — all small bumps that are probably even more accentuated when you can count most of the employees on your fingers. And that’s before you factor in the time that staff are likely to spend rolling around in their piles of cash.

Cloud or silver lining?

If there is a positive outcome for rivals, the truth is it’s most likely to be a simple one: that Instagram goes mainstream and brings the idea of photosharing to the masses. After all, if everyone who uses Facebook (which means everyone, more or less) will suddenly be introduced to the idea of these apps, that will increase the activity in the space in general.

Still, whatever hope competitors may glean from this blockbuster deal, let’s not pretend that this is rosy news for the thousands of photo-sharing wannabe companies out there. They were all trailing Instagram before yesterday, and now they could be left a long, long way behind.

Sure, they may feel like they can make a little progress while Instagram gets mired in the bureaucracy of joining a big business — but the chances are that whoever they are, they’ll struggle to be heard above Instagram’s roar.

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The Seattle-based company will house a sales and marketing team in Berlin, according to Adam Selipsky, VP of AWS, who stopped by for a quick chat with me on Wednesday morning. He is in town for the finals of the fifth annual AWS Startup Contest, scheduled to be held on Nov. 10 in San Jose, Calif.

AWS is expecting a lot of growth from Berlin in particular and Germany in general, Selipsky said. AWS’s Selipsky points out that the company is making investments throughout Europe to address customer demand, but Berlin, the UK and Amsterdam are a few of the hotbeds of innovation we’re seeing. To address demand in Berlin specifically, AWS is adding various customer facing folks such as account managers and solutions architects. AWS is widely viewed as one of the main reasons we are seeing the blossoming of consumer web-focused startups. AWS is inching toward a revenue mark of a billion dollars.

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Who would be crazy enough to launch in a space that crowded?

Step forward EyeEm, a German startup that’s launching its photo app for iPhone and Android today. Have they got what it takes?

Well, founder Florian Meissner knows there’s a vast amount of competition out there. He admires most of them. “Instagram and Lightbox are great, and focus on content creation,” he says, “And as a result, the number of photos is skyrocketing.”

But he believes there is still a chance to emerge as a big name, by doing sharing right… and that means making it easier to do than anybody else.

“The winner of this game is the one who comes up with the simplest user experience and user interface,” he says. “When you fire up our app, you have two options: take a photo or see photos.”

True, EyeEm does let you take photos. This is fairly ordinary stuff, and includes the standard set of filters to dirty-up your image — whether it’s for getting all artsy or simply pretending you aren’t taking your pictures on a phone. The filters, though, are used in real time rather than applied in post-processing like most other apps, which Meissner likens to “watching through a kaleidoscope.” Still, though, it’s not a radical departure from the past, or any other service that falls into the Yet Another Mobile Photo App bucket.

But the real difference with EyeEm — and the place where it might have a slim chance of breaking out — is in sharing and seeing other people’s photos. This is done through what the company calls “vibes”: essentially an automated system that categorizes photographs by subject and location, allowing you to tap into the stream of photos from other people.

“We believe hashtags are pointless,” says Meissner. “No one should need to bother with them. We know who you are, where you are, when you’re taking the photograph. So we’ve developed an algorithm that gives you as accurate suggestions as possible.”

It’s not entirely accurate that they think tags are dead; they just think tags should require less human intervention. For an example: here’s a photo I took just now. In the best tradition of Internet photography, it’s of one of my cats (sorry it’s a bit dark, that’s the Great British Summer for you).

Once I’ve taken the photo, EyeEm automatically tags it with a few notes based on what it knows about me already. I can then add new tags, or delete existing ones if they’re not correct.

And these all feed into a very intuitive viewer that can show you photos related to you, and who took them. Here, I’ve swiped into the popular photos stream to take a look around.

Like the initial tags, the selection of photos available to you is also based on what EyeEm knows. “We recommend you photo albums based on your taste,” Meissner tells me. “Say, for example, you’re at a skateboarding competition in Madrid, we can suggest photographs of skateboarding from around the world, or show you pictures that are being taken elsewhere in Madrid right now.”

Overall, EyeEm does what it says: it’s all very, very easy to use and feels friendly. You can sign in through Facebook, and share your photos on pretty much all of the social networks, or send it to a select group of friends (a la Path, but in a more ad hoc fashion).

I really like the product. It’s pretty fun, with a sort of Instagram meets Tumblr feeling as you watch the photos of people around you. That will no doubt get bigger as the service gains users. And I think their philosophy is definitely on the right track. But doesn’t this all feel a bit late in the day? After all, how is anyone going to compete with the established players in this young but oversaturated market?

“I really admire the idea Color had,” says Meissner, of what is probably the biggest straightforward rival. “But it failed because it didn’t have accurate user interface… It’s not about having stupid amounts of money.”

Perhaps it’s not an entire surprise that EyeEm is coming late to the game, however; Meissner’s own conversion to the world of photo sharing apps came fairly recently. He says the realization that they were the future came after he moved to New York to work for a photography magazine — and on his first day in the city, his SLR was stolen. The only camera he had was an iPhone, and he suddenly discovered the huge communities of people sharing creative photos on Twitter and elsewhere. It’s a nice story, but reveals something about why EyeEm is late to arrive at the party.

Still, after building the product under their own steam, the company now has ambition. It’s raised a small round of money from Passion Capital and Wellington Partners, and is now pushing forward from its headquarters in Berlin. The app, which is free, is now available in the Android Market and on iTunes. Let’s see if it manages to stand out from the crowd.

“We believe we have the most accurate sharing system out there,” says Meissner. “And the key differentiation is that we go beyond the social graph.”

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