Aim Higher: Stop Building Photo Sharing Apps
cristinajcordova.com
cristinajcordova.com
For instance, consider the market I know: neutron physics modeling of nuclear reactors. The existing solutions represent a ton of accumulated domain knowledge, but they're none of them very user-friendly or well-integrated into either the reload design process or the document creation process, nor were they designed with certain improvements in technology infrastructure (distributed computing, GPU computing) in mind.
Getting into this type of technology is hard, though - you need to pay for access to nuclear data files, and vast reserves of historical data are essential for validating your code's predictions, as well as reams of experimental thermal-hydraulic data for building empirical correlations. Information about modern neutron transport algorithms is scattered throughout academic journals, and unbiased comparisons, to say nothing of sample implementations, are so rare as to be nonexistent. Once you've done all of this work, then you need to produce all of the documentation required to convince the NRC that your algorithm is accurate enough for design calculations.
And after all of that, chances are the utilities will just buy the fuel vendors' codes because why deal with two companies, and the fuel vendors will keep using their in-house codes, because fuck you, that's why.
To compete in a market like that, you need connections, and you need experience, probably way more than 4 or 5 people's worth of either. A minimum viable product is probably a man-decade or so of labor.
What were the barriers to entry? I imagine competing with the credit card oligopoly at point of sale is pretty tough.
1. Building a scalable accounting system that works for merchants and consumers
2. Keeping good enough records to get audited financial statements for as many years as it takes you to build (1)
3. Building mobile applications on 3 or more popular platforms with completely different SDKs
4. Applying for 43 state money transmitter licenses
5. Getting enough money to be able to afford (3) and (4)
6. Complying with the changing USA PATRIOT Act, Bank Secrecy Act, Federal Reserve Bank and U.S. Treasury / FinCEN directives on an ongoing basis while maintaining profitability
7. Convincing people and POS vendors to sign up and develop for a new system en masse...
8. ...without allowing malicious hackers to sign up en masse
9. Not moving so slowly that Apple, Google, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, Intuit, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or any other startup trying to break into mobile payments can copy you
10. Not moving so quickly that everything breaks, because it can't
It's a hard problem.
I'd like to see the other pics people take at get-togethers or on camping trips, but the effort of uploading them to something like facebook doesn't seem worth the effort for many (most?) people (that i know, at least), and there's no way easy way to collate the pics taken by diff people.
But anyways - three smart guys in a garage can build a minimum viable photo sharing application using knowledge and technology obtained from the internet.
You can say "oh, it's hard to do photo sharing right, it's a hard problem", but the fact is there are technological problems out there that are hard to do at all, that are completely beyond the reach of three smart guys in a garage using only knowledge available on the internet.
Just because you don't see them on TechCrunch doesn't mean they don't exist.
Granted, there could be three competitors in stealth mode ... but I'm not getting any whiffs of any.
For example, check out resources like LiveScience or MobileActive.org every once in a while.
Wonderful people are solving big problems as we speak, I promise.
(2007-2008 CS193P) Stanford Apple iPhone app project involves twitter api -> many twitter clients created.
(2009-2010 CS193P) Stanford Apple iPhone app project involves flickr api -> many photo sharing apps created.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/system/f...
"By this point, your Paparazzi app looks up real users on Flickr, finds and lists their photos and lets you view them up close by zooming and panning. It also plots these photos on a map and lets you browser photos by location."
That's not the case for Path, Color or Instagram.
Instagram is a photo application. Just like Flickr is a photo application. They're about Photography. They're shrines to images, where the image is paramount. These are apps where energy and attention is poured in, and photos come out.
I think Color might be a valid attempt to invert that idea. I think it's possible that Color is no more about photos than Twitter is about words.
Maybe photos are a real medium. This isn't a masturbatory attempt to tag and glorify false-attempts at art with a camera phone. The photos are visual information, and frankly I don't really think we've figured out how to deal with that elegantly. Youtube, Google Image Search, Flickr.. these are all really brute 'Search for something to look at' kinds of ideas.
I've been waiting to see someone think differently about visual information, and I'm hoping that Color is doing that.
Or whatever. Maybe they're a bullshit bubble-canary that's gonna spend the money making grunge-photo-filters and hooking iPads up to beer kegs. I dunno. Just hoping.
When I was in their office, the executives kept making vague references to how they would be doing some heavy data crunching and creating recommendation algorithms. They really didn't elaborate, but it sounded like the photo-taking was very much just a Step 1. Almost like an excuse to get people to pull out their phones so that Color could collect a bunch of data beyond just the photo itself (the implicit social graph, location, time, audio, etc).
Maybe they were just saying this stuff so that I wouldn't put them in the same bucket as Instagram and the rest, but this is a really smart team, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.
Also, I don't think Sequoia would have poured this much money into just another photo sharing app.
I understand the point here, but I disagree with it completely. Let people build what they're passionate about. Fund passionate people. If there's a market for the product it will be successful. If not, the investors made a poor decision. The money went into the ecosystem, it didn't disappear, it wasn't wasted.
We hear a ton about the venture firms that fund internet and software businesses because of what we read and pay attention to. Because we don't hear about all the bio-med and energy companies on TechCrunch or HN doesn't mean that they're not out there building the exact same products and getting funded by VC firms specializing in that space. They are getting attention, you're just not looking in the right places to see it.
All I've been reading lately are opinion pieces on what people should and shouldn't be doing with their lives, their businesses and their talents. If you're so passionate that you need to tell everyone what to do, quit complaining about about what should be happening and go make it happen.
Edit - Plus the author is currently head business development at Alphonso Labs, which develops iPhone, iPad and Android applications. What sense does that make? Quit making apps and do something else, but I'm going to keep working for a company that makes apps?
She said I just don't happen to find photo sharing to be a big problem requiring $41M to solve at the moment. And my comment regarding the patents was based on the $41M investment being in their technology, not a photo sharing app.
I made no other comment on the validity of the patents. I believe the investors based their investment on the underlying technology used to create the app and not the app itself. They valued the technology and the team that created it worthy of a $41M investment.
1. It's a huge opportunity. Huge market. 2. No one has nailed it yet. (No, Instagram has not yet won.)
It's perfectly reasonable to build a photo sharing app if you think you have the right formula.
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If its a big space with lots of potential people will try to fill it. Remember, people build the future, it doesn't just "happen." All these services and large funding rounds are just proving that photosharing is a big unsolved space (just like group buying, LBS, social networks, search engines, online retailers, computer manufacturers, operating systems...). Relax and let the market do its thing. Or jump into the market. But please don't complain about the way innovation works.
If there was a better ROI for young entrepreneurs, they would do it. There is nothing that scales like the internet/software that can be built with such a low cost. Michael Lewis said this best in his book, the last 20 years have been the largest legal value creation in the history of mankind in Silicon Valley (measured by normalized job creation, revenue, new businesses, etc.)
My question was: what's inherently derivative about software startups? Why is everyone making photo-sharing software and not software to solve other (unaddressed) problems?
2. ^What real problem does a company like Color solve? Is there one?
3. Maybe the problem is that startups are targeting consumers? B2B has a way of culling the herd: if you don't solve a problem, no one buys your product.
Web startups are attractive because they have low capital requirements, don't need much domain knowledge, and are more closely tied to changes in culture than technology, so there are always a few open niches.
On the other hand, this is simply what the media is obsessing over. It's easy to understand convenience apps, but not new technology for which the implications on large scale are still pretty unknown.
It's all still happening: Better and smaller chips, commercial spaceflight, more efficient solar energy, interesting developments in DNA sequencing. Real high tech. Just look past the attention whores.