Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
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Location-based photo sharing is an incredible idea. When I'm at an event -- say, a concert -- there are hundreds of people around me taking lots of different pictures. I want those pictures, but I don't know any of those people. Imagine going to a venue, not bringing a camera, but still coming away with awesome, memorable photos of the band, from people that have nice equipment and know how to take photographs.
I'm not sure it justifies the huge valuation, but I can easily see why this product had the potential to be a huge player in the photo-sharing space. I feel like the press from their first round caused such an unnecessary uproar around their brand that coming back and producing a humble, useful app was nearly impossible.
That said, I probably would have taken a $200 mil payoff for an idea for an iPhone app.
I attended Anime Expo 2011 in costume. Over the course of the two days I was there, I probably had at least 100 people stop me for photos -- not unexpected with thousands of people walking around carrying cameras. I attended a photo shoot and the whole deal: surely it'd be easy to find at least one of these pictures later, right?
After the event, some friends were curious and wanted to see a photo of me. So I just search through the albums uploaded to Flickr and...
... well, it took days after the event for anyone I knew to find a single photo that even had me in the frame. The volume of uploaded photos was so high that you'd probably have to search for hours to find anything in particular. Nothing was tagged. Want to show your friend a really cool cosplay you saw? Unless you took a picture of it yourself, with your own camera, the odds of being able to find it are practically zero, even if hundreds of people took pictures of it.
Now I understand the need of so many people to bring cameras with them: it's not necessarily that they need to have their own personal pictures of the things they liked. It's that if they don't take them, they'll never be able to find anyone else's pictures either. We're overwhelmed by such a sheer volume of photos and left unable to find what we want.
EDIT: I should cleanup and redact the Product Requirements Document I wrote 5 years ago for a transceiver board we built that could talk ISO 14443 and ISO 18092 (as well as ISO 15693) using a single transceiver ASIC and antenna tuned for 13.56MHz.
If you _really_ wanted a picture of yourself from the expo, you'd have gotten someone to take a photo of you. So your interest (given that it comes from after the fact friend-curiosity) is right at that marginal level.
If you just wanted some non-specific photos of the expo without any particular goal in mind, that's already easily done, as you saw.
So what you're looking at here is people with specific goals in analyzing a photo stream but who didn't, for one reason or another, turn up and take photos to meet these goals. I don't know if you can make any kind of money - good or otherwise - from providing a service to such a marginal set of customers.
The exception might be law enforcement - find some better photos of the guy who followed a woman into a bathroom at exactly 12:42, or the person who grabbed someone's purse, etc.
A two day period is more difficult, but sorting photos by popularity will let people find most of what they're looking for. Photos of themselves are harder, but the facial recognition technology to do so exists as long as you're not in too elaborate of a costume.
I've almost convinced myself to work on this at this point. I hate taking pictures, but I love looking at pictures of memories I have. I don't think I'm alone.
After all the fanfare... nothing seems to have come of them, at least not at the level they seemed to promise.
This seems a pure tactical team move - I mean they can obviously do some decent coding :) and have a good product idea, plus they appear to be ace at marketing. That's the sort of company you want to be acquiring; especially if you can pivot the (not-very-good) product and steal the brand new market.
(note 1; I know I'm not the target audience for any social network)
(note 2; I really dislike the fact that the audiences to gigs are just filled with people holding up their mobile. Instead of trying to get a pic to put on FB, why don't you try enjoy actually being there?!)
deja Mi has built an iPhone app that allows you to capture media and upload it to a collection of media assigned to the specific venue or event you're attending. You can hear the spiel straight from the horse's mouth here: http://www.mycarolinatoday.com/2011/07/deja-mi/
On a side note, for those local to the Triangle, NC there's going to be free concerts throughout the weekend in downtown Raleigh to kick off the release of their app. The lineup of musicians is very impressive, go check it out if you're able. More details: http://dejami.com/dejafest
http://dejami.com/ http://itunes.apple.com/app/deja-mi/id447681380?mt=8
You're absolutely correct. They just aren't using Color, and that's the problem. Every single person I've talked to has said that Color is a great idea, _hypothetically_. In reality, Color fails on the most basic of user experience, it shows absolutely no content when it starts up, ever, and there's no sort of reward for even taking a photo with Color-- you don't get anything out of the experience.
