Wow - the first thing it does is to ask you to give your name and take a photo of yourself, then it shares it with random strangers without warning or asking your permission or giving a way to delete it.
probably more unpleasant for the people w/in 100 feet of me as I accidentally snapped a quick photo of my coin purse... (hopefully it doesn't get mistaken for an ariel photo of Iraq again)
That bugged me too. Turns out you can swipe to delete the photo in one of the views. The photo still shows up in some other views so I'm not entirely sure it did anything.
Agree. I found the UI to be generally unintuitive: lots of new icons that didn't immediately mean anything to me, the groups seem to create and disappear and not mean anything. I spent 5-10 minutes with it and didn't get it - not good for an iOS app.
According to one of the comments at TC, the domain cost $350K. It's cool to see newer (and well-funded) startups going for non-"web 2.0" names, e.g. Path, and now Color.
Exactly: provided that $350,000 was a decent price (which doesn't seem too unreasonable) and the fair value does not decline they now have a $350,000 intangible asset on their balance sheet that will not likely decline in value.
You can't say the same for a similar amount of put into high end office furniture, for example.
For one, a glorious failure taints the name. Not many (any?) ships are called "Titanic" anymore. I tried to find good examples of famous failures having their domains reused but wasn't able to.
webvan.com still exists as part of amazon.
pets.com points to petsmart.com
An untainted domain is an asset, which is why there are many squatted domains. A tainted domain is a liability.
I'm from one of those countries where 'color' is spelt 'colour' and I'm glad to see www.colour.com is owned by them also. I doubt it cost as much though.
It would also be interesting to see if searching for 'colour' in the respective app stores also brings you to 'color' so that they are truly interchangeable
It's important, but only because the idea that you can have an exclusively mobile content sharing product is not realistic (right now). There's an expectation among users that they should be able to access the service from whichever screen they are using at that moment.
Ironically in Color's case, they don't even ask you to login, so there's really no way to do that. Therefore, the $350K has gone towards a really expensive splash page.
Especially in cities, where sharing photos with the people within 100 feet of you can include anyone in your 20 story apartment building. Even if the rate of obscene photos is low, just one could ruin the user experience.
This thing's fuckin creepy. it uses the camera and mic to get my location as well. The tech sounds rad, but for privacy i wouldn't touch this thing with a 10 ft pole.
I think the techcrunch article (linked on one of the comments) mentioned that if they can't get a gps/wifi signal they look at lighting (camera) and sound (mic) to determine if people are in the same location. Neat use of the technology but - yes, a bit creepy.
I'm baffled and frustrated by the level of funding these guys are getting. Yes there are some interesting and smart people involved but the initial idea smacks of a solution to a non-existent problem.
I just tried the app and definitely didn't like it, it mandatory requires you to give away your location information otherwise you cannot use the app. That's not the way to go guys :S specially with the recent discussions about internet privacy...
For some reason that makes me feel uncomfortable, heres the thing: you can share picture with the friends you have around, let's say the people that's in the same room to get "different angles of the same event", if they're already with you, what's the point of disclosing my location with the app?
Dislike the name. Doesn't suggest anything relevant to what the service actually does. Worse, it actively suggests something else -- something to do with color, perhaps for artists or a color-involving game. I also have a personal pet peeve of people hi-jacking existing words and trying to give them an Nth meaning. If the new meaning is at least similar to one of the existing ones, fine, especially if just in a different context or field or medium. But if the new meaning has nothing to do with the original ones, it just worsens the language for everybody. And yeah, could be useful service. May make sense for some existing bigger company or social network to buy and integrate them. But $41m for this, and this stage, feels very Bubble-y to me.
That's ...err.. apples and oranges. Apple got its name before there was a web, before search engines. Plus, Apple isn't a term that is used frequently when working with computers. What do apples and computers have in common? Nothing.
Color is too generic a term and it's already used in computer lingo. This company might be able to make Color their brand, they might be able to one day own it like Apple owns apple, but it will take years if not decades.
I'm interested in the exploits that may target this. First thing I would want to do is create a way to spoof my location in real-time and see what's going on in that place right then.
Then I would want to send everyone in that area a picture of goatse.
If you see some photos of amused british people in their living room representing themselves as having been taken deep in the most self-regarding of san francisco's fashionable hangouts, that was us.
I would have thought they would have included a link to the app in the android marketplace on the home page. I clicked it and it just takes you to the android marketplace home. So far no luck finding on Android...
I thought the app had nothing to do with photos initially.
The only reason I read about it was that they were "given more money than Google". I wonder if that can be used as a marketing strategy. Take enough money to get yourself in the headlines and simply return it after you get it. I'm sure its illegal and it's surely unethical, but it might work.
