How Many Mulligans Does Color Get? | Hacker News Reader

How Many Mulligans Does Color Get?

techcrunch.com

69 pointserikpukinskis44 comments

Ok- so I was one of the thousands near the Palace on Friday, and used it as an opportunity to properly test color in a public situation. It failed.

If you've ever tried to send a text message from a concert or football match, you'd understand the first issue: needing to be online to use the app gives it woeful performance when 500,000+ people are trying to simultaneously access cell networks in a confined space. The Facebook App ground to a halt and messages took hours to get through: real time photo sharing app? No chance.

As a consequence of this, we (I got my beautiful wife to use it as well, so we had a base group) kept getting dropped from the group. By the end of the day, there were five members of the group- but most of our photos were added to our solo group instead! So we saw few photos from others, even ourselves.

Not being easily connected also sucked battery life as the app seemed to be constantly trying to geo locate. We killed it half way through the day, when we had to turn our phones off to preserve battery.

I can see potential here- that's the mulligan on offer. At my next conference- smaller crowd and something stronger in common than our head of state- this could be useful. But sharing my photos through a confusing interface that doesn't work in big crowds and is supposed to only add value in big crowds? Not again.

As for the 500 photos- we ended up with 32 in our group and another dozen that ended up in our solo accounts. Did the app recognise and add them?

Sent from phone so apologies for typos, if any.

This is the killer point. The most fun/useful cases for Color are events; which inevitably means strained networks. I think a Color is destined to become chatroulette for the bar scene.

Have you tried searching for yourself in the BBC high hi-def crowd picture taken from the Palace?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13200114

Seems to need flash so will check from laptop next week- thanks for the link. I'm blurred in the background of one low-res BBC shot and also made the ITV news background, which made for a laugh at our after party.

Unrelated, but pretty cool!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13248642

I wonder if there's a way to use a short-range radio signal on a public band (like CB, if that still exists) to do local sharing at crowded places. Can the radios in iPhones and typical Android phones even do such a thing?

Cell phone radios are purpose built to save space, expense, licensing, and energy. They can only communicate using the specific frequencies and technologies (GSM, CDMA, WiFi, etc) that they were designed for.

I was up there as well, I used instagram on my old iPhone 3G (as well as rocking a DSLR) and had barely any problems at all. In fact I found the whole experience of the app very liberating, literally taking shots on the phone, styling them, uploading them and having people commenting, liking and following me within in minutes of them going up. I can't say I've tried Color, but I see it struggling to beat the penetration that instagram has achieved.

Just tried to see if our photos made it. Can't view either the Daily Telegraph page or the Color compilation page from my iPhone!

Pfft. Who has talked about Color since their launch? Absolutely nobody except HN and TechCrunch.

I'm going to tell you why no one in the UK used Color: 1) no one cares for another photo sharing app -- they have Facebook, and, 2) it's misspelled. :)

I know your quip about the misspelling is a joke, but I think their branding will be problematic throughout the Commonwealth (perhaps less so in western Canada), and French speaking nations -- it just doesn't look right.

Not quite in the same vein, but instructive nonetheless, many years ago our US born chairman insisted on branding a product with the prefix 'kwik', a relatively common misspelling in the US, instead of 'quick'. The product bombed, and market research suggested the brand simply looked wrong to the target market. We rebranded, and as far as I know -- I've long since moved on -- the product is still around and does reasonably well.

Interesting. As an American, the British spelling "Colour" always seemed classier to me than "Color".

So it's interesting to find an example of the "opposite": As a non-American, "Color" is strange to you in the same way "Kuller" would be strange to you.

If you really think about this, you may recognize the genius of Jim Meddick (of Robotman and Monty fame), in naming a compilation "Primary Crullers".

> French speaking nations

OTOH, "color" is better for Spanish speaking countries.

Indeed. I suspect "color" will play ok in most of Asia also.

Depends on the particular Asian country's relationship with the US during the cold war period - some decided to teach American English in their education systems while others followed the British way.

Depends on the particular Asian country's relationship with the US during the cold war period - some teach American English in their education system while others teach the British way.

Their PR stunt really wans't very well executed, I live in the UK and closely follow the tech world, yet I had no idea it was happening until I read this article.

Most people I speak to agree that while what colo(u)r does is pretty cool, it's not enough to make people stop using facebook or anything else, the whole thing smells a bit 'gimmicky'

FWIW, they do own colour.com too.

So what? The app is called 'Color'.

Name one company which relies on "contentious" spelling and has succeeded. I can't think of one.

You should try naming one company which relied on "contentious" spelling and failed. I'm pretty sure the sample either way is too small to be meaningful.

Flickr?

It's not as though we in the Commonwealth spell "Flickr" as "Flickur", you know.

Yeah it's flickre right? ;-)

The Coca-Cola product and company is partly named after the Kola nut.

I agree with other commentators that given their initial raise, the company has a number of 'chances' to find the right mix which connects with their user base.

