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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>That said, I probably would have taken a $200 mil payoff for an <i>idea</i> for an <i>iPhone app</i>.
For me, the brilliant idea behind Color, (which they did absolutely not realize in their app), is the idea of an elastic social network.<p>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 <i>currently</i> care about the person and the kind of content...
i feel like HN is fascinated by but has relatively little understanding of how deals work.<p>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 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 <i>so beautifully simple yet obvious yet useful</i>!<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.
A lot of the comments below are criticizing "irrational investors" that were "duped" or the product as "vaporware."<p>This is not the case. Color had a very talented team attempting to attack multiple technically challenging problems, that remain unsolved today.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
In Groupon's case ($6 bn offer), Twitter's case ($10 bn offer) and now Color, I feel as if Google got <i>lucky</i> 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.
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.<p>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.
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
(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: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2790700" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2790700</a>)
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.
Wouldn't Color be the worst copyright/privacy infringer ever created unless they setup some system to blackout certain areas? Sounds like a nightmare.<p>What happens when Tool and Madonna don't want photos at their venue?<p><a href="http://asmp.org/tutorials/property-and-model-releases.html" rel="nofollow">http://asmp.org/tutorials/property-and-model-releases.html</a>
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.<p>I am yet to use Color with another person in the same room.<p>I think Google is after their sound technology.
as an outsider, i don't understand the allure behind color at all.<p>elastic social network? is this something a 16 year really thinks when using facebook? oh i wish it was more elastic? sounds like nerdvana.<p>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?<p>honestly, not all ideas by talented and bright people are good. just look at asana, yet another project tool.
$200 million. For the domain!<p>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.
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?
$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)
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.<p>Look at Google Ventures and you might see some questional investments as well: <a href="http://www.googleventures.com/portfolio.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.googleventures.com/portfolio.html</a>
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.