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Whether there's good money in solving this sort of problem is another question -- but sorting through shared photos at events is a surprisingly hard problem, as I learned recently.

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.

Sounds like a good case for NFC. Put RFIDs in the attendee badges, and a sufficiently-advanced camera app could auto-tag those people as the picture is taken.

Does that sort of technology work directionally? Typically the place was so crowded that you'd often have 40 other people within 15 feet when taking a photo, so it'd have to identify exactly the people in front of the camera, and not to your sides or behind you.

GP conflated RFID and NFC a bit, at least their colloquially accepted meanings. What we normally call 'NFC' has a range of <20cm, often <<20cm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication). This is what also makes NFC more suitable for mobile payments than RFID.

Hmm; true. Maybe just passes with large, simple QR codes on the front of them, then? Then the device taking the picture wouldn't even have to decode them just-in-time; the data would be encapsulated in the picture itself.

QR code on a name tag or conference badge would be a great idea.

RFID refers to a family of technologies that operate over a variety of frequencies and given by the ISO standards. Specifically, 134kHz, 13.56MHz, ~915MHz, and 2.4GHz. The 13.56MHz standardized frequency for RFID is the same as that for NFC. The RFID ISO standards that specify the use of 13.56MHz are ISO 14443 and ISO 15693. NFC is specified in 2 ISO standards, but the more relevant to the discussion is ISO 18092 and it is derived from ISO 14443. So, there is some interoperability between ISO 14443 and ISO 18092, and therefore there is good reason to "conflate" NFC and RFID.

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.

Also I should add, you might want to take pictures of yourself or your friends in the foreground. That's what personalizes a photo for MOST people. imho.

I thought of that as well, but surprisingly, I only got about half a dozen requests to take pictures with people out of the ~hundred total. Going by what I saw of other people being photographed, this was probably typical.

If you have a seed image then Google Search by Images solves this to some extent.

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searchbyimage.html

This is true for what it's worth (and you acknowledge that there may not be 'good money' in solving this problem).

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.

The problem you've described is very solvable. Photos contain the time they were taking and, increasingly, the location they were taken. If you're looking for photos of something you know you saw, a reasonably accurate guess of time and location should narrow the choices to a manageable number.

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.

The idea of Color was using data harvested from your phone to take a stab at figuring out which pictures were relevant to you.

I love going to gigs, but.. I prefer to remember my experience of what happened, which is not something that can be caught on camera.

(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?!)

Second that. Be present. Live in the moment. A few choice photos are fine, but don't let the need to document and fb-brag consume your life. Just live it.

I think a lot of the commentators are saying (and this my view too) that the concept is brilliant - but the execution was terrible and the valuation way too overblown.

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.

"When I'm at an event -- say, a concert -- there are hundreds of people around me taking lots of different pictures."

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.

* They just aren't using Color, and that's the problem. *

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.

Oh be quiet, secret Color employee. The problem is not with him. He's talking from a business standpoint about the friction for the average user. That's a REAL problem, and it's not his fault for lacking enthusiasm to use it. Besides he got nothing to lose.. it's not like it's a dealbreaker for his life.. Unfortunately, Color has a lot more at stake when they can't make users love their product. The good life down the drain...

I agree to an extent, its not the idea of capturing a location as so much a collective at a specific moment in time. Example: Yelp/Gowalla collect pictures of food and venues and really it doesn't matter so much when they were taken. Color is cashing in on capturing moments in time that are relevant to a group of related or unrelated people, but the real question is how often is this relevant and even for times that are relevant, as a fleeting moment, will 90% of the pictures provided even matter to a user. I can tell you honestly I get bored after looking at the first few pictures of random people I care nothing about.

The time axis on this is the most interesting part, but as you point out the reality is for most things people don't care. On the other hand, I can't wait until Google releases their timeline-based photos on top of Google streetview. It will be a browsable history of earth, geolocated.

There is a startup out of Raleigh, NC that's trying to solve this exact problem.

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

But why would those people with nice equipment who take great photos want to give the photos to you, or anyone for that matter. They might be willing to share the photos but am not sure how that really helps. Will they allow you to share the photos to your circle.. so on and so forth.

The valuation is another total mystery.

I'm solving this with my new iPhone app called Crowd (still in private beta), here's a sample of the web viewing portal http://thecrowdapp.com/5Qp6CHy if anyone wants to get a beta invite just email. jmm.seasons@gmail.com

Agree with you and made my comment couple of days ago in here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2753996

Idea is good, they only need users.

That's what I figured as well, but the execution was too confusing as it turns out.

There is no bad PR!