The Original Hyperlapse App Is Cashing In On Instagram's New, Identically Named Hyperlapse App

It was only last week that Instagram released Hyperlapse, the new app that alleviates one of photography's oldest problems - a shaky camera and, subsequently, a blurry image - to let users easily take long timelapse videos.

But through The Daily Dot, Business Insider has learned that Instagram was not the first company to market an app with a timelapse features called "Hyperlapse." That honor belongs to this app called Hyperlapse, which was launched in August last year.

The original Hyperlapse pulls visual data from Google's Street View and melds it into a timelapse video that lets you see what it's like to travel along a chosen route. Instagram's Hyperlapse, by contrast, lets users film a long series of still photos and compiles them together into a timelapse video.

Although the products share the same name, the inspiration for the Instagram's Hyperlapse came from the industry term 'hyperlapse', coined by the American filmmaker Dan Ekert. It is defined by Wikipedia as: "a video post-production technique that improves the appearance of a moving shot by reducing the jitter that results from camera movement during exposure. It is useful for processing a time accelerated tracking shot or other timelapse sequences."

Although Instagram's Hyperlapse topped the app store charts, its predecessor didn't do too badly either. In response to the Instagram app of the same name coming out, the creators of the original Hyperlapse started charging 99 cents for their app, which was previously available for free.

This plan led to more than 2,000 app buyers apparently paying for the wrong Hyperlapse, and the original makers making a tidy sum of money ($1,980 for one day's "work").

The maker of original hyperlapse also had time to thank Instagram on the product's company website. It read (sic): "i got an E-mail from a journalist from the San Fransico Cronicle. She wanted to interview me because she noticed Instagram had just released an App with the same name! Well, almost, they call it Hyperlapse by Instagram."

"That explains a lot. A lot of users accidentally downloaded our App instead of the Instagram App. To prevent users from downloading the wrong App, we increased the price to US $ 0.99."

"One day later i had 45.000 free downloads and 2000 paid ones "