I am very excited to talk about our new updates for 360 today ..
Trip Mode
A lot of our users use 360 to capture key moments and places during a trip or outing . The most important things you want to conserve when you are travelling are battery life and data usage. Keeping this in mind we are adding a free upgrade called the Trip Mode. By enabling this free upgrade you can decrease battery usage by our app by 50% and data usage by 90%. So what is this magic that is Trip Mode well read on ..
Tumblr Integration
We love Tumblr and so do a lot of our users, this has been one of the most requested integration and when early this year tumblr announced that they were supporting panoramas on Tumblr blogs we had to get this integration done. We do realize its been a while to get this done but it is here now and we look forward to working with Tumblr to create better experiences for our users.
New Designer extraordinaire
You will see a lot of elements look better and finally some elegance in our messaging. All this thnks to Mahesh Haridevan who joined our team this month and has already imprinted his style on our product with the revamped awesome product tour.
I am sure most of you must have seen the feature image we added on top of the streams in our last update, we have been adding different themes weekly and hope to continue doing this twice every week
This Friday we are featuring #beach on 360. So go ahead and check out some of the beautiful #beach panoramas on our app taken by some of our awesome users. We look forward to some more #beach panoramas this weekend. If you missed our post on some of the top 10 panoramas of beaches on 360 check it out here..
We will be looking for beautiful panoramas to feature on our blog .. so get snappy 
PRO tip: Add the hashtag #beach in the title of the panorama so that we can find them
The world of panoramas, Android and consumer internet has changed a LOT since we launched our first version of 360 in Aug 2011. Apple launched an inbuilt panorama capture, we raised our seed round and Instagram sold for a billion$’s.
When we built 360, we saw panoramas as the best possible way to showcase a place, we bet on the fact that smartphones were the best way to create and share these immersive experiences and 360 was going to be the best app to do it. Today we support the most number of devices and the fastest growing social network for panoramas.
We focused a lot of our time since launch in improving our stitching and making it faster, better and compatible with every possible device. Our user base and community started growing and got more and more active, it reached a point sometime late july 2012 where we had to redesign our entire product to foster the community that we wanted to build.
Recently Google announced an inbuilt panorama feature in Android that integrates with Google maps. This means that in the next 6-8 months ~85% of all smartphones will have the ability to capture panoramas and this means billions of panoramas being shared. This means that the bet we took in late 2011 has come to fruition and with these new changes we hope to become the one place where people share ”immersive experiences” .
Today we are happy to announce that our new UI is alive and kicking. A lot has changed since our last app. Everything has changed and we soft-launched a week back and all our metrics in-terms of engagement have already doubled.
So what has changed in 360 ? EVERYTHING
Below I have mentioned some of the main new features we have added along with the new UI elements.
Stitch Later
One of the biggest drawback of panorama apps is that they are a massive battery sink the stitching process for any app even panorama apps that come with the camera let you capture a max of 3-4 panoramas leaving your battery down to 50%.This is why we introduced the new Stitch later feature that lets you postpone the stitching part to when you are back home from your trip so that you are not left hanging with no power in your phone because you took too many panoramas. This is also our first foray into in-app purchases. We provide this functionality for 1$.
Streams: (old v/s new)
Panorama capture: (old v/s new)
User profiles: (old v/s new)
Panorama viewing: (old v/s new)
We have also introduced the follow feature, it works very similar to the follow feature in Twitter and Instagram. This was one of the most asked for feature and since we have implemented it we have had thousands of users following each other curating the panoramas they see.
Search is going to be the most important part of our product in the coming years and we introduced a very simple yet effective way to search through our bast database of hundreds of thousands of panoramas, panoramas can be searched based on location or keyword. This is one of our first steps to why we call our company TeliportME
We have completely changed our capture process introducing a nice and easy way to capture HD panoramas. Our previous sweeping capture process while extremely intuitive and easy to use was not able to capture HD panoramas. Now with this new capture we are able to offer users the highest resolution of panoramas their phone can possibly capture.
We are really excited about these changes, and is the first time this has been introduced in the world of panoramas.