I get the idea that the product guys at Color sat down and thought, "okay, if everyone who has an iPhone or Android used our app instead of the default camera app, and everyone at a concert stood within 150 feet of each other (don't laugh, that's the range of Color), and all took photos within a short amount of time, they'd be in a great social network."
I'll leave it to the reader to determine how absurd that sounds. The constraints on the application at startup basically doomed it.
Take a look at Foursquare as a counterpoint. Early adopters didn't get to see anyone else checking in, they likely didn't have any friends also checking in, there weren't any photos, and there were very few non-NYC badges. But goddamn, you could be the mayor of _everywhere_. The functionality of Foursquare still works even when there's only _one_ person using it. The functionality of Color completely fails unless there are groups of people in very close proximity all using it at the same time.
Then the problem is you, buddy. Self-organization and organic growth doesn't just "happen." It's the aggregation of many individuals TAKING individual ACTION. So it starts with you.
The next time you go to a show, get your ten friends to download the app, and share the photos with each other. And make a couple new friends getting them to download it as well (you talk to people at shows right? If you aren't social why do you care about social apps?). Then if it's a good experience, when they go to shows some of them will tell their friends to do the same. That's how it starts. You don't just sit around on the HN comments waiting for it to blow up big.
Idea is good, they only need users.
The valuation is another total mystery.
In real like, friendship isn't binary. It's a scale of how close we are, what we talk about, what we share in common, etc. If you came up with a social network that would figure out who your friends are based on how often you talked, hung out, what you talked about etc., I'd call you a genius. A social network where there's no awkward friend requests to accept or reject. A social network that shows me feed items based on how much I currently care about the person and the kind of content...
companies don't just show up on your doorstep with an acquisition offer and a giant check. many times the deals are staged and dependent on progress. consider google's acquisition of dMarc, the talked about price, and the actual price.
There's not even a glimmer of doubt in anyone's mind that the reporting might be incorrect, etc.
- Still bitter about the TC/Last.fm/U2 story
Think of all the companies google has made these offers to and the deal didn't happen. Strategy at this level is kind of like macroeconomics, it just doesn't map to what makes sense on face value.
Google is addicted to social because it seems to be the only game in town that can bring in magnitude times more people than a typical product could (e.g. Basecamp)
Color was founded with this power-team of folks that had proven records so when the Hyposaurus came stumbling down the block and Google saw it coming with the potential to snatch up an amazing team with the potential to pull in millions of more users into the Google ecosystem and then direct them not just towards ads, but all their other offerings... it looked like it had every indicator that it would fly.
Unfortunately it looks like some air got let out of the tires and things slowed down considerably for them.
I don't know that I have all the faith in Color staying around, but Path I believe has staying power. They have a really cohesive/directed vision and purpose that they are executing really well.
They may not launch with a billion new accounts a minute, but I think there is so much solid product/story there that once they pass that event horizon, they'll have people pouring into them.
Sort of like a Tumblr or Posterous growth curve -- really focused, really solid products so once people start taking notice, everyone likes what they see.
Just my 2 cents and I used to eat a lot of paint as a kid... so take this all with lots of salt.
1) There are reports that Google offered some of its product managers tens of millions of dollars to keep them from joining Twitter. If that's how they're valuing talent, then $200M is in the ballpark for Color's "superstar team" combined with some very interesting IP,
2) Smart investors described Color's technology as breakthrough and potentially "the next Google". Even accounting for some hyperbole, suppose that it really is groundbreaking for reasons that us mere mortals can't fully grok. In that case, adding it to Google's arsenal and combining it with all their other assets (and proven engineering and operations strength) could be a multi-billion-dollar win and a big addition to Google+. Or not, as the case may be; but making a risk/reward tradeoff, it could have looked attractive.
Not comparing Color to them talent-wise, just saying, you made me smile :)
It sounds like you're not too enthusiastic about it either ;)
And then sometimes stupid is just stupid. This is Earth.
There isn't necessarily rational thinking behind it.
The people running a company like Google don't necessarily have wisdom you don't - see Microsoft, Yahoo! or (especially after dismantling Google Labs) AOL.
Isn't it obvious that if you are at an event, say, a birthday party, you'd want to see what photographs your friends are taking as they take them? What about at a sports game or concert, can you imagine how amazing that'd be?
Raising $41M, selling for $200M, all irrelevant versus the grand scheme of this idea. I worry that they have this awesome idea, and are poor at actually building the product, and this makes me sad because I really want someone to do it right.
