I might be the only person in the universe who thinks Color is a fantastic idea, but not because it's trying to be an uber-cool new social network.
Location-based photo sharing is an incredible idea. When I'm at an event -- say, a concert -- there are hundreds of people around me taking lots of different pictures. I want those pictures, but I don't know any of those people. Imagine going to a venue, not bringing a camera, but still coming away with awesome, memorable photos of the band, from people that have nice equipment and know how to take photographs.
I'm not sure it justifies the huge valuation, but I can easily see why this product had the potential to be a huge player in the photo-sharing space. I feel like the press from their first round caused such an unnecessary uproar around their brand that coming back and producing a humble, useful app was nearly impossible.
That said, I probably would have taken a $200 mil payoff for an idea for an iPhone app.
Whether there's good money in solving this sort of problem is another question -- but sorting through shared photos at events is a surprisingly hard problem, as I learned recently.
I attended Anime Expo 2011 in costume. Over the course of the two days I was there, I probably had at least 100 people stop me for photos -- not unexpected with thousands of people walking around carrying cameras. I attended a photo shoot and the whole deal: surely it'd be easy to find at least one of these pictures later, right?
After the event, some friends were curious and wanted to see a photo of me. So I just search through the albums uploaded to Flickr and...
... well, it took days after the event for anyone I knew to find a single photo that even had me in the frame. The volume of uploaded photos was so high that you'd probably have to search for hours to find anything in particular. Nothing was tagged. Want to show your friend a really cool cosplay you saw? Unless you took a picture of it yourself, with your own camera, the odds of being able to find it are practically zero, even if hundreds of people took pictures of it.
Now I understand the need of so many people to bring cameras with them: it's not necessarily that they need to have their own personal pictures of the things they liked. It's that if they don't take them, they'll never be able to find anyone else's pictures either. We're overwhelmed by such a sheer volume of photos and left unable to find what we want.
The problem you've described is very solvable. Photos contain the time they were taking and, increasingly, the location they were taken. If you're looking for photos of something you know you saw, a reasonably accurate guess of time and location should narrow the choices to a manageable number.
A two day period is more difficult, but sorting photos by popularity will let people find most of what they're looking for. Photos of themselves are harder, but the facial recognition technology to do so exists as long as you're not in too elaborate of a costume.
I've almost convinced myself to work on this at this point. I hate taking pictures, but I love looking at pictures of memories I have. I don't think I'm alone.
This is true for what it's worth (and you acknowledge that there may not be 'good money' in solving this problem).
If you _really_ wanted a picture of yourself from the expo, you'd have gotten someone to take a photo of you. So your interest (given that it comes from after the fact friend-curiosity) is right at that marginal level.
If you just wanted some non-specific photos of the expo without any particular goal in mind, that's already easily done, as you saw.
So what you're looking at here is people with specific goals in analyzing a photo stream but who didn't, for one reason or another, turn up and take photos to meet these goals. I don't know if you can make any kind of money - good or otherwise - from providing a service to such a marginal set of customers.
The exception might be law enforcement - find some better photos of the guy who followed a woman into a bathroom at exactly 12:42, or the person who grabbed someone's purse, etc.
Sounds like a good case for NFC. Put RFIDs in the attendee badges, and a sufficiently-advanced camera app could auto-tag those people as the picture is taken.
Does that sort of technology work directionally? Typically the place was so crowded that you'd often have 40 other people within 15 feet when taking a photo, so it'd have to identify exactly the people in front of the camera, and not to your sides or behind you.
GP conflated RFID and NFC a bit, at least their colloquially accepted meanings. What we normally call 'NFC' has a range of <20cm, often <<20cm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication). This is what also makes NFC more suitable for mobile payments than RFID.
Hmm; true. Maybe just passes with large, simple QR codes on the front of them, then? Then the device taking the picture wouldn't even have to decode them just-in-time; the data would be encapsulated in the picture itself.
