Hipster App Gives Digital Postcards a Spot on the Map

Remember Color, the strange app that promised to help people share photos around locations? It was kind of a cool idea, though the much-maligned company has moved on to the even wackier prospect of sharing real-time silent videos through Facebook.

But that doesn’t mean that Color’s first premise was bad; perhaps it just needed tweaking. Today comes another such app, Hipster, which helps users post geo-tagged digital picture postcards from their iPhones.

Hipster says it will help people explore a place by glancing through other people’s pictures taken nearby and topped with pretty photo filters and frames.

Hipster is twee and design-y and a bit confusing to get the hang of. So far, the mobile feed of “wish you were here” photos feels very similar to Instagram.

What’s different is that Hipster is less about people and more about places, said CEO Doug Ludlow today. All Hipster content is public by default, so each upload is contributing to a network-wide repository of pictures from a location.

San Francisco-based Hipster, which has worked to cultivate hype around what it’s doing, employs six people and has raised $1 million in funding from investors including Google Ventures, Lightbank, Mitch Kapor, 500 Startups and Charles River Ventures.