I really do not understand the hate at Color, they have made mis-steps, but their concept is actually a good idea - compared to a lot of stuff that Hacker News thinks is dumb.
For most people, at least, it's not, because why would you be looking at your phone rather than the event that's actually going on, at full scale, around you?
It would perhaps be good to see the photos others took of the event afterwards, when reminiscing.
This is not the case. Color had a very talented team attempting to attack multiple technically challenging problems, that remain unsolved today.
The first is the discovery of your implicit social network, as defined by your virtual and real-world interactions with others. Facebook currently uses this to determine what information is shown in your News Feed and make friend recommendations, but is not using it to its potential. Google Buzz tried to do this directly via your emails and flopped partly since it did not account for the privacy implications. The ability to transform people's natural interactions into strong recommendations of what they should pay attention to and who should meet each other is still an open problem.
The second is the mapping of real-world events (initially defined by the pictures and people) onto the virtual world. There is potentially a lot of value, both to participants and outsiders, to say (1) who came to real world events, (2) how they interacted, and (3) what happened, while properly dealing with the corresponding ethical implications.
For both of these to work, Color needed a viral social product to gain data and users. They failed on product/market side, especially because they did not have enough focus on "what is the experience we want our users to have the first time they launch the application?" The opportunity remains open, for Color to redeem itself, for the big players to improve their products, or for a new startup to come along and show the world how it's done.
Sure -- so what? Just because you've got some smart folks trying to solve hard problems doesn't mean you're worth $200 million.
I don't disagree with your analysis, but surely one surefire way to gain social network data is to be bought by someone who has the data already. Google has a pretty good idea who a gmail user's social network is, as evidenced by the Google Plus suggestions.
This is why you don't want to get your news and journalism from the people who are also financing deals. Now I'm not sure when to trust them at all.
Once Sequoia invested, the acquisition was derisked for someone like Google. Then Google just needed to offer a price of some multiple of the investment ("How about 5x? Not bad for 6 months!"). Conversely, Sequoia might have hoped for a flip knowing Google was so aggressive for social startups at the time and invested accordingly. As far as I can tell, the Color leadership were blinded by their own genius and these early "signals" of success and they screwed up their acquisition, launch, and thus far all meaningful execution.
Either Color has enormous value or it doesn't.
That sounds like a great co-branding opportunity. Color could also sell/host conference services such as preloading conference-related photos/ads or providing additional Color photographers to "augment" the conference's Color photos when the app's adoption is still low.
Color had a genuinely interesting idea: make a social network via implicit information rather than deciding whether or not the a person is a "friend".
I can see this being of particular interest to Google as they built themselves on a similar premise: ranking web searches via implicit data (links, etc.) rather than a hand built index.
So, with an interesting idea and a strong team they secured both acquisition interest and a huge funding round. The idea being that they would release a series of applications and products that would deliver on the promise of implicit social network creation.
Then their PR got ahead of them (no doubt purchased with a chunk of the $41 mil) and expectations got built to a level that could never be delivered on with the first iteration of their first product - an iPhone photo app.
So, now there is a big backlash as people feel "duped" by the gap between the hype and the product and it is crushing the company.
Google wasn't paying for execution, so $200M might have been worth the talent (and perhaps the idea).
What happens when Tool and Madonna don't want photos at their venue?
I am yet to use Color with another person in the same room.
I think Google is after their sound technology.
elastic social network? is this something a 16 year really thinks when using facebook? oh i wish it was more elastic? sounds like nerdvana.
proximity photo sharing? why would i want to do that? i am careful about which pics i share with the world. they transmit my persona, so i don't share shots that suck. or maybe i am taking pics no one else is supposed to look at - as in private. why would you want to look at my kids, perv?
honestly, not all ideas by talented and bright people are good. just look at asana, yet another project tool.
At the rate the value of that domain was rocketing, seems like a decent investment at the time. Too bad no one's going to want to be associated with it after what team Color did to itself.
For the record: Color.com was purchased for $350,000
*educated guess.
Okay, maybe not "YOU" you, but the end user. A public photo album where you provide who you are (via registration) and WHERE you are? Real-time targeted ads would be just the tip of the iceberg!
Look at Google Ventures and you might see some questional investments as well: http://www.googleventures.com/portfolio.html