China's Instagram and Other Tech Startups Look West

Entrepreneurs are adding new features and looking West
Edmond Lococo
Xu says PaPa will have 200 million users in three years Photograph by Ka Xiaoxi for Bloomberg Businessweek

Instagram, the photo-sharing app bought by Facebook last year, offers special effects that can give pictures a weathered black-and-white cast or retro tints. In Beijing, Xu Chaojun’s PaPa app does that, too. But it also lets users add voice messages that can sound like robots or cats. PaPa notched 10 million downloads in five months from iPhone and Android users; the company released an English-language version, Wave, on iTunes on March 10.

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