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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

I'm fascinated by this Photo-Sharing-is-tip-of-the-iceberg tidbit:

"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."

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/technology-photo-app-...

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But what happens if you have 500 people in different rooms in the same building? "Detecting when people are taking pictures at roughly the same time in the same room" sounds like an awesome piece of technology with about zero practical uses in terms of iPhone apps. Sure, if you have a bunch of uncoordinated autonomous fly-robot things, it would be great to give them really cheap sensors and stitch everything together Dark Knight style, but who needs this in an iPhone app?

Yeah, I too noticed the mic and camera monitoring being an integral part of the app. It seems to me they realize privacy issues stemming from this and are trying to downplay them by calling the microphone an "audio sensor". And this just does not sit right with me. Feeding users half-truths for their own sake is a slippery path.

But perhaps I am overreacting.

I would imagine it does the analysis locally and sends some sort of "room signature" to the server, rather than a complete audio stream, which would be an awful waste of bandwidth.

I don't buy it either. You're telling me that every room on the same floor of a building (for example) has a specific audio signature, but identical rooms on other floors do not? I betcha if I sat next to the pop machine in my office's cafeteria, it wouldn't match the ambient noise in the conference room next door.

So... it's the great photo sharing app of all time, then? Um, ok? $41MM?

When's the last time you had even the faintest urge to share a photo? I'm a geek, and that urge hits maybe once every other week.

It's like Foursquare/Facebook where you have to opt out of publicizing your entire life. I suppose advertisers (the FBI?) are drooling over the possibilities, and that's probably what fuels the investment more than user excitement.

Also, "everyone who was at the bar last night automatically sees the pictures (without any pesky 'publish' button or other form of 'opting in')" may be a more compelling user story than you give it credit for.

I'm looking forward to all the "Fired/Divorced for Facebook/Twitter comments" equivalents that result from photos taken by other people you were in the same bar as turning up in your friends, family, spouses and bosses photostreams.

I think you vastly underestimate the driving compulsion of millions of attention whores to get random men to tell them how hot they are by virtue of myspace angles and flattering lighting.

I think his point is that the photo sharing is little more than a proof of concept. The exciting thing is the automation of ad-hoc networking. The internet collapses geography, but as a result it does a poor job of many tasks at the local level - search for 'Bob's diner' and you may find that you're just on the wrong side of the block, or you might get info on cheap flights to some completely other city containing a more famous restaurant with the same name.

The technology underlying Color seems like a much-needed metric for establishing spatial (and by implication, temporal) relevance. An accurate and behavior-based metric of relevance, as opposed to one based on self-selection via search/signup, would be very, very easy to monetize. Say you're in the fashion business. You could buy online ads to reach people who search for fashion-related stuff online, but wouldn't you rather reach people who spend a lot of time in the same places as your target demographic?

You're selling the technology to me. It sounds interesting. But so was that iPhone app that translated Spanish out of OCR'd video in real time, rendering the results back in the correct perspective. Shouldn't the real-life Babelfish be worth more --- and I mean, to the market --- than Color?

I had the same thought (roughly)..

Their concept of an "elastic" network that naturally decays your connections with people you associate with less is a perfect complement to a network that self-organizes in the first place.

I think photo sharing is just a shot at hooking into a really valuable data stream. All they should want are phones that are turned on and sending them pictures, audio, and location info, and they can turn around and spit out all kinds of analytics that advertisers will eagerly pay for.

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