RFID refers to a family of technologies that operate over a variety of frequencies and given by the ISO standards. Specifically, 134kHz, 13.56MHz, ~915MHz, and 2.4GHz. The 13.56MHz standardized frequency for RFID is the same as that for NFC. The RFID ISO standards that specify the use of 13.56MHz are ISO 14443 and ISO 15693. NFC is specified in 2 ISO standards, but the more relevant to the discussion is ISO 18092 and it is derived from ISO 14443. So, there is some interoperability between ISO 14443 and ISO 18092, and therefore there is good reason to "conflate" NFC and RFID.
EDIT: I should cleanup and redact the Product Requirements Document I wrote 5 years ago for a transceiver board we built that could talk ISO 14443 and ISO 18092 (as well as ISO 15693) using a single transceiver ASIC and antenna tuned for 13.56MHz.
Also I should add, you might want to take pictures of yourself or your friends in the foreground. That's what personalizes a photo for MOST people. imho.
I thought of that as well, but surprisingly, I only got about half a dozen requests to take pictures with people out of the ~hundred total. Going by what I saw of other people being photographed, this was probably typical.
I love going to gigs, but.. I prefer to remember my experience of what happened, which is not something that can be caught on camera.
(note 1; I know I'm not the target audience for any social network)
(note 2; I really dislike the fact that the audiences to gigs are just filled with people holding up their mobile. Instead of trying to get a pic to put on FB, why don't you try enjoy actually being there?!)
Second that. Be present. Live in the moment. A few choice photos are fine, but don't let the need to document and fb-brag consume your life. Just live it.
I think a lot of the commentators are saying (and this my view too) that the concept is brilliant - but the execution was terrible and the valuation way too overblown.
After all the fanfare... nothing seems to have come of them, at least not at the level they seemed to promise.
This seems a pure tactical team move - I mean they can obviously do some decent coding :) and have a good product idea, plus they appear to be ace at marketing. That's the sort of company you want to be acquiring; especially if you can pivot the (not-very-good) product and steal the brand new market.
"When I'm at an event -- say, a concert -- there are hundreds of people around me taking lots of different pictures."
You're absolutely correct. They just aren't using Color, and that's the problem. Every single person I've talked to has said that Color is a great idea, _hypothetically_. In reality, Color fails on the most basic of user experience, it shows absolutely no content when it starts up, ever, and there's no sort of reward for even taking a photo with Color-- you don't get anything out of the experience.
I get the idea that the product guys at Color sat down and thought, "okay, if everyone who has an iPhone or Android used our app instead of the default camera app, and everyone at a concert stood within 150 feet of each other (don't laugh, that's the range of Color), and all took photos within a short amount of time, they'd be in a great social network."
I'll leave it to the reader to determine how absurd that sounds. The constraints on the application at startup basically doomed it.
Take a look at Foursquare as a counterpoint. Early adopters didn't get to see anyone else checking in, they likely didn't have any friends also checking in, there weren't any photos, and there were very few non-NYC badges. But goddamn, you could be the mayor of _everywhere_. The functionality of Foursquare still works even when there's only _one_ person using it. The functionality of Color completely fails unless there are groups of people in very close proximity all using it at the same time.
* They just aren't using Color, and that's the problem. *
Then the problem is you, buddy. Self-organization and organic growth doesn't just "happen." It's the aggregation of many individuals TAKING individual ACTION. So it starts with you.
The next time you go to a show, get your ten friends to download the app, and share the photos with each other. And make a couple new friends getting them to download it as well (you talk to people at shows right? If you aren't social why do you care about social apps?). Then if it's a good experience, when they go to shows some of them will tell their friends to do the same. That's how it starts. You don't just sit around on the HN comments waiting for it to blow up big.
Oh be quiet, secret Color employee. The problem is not with him. He's talking from a business standpoint about the friction for the average user. That's a REAL problem, and it's not his fault for lacking enthusiasm to use it. Besides he got nothing to lose.. it's not like it's a dealbreaker for his life.. Unfortunately, Color has a lot more at stake when they can't make users love their product. The good life down the drain...
I agree to an extent, its not the idea of capturing a location as so much a collective at a specific moment in time. Example: Yelp/Gowalla collect pictures of food and venues and really it doesn't matter so much when they were taken. Color is cashing in on capturing moments in time that are relevant to a group of related or unrelated people, but the real question is how often is this relevant and even for times that are relevant, as a fleeting moment, will 90% of the pictures provided even matter to a user. I can tell you honestly I get bored after looking at the first few pictures of random people I care nothing about.
