Bill Nguyen demo'd Color to and within a day had $25M commited from Sequoia | Hacker News Reader

Bill Nguyen demo'd Color to and within a day had $25M commited from Sequoia

forbes.com

30 pointspclark32 comments

I don't buy this whole "we use the lighting and audio sensors to detect where you are!" Lighting is so variable and there are no APIs to access said things (like exposure) on IOS devices in any efficient way anyway. I haven't done any true tests but when I fired up the app I got Color HQ which is a good 8 blocks away - not 100ft.

That being said, Bill Nguyen used to work with Steve Jobs so there's probably a fairly high likelihood that if there is secret API's and tighter integration with IOS than normally allowed.

Edit: someone should put a spectrum analyzer near the speakers of an iPhone that's running Color to see if they're doing any sonic stuff like Shopkick. I would but I don't have time at the moment...

no kidding -- what about the built in gps?

Built in GPS gets +/- 40 meters in an urban canyon like SF (i.e. worst case). I think for all intents and purposes GPS will get you 97% there for 3% of the effort as any of these other methods (which probably aren't implemented anyway).

In the real world (with signal problems, battery problems, and a skyhook database with inevitable errors) GPS is unfortunately not quite that good. I really wish it was though!

i'm basing my numbers based on my experience when I was at yelp - which always presumed a real GPS signal and not using any skyhook (or at least not only using skyhook).

huh? So they have the lighting profiles of every public and private space indexed?

No, they (supposedly) use lighting and sound to see if two phones running Color at the same time in the same approximate location are likely actually in the same place.

For example, we could have the same GPS location while being on different floors of a building.

Yeah my first thought was it was more of sound level and light level thing. So if you're somewhere dark and loud you're probably not in the same place as someone nearby who's somewhere quiet and light.

First, let me say: founders of Color, if you're on HN right now reading all of this, please ignore all of the haters. Most of us are just jealous. Some of us would be over the moon to get 1/1,000th what you just got in funding.

Good on you guys. Awesome job.

That said, I absolutely cannot figure out what color is supposed to do. I went to lunch with a friend of mine today, downloaded the app while we were in line, took a picture of myself, then took a picture of her...and I can't really figure out what I'm supposed to do next. I'm sure there is a guide or something online somewhere, but I think it would really help you out if there was a walkthrough of how I'm supposed to interact with the app within the app itself.

Again, congrats, but if I'm honest, I will probably never run the color app again.

"ignore the haters... we're all jealous... btw what does your app do I'm never using it again".

You just proved all the "haters" right and disproved your own statement.

(Not that I agree with all the "haters", I quite like the idea and can think of times I'll use it, but your post is contradictory)

It isn't contradictory to congratulate someone and state honestly that he is confused about how the app is meant to be used, and therefore won't likely try it again. For example, I admire what Zynga has accomplished but won't ever play one of their games myself.

but you're saying everyone is jealous when almost all of the grievances come from the fact that the app is useless to most people. You confirmed this point (that it is useless to you) yet you also claim that everyone else is just jealous. Why can your "I'm never going to use it" not be the same reason everyone else has and why can't that be a valid reason for thinking this is ridiculous?

Somebody saw something huge in their app. I wasn't this person.

I am happy that somebody saw something huge in their app because it means that a few developers have found some success, and seeing other people be successful makes me happy.

I personally think that a lot of the comments I've seen here stem from jealously because I personally am jealous of their funding.

Signal to noise, how are they going to handle that?

Say you are in a concert and turn on ColorApp, sure you'll get a thousand pics not all of them worth a view. You might get pics of the stage from many different angles and distance but the same in essence.

What is worth and what is not?

Also 100M users will mean a shit-ton of pics up/down the wire. I hope they save some of the 40M for servers and bandwidth costs. They may consume 100TB daily, for years, till the end of times (or end of cash, whatever comes first)

Regardless of the funding, I think if this tech is true it's pretty neat. It's kind of like Shazam for Geolocation:

"A few feats of engineering brilliance hide under Color's slick surface. How does the app determine who's in the same room with you? Not with GPS, which is flummoxed by floors because it can't distinguish vertical distances between people. So Nguyen's team taught Color to use a phone's lighting and audio sensors, stitching their signals together with the sound and light environments of nearby devices to determine which user is where--it's almost like a bat's senses."

Using sonar in apps is nothing new...I suppose they probably just make a rough map of the area you're in and note the lighting properties and whatnot...ultimately you have probably spent some time outside or on wifi so they know approximately where you are and can narrow it down based on observations from other users.

Are we moving towards a world where people walk around with video cameras strapped to their heads to broadcast for all? While elements of such a world might be cool, it seems a little too 1984 for my likes.

I find it interesting that people would choose to forgo organic real life experiences in favor of these augmented tech mash-ups. If I'm on the beach, I want to breath in the crisp air, feel the warmth of the sun, touch grains of sand, hear birds singing, and see the ocean waves wash ashore. I don't want to have my face stuck to the god damned igadget to see a pic someone else took of the same damn thing I can see with my own eyes.

To others, the matrix awaits.

Maybe less 1984, more _Mathematicians in Love_.

I've been reading every article about Color since this morning (3/24) in office and at the end of the day before shutting down my machine and head home I decided to read this one too from forbes.

A sudden sense of realization hit me real hard just this second (honestly not trying to be dramatic).

Color is emulating the exact thing that was shown in The Dark Knight where all the mobile phones are used for spying, but in a more beautiful and positive way. Color is trying to more than an app. It gives the feel of living in the virtual world yet not loose grip on the reality.

I can now feel (in a small way) what the creators of color are trying to do.

That's idiotic. While it's important to work quickly, to invest that much money that quickly is proof positive that the bubble is about to pop. Mark my words: people will say that this was the inflection point that ends up with a new dot com crash. Color is pets.com, webvan and friendster all in one.

Pets.com raised something like 180M in total funding. Webvan, I'm pretty sure was in excess of 800M Friendster has taken in about 50M over the years.

So really color is about 4% of "Pets.com, webvan and friendster all in one."

It's important to consider the actual dollar amounts when making these sorts of comparisons.

I think the relevant part is "Bill Nguyen demo'd", not what he actual demoed.

sorry for the lack of intelligence, or the excess of ignorance, but what is so special about him? I'm not criticizing, just asking. I might be able to search it, but don't know if I would get the full gist of who he is.

He has a great track record and an almost Jobsian "reality distortion field" around him.

If Steve Jobs left to found a startup he could raise money on irrationally great terms too.

How many folks have actually _tried_ this app yet? I downloaded it, and despite having been a user of Path, Instagram and just about every other photo sharing / social media app that's popular, I've yet to get any interesting result from it. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but how the hell do you use this thing? Am I supposed to just randomly take photos and hope other people nearby are using the app? Why do I care if they are?

i liked the idea of color.

it will be massively used at cafes by the loudly laughing teen girls companies, in dreaming that all boys around want to sit at their table.

like Twitter and Facebook? heh.

>Bill Nguyen, a serial tech entrepreneur who sold his last company, the online music streaming site Lala, to Apple for $80 million in 2009.

That helps a little.

This also helps:

"In 1999, Nguyen sought to catch the burgeoning unified messaging movement by the tail by founding a company to develop an Internet-based solution. Onebox.com was a hit with host service providers and users, and within two years, Nguyen parlayed his ascending reputation and Onebox.com's buzz into an $850 million merger with Phone.com."

What were are missing to ask is "Is there a patent here?".

These guys could turn tomorrow and ask any company trying to combine local + photo + mobile to pay high dividends.

In six months we won't think this particular number is all that outlandish

Definition of a bubble.

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