Color Pivots; Bill Nguyen Fired Peter Pham | Hacker News Reader

Color Pivots; Bill Nguyen Fired Peter Pham

nytimes.com

32 pointsolivercameron15 comments

Heh, it's funny, yesterday I was wondering if Color was still a thing.

It turns out it never was.

Once again, (after viewing their demo video again) I find myself puzzled by who Color is targeting, what their app really does, and of course how they will make money.

It seems they're kind of a twitter for photos with ad hoc local area wireless photo sharing. What problem does this solve?

When I take a snapshot, why would I want to share it with anyone who happens to be in range? What makes this so appealing? I can't see any appeal, but perhaps that's just me.

How do they make money? It seems they'll be going for some variant of permission marketing, based on accrued data of user interests. But how does the user benefit?

I think it's ad-hoc location-based social networks. So attendees at a conference would form a social network and share comments, photos, etc. In fact, every presentation could be it's own mini-network of people in that room. They could sell ad space to the vendors at the conference.

They just need to find a killer use case that motivates early adopters to use it. For example, it could be used at colleges to form networks around classes, sports events, parties. This app would be very useful during disasters, but you can't build a business around that. ;-)

This reminds me of the story about the executive in training that cost his company several hundred thousand dollars. He goes into the boss' office and says "are you going to fire me?"

The boss says: "Hell no, why would I fire you when I just paid $500k to educate you!"

They're not pivoting - they are simply iterating.

"Mr. Nguyen said the company had taken the criticism to heart and charted a new course".

"Photos might not even be a part of Color in the future, he said".

Sounds like a pivot to me.

Huh, strange, I must have missed that paragraph. Totally sounds like you're right.

This actually blew my mind quite a lot.

Color is a damn good proposition and ironically a company that shouldn't pivot and the founder should be stubborn and force his idea down peoples throats. I really really like their end goal idea, and feel like they could get there with a lot of very clever execution.

Most of their technology is in location. Such as the piece that listens to your microphone and can identify the specific location you're in better than GPS does.

They just need to find a "disease vector" (photosharing? music sharing? sexting?) to get people to use their location technology and make themselves available for tracking and advertising.

Color will make it. They are smart people. Bill sold companies for a total of $900+ M. Peter was the guy who got T-Mobile to introduce BillShrink to its millions of subscribers and more people (through tv ads). Apparently they also have LinkedIn former chief scientist on staff. Teams like that win. Sooner or, maybe in this case, later.

Cuil will make it. They are smart people. Anna Patterson was the architect of Google’s search index. Tom created a revolutionary search engine that introduced automatic clustering and page analysis. Apparently they also have a Google former technical lead on staff. Teams like that win.

Where does it say Bill fired Peter?

CTRL + F [fir]

Mr. Nguyen said the company had taken the criticism to heart and charted a new course. He fired Color’s president, Peter Pham, and its engineers are building a new version of the app to be released later this summer.

I wish they went into why they fired Peter. It seemed like a passing thought in the article. What was he doing wrong? Seems like Bill was equally at fault...

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