The time axis on this is the most interesting part, but as you point out the reality is for most things people don't care. On the other hand, I can't wait until Google releases their timeline-based photos on top of Google streetview. It will be a browsable history of earth, geolocated.
There is a startup out of Raleigh, NC that's trying to solve this exact problem.
deja Mi has built an iPhone app that allows you to capture media and upload it to a collection of media assigned to the specific venue or event you're attending. You can hear the spiel straight from the horse's mouth here: http://www.mycarolinatoday.com/2011/07/deja-mi/
On a side note, for those local to the Triangle, NC there's going to be free concerts throughout the weekend in downtown Raleigh to kick off the release of their app. The lineup of musicians is very impressive, go check it out if you're able. More details: http://dejami.com/dejafest
But why would those people with nice equipment who take great photos want to give the photos to you, or anyone for that matter. They might be willing to share the photos but am not sure how that really helps. Will they allow you to share the photos to your circle.. so on and so forth.
I'm solving this with my new iPhone app called Crowd (still in private beta), here's a sample of the web viewing portal http://thecrowdapp.com/5Qp6CHy if anyone wants to get a beta invite just email. jmm.seasons@gmail.com
For me, the brilliant idea behind Color, (which they did absolutely not realize in their app), is the idea of an elastic social network.
In real like, friendship isn't binary. It's a scale of how close we are, what we talk about, what we share in common, etc. If you came up with a social network that would figure out who your friends are based on how often you talked, hung out, what you talked about etc., I'd call you a genius. A social network where there's no awkward friend requests to accept or reject. A social network that shows me feed items based on how much I currently care about the person and the kind of content...
Absolutely, I think this is exactly the BIG idea that the VCs saw that others didn't really get. I would add that I don't even think it's about "friends" in your elastic social network, it is that the social network exists based on the context (where you are, who you're with, what you're doing) regardless of whether the other person knows/friends you or not. There is a shared thread that is tied together by a shared experience and Color was trying to capture that.
i feel like HN is fascinated by but has relatively little understanding of how deals work.
companies don't just show up on your doorstep with an acquisition offer and a giant check. many times the deals are staged and dependent on progress. consider google's acquisition of dMarc, the talked about price, and the actual price.
I think HN is much better than TechCrunch/Mashable/etc in that regard. The big tech blogs seem to have a vested interest in promoting the idea of huge acquisitions. People here seem genuinely interested in the details and the detailed outcomes.
We use the the article as the basis for the debate here. Sometimes that debate stays on topic, sometimes it does not. For the sake of timeliness we mostly have to assume the article is accurate, however sometimes the debate itself is regarding the authenticity of the publisher, author or sources (or lack thereof). The HN system is quite healthy IMHO
Google is addicted to social because it seems to be the only game in town that can bring in magnitude times more people than a typical product could (e.g. Basecamp)
Color was founded with this power-team of folks that had proven records so when the Hyposaurus came stumbling down the block and Google saw it coming with the potential to snatch up an amazing team with the potential to pull in millions of more users into the Google ecosystem and then direct them not just towards ads, but all their other offerings... it looked like it had every indicator that it would fly.
Unfortunately it looks like some air got let out of the tires and things slowed down considerably for them.
I don't know that I have all the faith in Color staying around, but Path I believe has staying power. They have a really cohesive/directed vision and purpose that they are executing really well.
They may not launch with a billion new accounts a minute, but I think there is so much solid product/story there that once they pass that event horizon, they'll have people pouring into them.
Sort of like a Tumblr or Posterous growth curve -- really focused, really solid products so once people start taking notice, everyone likes what they see.
Just my 2 cents and I used to eat a lot of paint as a kid... so take this all with lots of salt.