That being said, back when everyone was reading "Snow Crash" and trying to be the guy/gal who created the metaverse, there was some good research into just what sort of 'group event' you could reasonably hold in a network space. (sadly they don't pop up easily on citeseer but they were in the late 90's early 00's about network group meeting events and the people congregating via digital networks).

The bottom line of the research was that it was really hard to build a workable mesh network protocol (basically which provided any to any connectivity / traffic amongst a modest sized group) in the presence of any traffic loss whatsoever.

One of the outcomes of that research was what most people think of as CDNs which push audio/video content amongst a number of servers and try to distribute the load of "Large" events. A more or less practical example was the 40 user 'raid' that the MMORPG World of Warcraft started with, provided co-ordinated events amongst 40 individual users located across the globe. It had a hard time pulling it off but was successful. 100 or 200 users in the same 'area' often killed the servers.

Color is shooting for 10's of thousands of people in the same space. This is P2P "gone wild" and not a solved problem by any means.

So kudos for failing fast, now to see what happens next.

As someone who's never been able to get the attention of TC, this quote bothers me:

"The team here at TechCrunch will give Color all the mulligans it wants to get things right. They can swing and miss all day and we’ll still be here in the stands, rooting them on."

It seems to me this is a clear ploy: we'll speak nice of you if you start giving us access. Has the staff of color shut out TC in favor of major media outlets? Does that challenge the industry assumption that you have to be in TC to get traction?

Certainly we all know of companies that Michael has invested in or the staff otherwise favors that get no mention of blunders or a lack of traction significantly beyond what color faces.

Or maybe they should have let Arrington throw some money in to keep him from trashing them.

Techcrunch Editor Discloses Investments, Admits To Conflicts Of Interests: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2011/04/like...

Does Colour need a certain critical mass to even start to be useful? I tried it in Sydney, at some very busy places around the CBD and I only ever saw one other photo from someone else.

Of course, I could have been using the tool wrong because I really had no idea which symbol did what, but seeing that one other pic suggested to me it was working and getting nearby photos.

I guess a different question is, can you define "useful"?

Outside of maybe seeing immediate photos from people closer to the front row at a concert, I can't think of a use for color. But I could just be unimaginative about this kind of thing.

TBH, I would be surprised if Color didn't "succeed" in some way. They have enough money to try at least 5-10 different ideas & approaches and that is an incredible luxury. And I don't mean slight pivots, I mean complete departures from what they are doing now.

Will they be successful? It seems obvious that they are fumbling around and actively searching for a model. I'm going to wager that if they do "succeed" some day it is because the VCs worked hard to find them an exit into some big company.

With that much money, they will likely have a huge burn rate and flame out much more quickly that expected. I've seen first hand multiple times what too much money can do to a startup. It's not pretty!

Personally, I'm expecting Color to have a similar fate to Cuil. I hope I'm wrong, though, just because being a winning cynic isn't fun.

From where I am sitting color seems like the idea of a computing scientist that has gone out of hand. The premise would work brilliantly if EVERYBODY was using color, but unfortunately they arent. Right now they seem to be facing the problem faced by any social network start up. If you dont know anyone in the network, where is the incentive to join?

It took me a while to realise the title of this article was about Color-the-app. Seriously, the name itself raises an eyebrow.

I think the idea that a failed launch can kill you is (generally) bullshit. Unless the company is weak it isn't the end of the world.

If they make their product great and it resonates with users it will be successful eventually, if they stick with it.

There are a billion people in their target market. Even if they spoiled their rep (for now) with 10 million (unlikely) that leaves quite a few other potential users.

Being cuil in Silicon Valley is not a prerequisite to success.

Yes, but it's harder to find that second 10 million users.

But, its well accepted that too much money too early will kill a company. eToys, etc.

If so many people who are willing to use the app are inherently confused by the use case, isn't THAT the failure point?

I don't remember being confused why Friendster was useful when it ushered in social networking. It worked because the use case was obvious.

It was hilarious watching Bill Nguyen on This Week in Startups tripping over himself apologizing about how badly his app sucked. I think the lesson here is that you shouldn't put your app into the wild unless you're certain(and have beta testers confirm) that it's ready for prime time.

I say to Color, “SWING for the fences!”

No rookie player (i.e. startup in this analogy) begins by swinging for the fences. Color are finding out that just putting the bat on the ball is a lot harder than it looks.

I guess Michael Arrington isn't an investor in Color.

Not to mention he basically seems to be writing blog posts during NBA playoff intermissions. Sports metaphors abound (and confound).

More likely UFC 129 http://www.ufc.com/event/UFC129 ;)

"How Many Mulligans"? What?!

This is HN. This is where we have thoughtful discussions on how to improve ideas, projects, and companies. This isn't where we sit in our armchairs and decide as users which companies are going to fail and why we've given up.

What the hell, people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com