BREAKFAST / INSTAPRINT

For those of you unfamiliar with the free to download Instagram iPhone app, here's a quick recap...

The easiest way to think of Instagram is as the hybrid love-child of your existing Hipstamatic, Flickr and Twitter apps. Users can snap pictures and choose from a selection of filters to give their photos a suitably grainy/bleached/retro look. There is then the option to upload the pics directly to Facebook, Twitter or even use an individual photo to check into Foursquare.

What sets Instagram apart from other picture sharing apps, is that it has its own mini social platform built-in, meaning that users can form a network of Instagram-wielding buddies, liking and commenting on their snaps. The app was downloaded over 100,000 times in just one week following its October 2010 launch; it then took just three months to top 1 million users and little more than one month after that to crack 2 million. As Fast Company pointed out at the time, this represented faster growth than Foursquare, Twitter AND Facebook...

So what to do with an already slick, seamless and successful app? Cue the clever chaps at BREAKFAST NYC who will today be wowing the crowds at the SXSW interactive arts festival in Austin, Texas, with their Instaprint beta technology. These wall-mounted pods are programmed to collect any Instagram pictures which are geo-tagged at a specific location or posted to Twitter using a relevant hash tag (for example, #SXSW). The unit will then automatically print out each photo - comments and all - using a new ink-less printing technology called Zink, which draws colour from the paper in much the same way as Polaroid prints.

During SXSW, Instaprint will be featured at The Good Capitalist Party (6PM on 3/12 at Union Park, 612 W 6th St) and BeerCamp (8PM on 3/13 at Emo's, 603 Red River St), among many others. For a full list of events that will feature Instaprint, visit Instaprint.me

For those of you (who like us London-based Contagious folk currently cursing our US-based colleagues) unable to get to SXSW, there is still the option to snap a pic on Instagram and tag it using '#instaprint'. By visiting Instaprint.me, you can then watch a live webcam feed of your picture being printed out at the BREAKFAST HQ.

This website will also capture, in real-time, each picture being printed by an Instaprint before storing them in a historic catalogue containing every image captured at each Instaprint event.