First of all take it with a grain of salt. That said, there are at least a couple of ways to look at it:
1) There are reports that Google offered some of its product managers tens of millions of dollars to keep them from joining Twitter. If that's how they're valuing talent, then $200M is in the ballpark for Color's "superstar team" combined with some very interesting IP,
2) Smart investors described Color's technology as breakthrough and potentially "the next Google". Even accounting for some hyperbole, suppose that it really is groundbreaking for reasons that us mere mortals can't fully grok. In that case, adding it to Google's arsenal and combining it with all their other assets (and proven engineering and operations strength) could be a multi-billion-dollar win and a big addition to Google+. Or not, as the case may be; but making a risk/reward tradeoff, it could have looked attractive.
You do live in a different universe if you think there are hidden patterns of rational thinking behind everything that looks dumb on the surface. There are often hidden patterns of selfishness and incentives, sure, and that's probably true in this case (if the acquisition went through and didn't pay out, who would get fired for it?).
And then sometimes stupid is just stupid. This is Earth.
Remember, Color's real mission was not photo-sharing, but data-mining. Google would pay dearly for a new, innovative way of collecting types of data that they don't have yet.
Anyone can do data mining if they have huge traction. It's getting huge traction that's the problem. I can do data mining if I sold a micro-chip that tracked ppl's movements 24/7.
These deals often faul through at the last minute. Much of the time, the company making the offer just wants to get a look 'under the hood' of a potential competitor.
Think of all the companies google has made these offers to and the deal didn't happen. Strategy at this level is kind of like macroeconomics, it just doesn't map to what makes sense on face value.
It reminds me of the Measure Map acquisition. Launch a new product, then acquire a talented team that worked on something similar. It worked pretty well I believe for Google Analytics.
There isn't rational thinking behind this. There's a lot of money and a growing fear of becoming irrelevant.
The people running a company like Google don't necessarily have wisdom you don't - see Microsoft, Yahoo! or (especially after dismantling Google Labs) AOL.
This was way before Google+ took off. Likely, the Color team would have been an integral part of their social strategy. With that in mind, a $200M offer isn't unreasonable.
I couldn't disagree more. Look at how many people Color's already gone through. Look at how atrocious their apps were (that they were pulled and still are). The only thing they have going for them is the "photos-after-the-fact" experience that others have detailed here. (Go to a concert, come back and see hundreds of photos of the band, maybe even you, etc, without even doing anything)
I think that Color is an incredible idea for an application, and when I read their pitch I wanted to bang my head on the desk for not coming up with that concept because it is so beautifully simple yet obvious yet useful!
Isn't it obvious that if you are at an event, say, a birthday party, you'd want to see what photographs your friends are taking as they take them? What about at a sports game or concert, can you imagine how amazing that'd be?
Raising $41M, selling for $200M, all irrelevant versus the grand scheme of this idea. I worry that they have this awesome idea, and are poor at actually building the product, and this makes me sad because I really want someone to do it right.
I really do not understand the hate at Color, they have made mis-steps, but their concept is actually a good idea - compared to a lot of stuff that Hacker News thinks is dumb.
Isn't it obvious that if you are at an event, say, a birthday party, you'd want to see what photographs your friends are taking as they take them? What about at a sports game or concert[...]?
For most people, at least, it's not, because why would you be looking at your phone rather than the event that's actually going on, at full scale, around you?
It would perhaps be good to see the photos others took of the event afterwards, when reminiscing.
A lot of the comments below are criticizing "irrational investors" that were "duped" or the product as "vaporware."
This is not the case. Color had a very talented team attempting to attack multiple technically challenging problems, that remain unsolved today.
The first is the discovery of your implicit social network, as defined by your virtual and real-world interactions with others. Facebook currently uses this to determine what information is shown in your News Feed and make friend recommendations, but is not using it to its potential. Google Buzz tried to do this directly via your emails and flopped partly since it did not account for the privacy implications. The ability to transform people's natural interactions into strong recommendations of what they should pay attention to and who should meet each other is still an open problem.
The second is the mapping of real-world events (initially defined by the pictures and people) onto the virtual world. There is potentially a lot of value, both to participants and outsiders, to say (1) who came to real world events, (2) how they interacted, and (3) what happened, while properly dealing with the corresponding ethical implications.
For both of these to work, Color needed a viral social product to gain data and users. They failed on product/market side, especially because they did not have enough focus on "what is the experience we want our users to have the first time they launch the application?" The opportunity remains open, for Color to redeem itself, for the big players to improve their products, or for a new startup to come along and show the world how it's done.
For both of these to work, Color needed a viral social product to gain data and users.
I don't disagree with your analysis, but surely one surefire way to gain social network data is to be bought by someone who has the data already. Google has a pretty good idea who a gmail user's social network is, as evidenced by the Google Plus suggestions.
In Groupon's case ($6 bn offer), Twitter's case ($10 bn offer) and now Color, I feel as if Google got lucky those companies didn't want to sell, because it seems they would've been a huge waste of money. Google seems to be pretty happy about over-spending on these companies, but is extremely cautious about over-spending for patents that could save Android in the long term.
I guess that with the patent issue, Google evaluated the fact that it will be cheaper to fight them, using lobbying, and licensing, than to pay that much for them.
Nobody pays $200MM for nothing. It's exceedingly hard to believe google valued a small pre-funding startup at over low eight figures. While most of the time I look at tech crunch leaks and believe they're real albeit spin infused, this just doesn't pass the wtf test. Arrington has appeared to have a grudge against color in the past based on the tone of the TC coverage. I'm inclined to believe this is entirely made up.
This is why you don't want to get your news and journalism from the people who are also financing deals. Now I'm not sure when to trust them at all.
-->"It's exceedingly hard to believe google valued a small pre-funding startup at over low eight figures."
But Sequoia did when they made the $40mm investment. That's what's so odd about it.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd chalk it up to 2 groups with deep, deep pockets making a long shot bet because they can.
Once Sequoia invested, the acquisition was derisked for someone like Google. Then Google just needed to offer a price of some multiple of the investment ("How about 5x? Not bad for 6 months!"). Conversely, Sequoia might have hoped for a flip knowing Google was so aggressive for social startups at the time and invested accordingly. As far as I can tell, the Color leadership were blinded by their own genius and these early "signals" of success and they screwed up their acquisition, launch, and thus far all meaningful execution.
Something must be there in their product that everyone is willing to pay top dollar. And these are all smart people who are ready to pay btw, not any average joe investor
There are always 3 things: idea, team and execution.
Color had a genuinely interesting idea: make a social network via implicit information rather than deciding whether or not the a person is a "friend".
I can see this being of particular interest to Google as they built themselves on a similar premise: ranking web searches via implicit data (links, etc.) rather than a hand built index.
So, with an interesting idea and a strong team they secured both acquisition interest and a huge funding round. The idea being that they would release a series of applications and products that would deliver on the promise of implicit social network creation.
Then their PR got ahead of them (no doubt purchased with a chunk of the $41 mil) and expectations got built to a level that could never be delivered on with the first iteration of their first product - an iPhone photo app.
So, now there is a big backlash as people feel "duped" by the gap between the hype and the product and it is crushing the company.
Investors act irrationally all the time and it doesn't help when their coffers are so overfull with other people's money that $40 million becomes chump change and not even noticeable in the ledger.
I suspect there might be some pretty heavy use of computer vision as related to those images -- perhaps to pick out brand preference or otherwise personal/private information that could be rolled up/anonymized such that marketers would buy in aggregate.
If the product was released differently, it very likely could have been successful. It seems to me that once they got all that VC funding, they were desperate to release something to prove their worth. But, since their product depends on tons of people all using it in a geographically tight area, it crashed and burned. I think had they started releasing at events (ala twitter @ sxsw), they could have had some success.
That sounds like a great co-branding opportunity. Color could also sell/host conference services such as preloading conference-related photos/ads or providing additional Color photographers to "augment" the conference's Color photos when the app's adoption is still low.
I feel like their target market should not have been the US but rather Europe or Japan. Both much higher population densities where location/presence based technology does much better (see 3DS Street pass feature).
I too feel like there something there people think has value but the average person doesn't see. But maybe there is nothing and this is really as irrational as it looks.
(Sorry-- Off-topic) HN Powers That Be: How did this get submitted twice? The URL is the same as far as I can tell... except a trailing slash? (see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2790700)
i keep reading in the press that color had a "superstar" team and this was a main driver of the massive funding. Yet, I've never seen an explanation - why are (were?) these guys generally considered "superstars" ?
Did Google dupe Sequoia and other VCs into thinking that Color was actually worth investing $40million dollar into even though eventually when they launched it turned out to be vaporware?
If the average employee of Color didn't already know this... wow, talk about an upsetting topic. Imagine doing the math on your options, seeing that you could have made a killing, then thinking about how the founders said 'no' to the deal, then thinking about how some of the guys who made that choice jumped ship... it all would make for some bad morale.
Color's service would be a killer feature for Google+. Color is an excellent idea assuming that there are users who are willing to post pictures and share location data. Unfortunately for Color, it will be a long hard road to get these users. Google, on the other hand, already has a ton of users, the beginning of a social network, and a really strong presence in the phone market. If Color-like functionality was built into Android, Google would find themselves with a very valuable service right from the get-go. A lot of the hard work is behind them.
Color's elastic network would be if only here were more people in it. I think they suffer with a massive chicken and egg problem. I hope they figure things out.
I am yet to use Color with another person in the same room.
as an outsider, i don't understand the allure behind color at all.
elastic social network? is this something a 16 year really thinks when using facebook? oh i wish it was more elastic? sounds like nerdvana.
proximity photo sharing? why would i want to do that? i am careful about which pics i share with the world. they transmit my persona, so i don't share shots that suck. or maybe i am taking pics no one else is supposed to look at - as in private. why would you want to look at my kids, perv?
honestly, not all ideas by talented and bright people are good. just look at asana, yet another project tool.
At the rate the value of that domain was rocketing, seems like a decent investment at the time. Too bad no one's going to want to be associated with it after what team Color did to itself.
$200 million for a domain as an investment? Only one domain has ever sold for more than $10 million. You get below the $1 million range before you're even out of the top hundred. Domains are not as valuable as people think they are, and the rules change entirely once the new TLD system hits.
For the record: Color.com was purchased for $350,000
Is this just pure greed? Did Color think they had a billion dollar idea? From my understanding they're a public photo album. What revenue source did they target?
The same revenue source all "social" sites target: You.
Okay, maybe not "YOU" you, but the end user. A public photo album where you provide who you are (via registration) and WHERE you are? Real-time targeted ads would be just the tip of the iceberg!
$200 million for a start up excluding hard patents is almost always a clear sale. Yeah, it's a good idea but not by any means something completely revolutionizing.
Remember Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo for $45 billion back in 2008? It is worth about $18 billion now (less, actually, especially if alipay goes badly)
Well, an acquisition would have to be for a premium of Yahoo's publicly-traded market capitalization, so it's tough to say how much they "lost" by scuttling the deal.
And there's always the counterexample of Larry + Sergey wanting to sell to Yahoo back in the day for $1mm, and Mark Zuckerberg turning down $1b from Yahoo later. (I sense a theme here...)
The idea was good, it was just the execution that was bad. The app itself was really buggy and the proximity-limit for near photoes was way too limited. Even in tech centers like SF it was empty.
http://cinch.fm/scobleizer/194769
Maybe this just looked like a good idea to Google at the time. Sometimes you have to make acquisitions to look progressive to your shareholders. Now, I'm betting they're glad they didn't make this purchase.
I agree with most here that it's a good idea, but it's been out for months, so maybe this idea was another dime in a dozen. I guess Google has lots of cash to spare on a domain name and a hype machine.
Location-based photo sharing is an incredible idea. When I'm at an event -- say, a concert -- there are hundreds of people around me taking lots of different pictures. I want those pictures, but I don't know any of those people. Imagine going to a venue, not bringing a camera, but still coming away with awesome, memorable photos of the band, from people that have nice equipment and know how to take photographs.
I'm not sure it justifies the huge valuation, but I can easily see why this product had the potential to be a huge player in the photo-sharing space. I feel like the press from their first round caused such an unnecessary uproar around their brand that coming back and producing a humble, useful app was nearly impossible.
That said, I probably would have taken a $200 mil payoff for an idea for an iPhone app.