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Don't worry, if Apple acquires them (like they did their last company, Lala) then Gruber will suddenly realize how revolutionary the idea is.
Do you have a refutation for the articles's words? Or is this simply an Ad Hominem? Compare and contrast to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370547, which is just as scornful but also logical.
Funny, I can't seem to find the article where I said much of anything about Lala, post- or pre-acquisition by Apple, let alone the one where I claimed they were "revolutionary".

Please let me know the URL for that piece.

As of about 6:50 PM EDT, this ad hominem attack on the article's author has almost as many upvotes (56) as every other top-level comment on this thread combined (67).

Sad.

Useless and irrelevant comments such as this one, along with it's many replies, contribute to signal-to-noise degradation of the discussion section of many popular HN posts. Maybe collapsible comment threads would help to mitigate this.
I remember attending a Startup School talk wherein Max Levchin explained that Slide wasn't a "pimp my MySpace" company, but rather a data mining company using MySpace widgets as the trojan horse. So, Nguyen isn't the first serial entrepreneur to receive loads of funding based on his reputation and attempt to exploit the trend du jour to mine data from the masses.

We all saw how well that worked out for Slide. My guess is that Color will see a similar fate. It's unlikely you'll build a great social photo sharing application if that's not your primary focus.

I think Color was funded for a variety of reasons, but it has very little to do with product. It's unfortunate that Bill feels he needs to defend the startup at this stage on the merits of it's product or future product - it's not a battle he can win until he has the social proof that traction provides.

For now they have cash, a great network and PR buzz that can kickstart traction.

In terms of product development, it's unfortunate they've raised so much money so early in their lifecycle. A cash surplus can really muck up the natural evolution of a product. e.g. you hire too fast and and up with a staff of 100 people all trying to justify their existence by pulling, pushing and shoving the product. No matter how strong a leader you are, it's tough to control that situation.

My prediction, and I don't feel good saying this, is that Bill and his team are going to do a lot of innovation that won't evolve into a business but will provide much inspiration for other businesses that will succeed.

Max still made about $40M personally on Slide. The real loser in that acquisition is Google. I think the VC scene in the Silicon Valley is becoming more and more screwed up (becoming more resume/track record, rather than innovative product focused), and the Silicon Valley will pay dearly for this.
Data mining at Slide was top tier but there was an unfortunate mis-timing with the economy tanking (read: advertisers had no money) ... and hence the eventual shift towards virtual goods.

I don't think many people understand how advertisers eat this stuff up. When they start throwing money around again (probably soon), you bet the big guys (like Color?) will repeat the benefits.

Couldn't agree more. Also; people don't want to use the app whether it be because they dont want strangers seeing their pics (I know I dont) and that its yet another photo sharing tool
I think Slide was acquired more for the talent than for the product itself - although that's an expensive talent buy.

And who knows, maybe in some capacity it works out - I believe the Slide team at Google is responsible for the launch of Disco.

Although Gruber is summing it up based on a developer's words, they do state this ridiculous data collection in their privacy policy (which is an implied agreement, based on your downloading of the app).

http://color.com/privacy

--

We also collect pictures, videos, comments, and actions you take through the App (“Content”), and information on your location. When our App is active, your Device provides periodic updates to our server of your location, which allows us to show you fresh Content based upon where you are at that moment. We share your Content with others. Sharing Content publicly with others from different locations is what this App is about. If you find this objectionable, please consider not using our App or Site.

That seems like a remarkably clear and fair privacy policy.
Yes the privacy policy is at least clear about it.
How long before Color becomes Chat Roulette? What protections are children afforded where the content is not "personally identifiable?"

And how long after that before Apple drops Color from their App Store?

I've been wondering about that for a while. The application is vulnerable to GPS spoofing (you can get your phone to tell it that you are somewhere you aren't), and while all the stuff it does to identify location (amount of light, listening to sound) is nifty, it can surely be defeated. How long will it be until hardcore pornography fills the feed at some major event? Or spam images, asking the reader to visit a site?
I feel so prescient now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2366765

Seriously, I think people are seriously overthinking the photo sharing aspect. That's just the first thing they could think of that seemed like it would have mass appeal, but I imagine the company has little to no interest in private photos or in tracking individual users.

Here's how I see the possible future applications. You go somewhere and use your phone en route. Your phone knows approximately where you are and have been recently with a fair degree of detail. Rather than uploading that information to a server and scaring people away from using it, it listens to a stream of numbers from a server, which represent various different location and/or environmental criteria. The phone matches these with what it knows about itself based on where you've taken it, as if it were playing bingo. Every so often it gets a good match, and then uses that as a hash to look up a particular commercial message - one that has a high probability of being relevant to the owner of the phone based on where they are, where they're going, or where they have an established trail.

So you're traveling up the escalator in a shopping mall, when suddenly your phone shrugs (tm). What is it? That obscure thing you like and searched for last week is in a store 2 minutes walk away. Hardly anyone buys those, so if you go there in the next hour they'll give you 20% off; otherwise it goes back to the wholesaler.

Not to bring pop culture to HN, but this "photo data mining" reminds me of the ultrasound/sonic contraption in "The Dark Knight" that collected visuals on everyone in the city.

What I find fascinating about Color, though, is that I can open the app in downtown Palo Alto and actually see photos of startups nearby, peoples' lunches, offices, whiteboards, window views, and so on. Mobile/GPS-based photography is an idea that has been tried in the past, but seemed to have never taken off due to lack of traction. Surely too early to tell, but perhaps the high publicity attracted here will actually make it possible for this one?

Wow. Is anyone still surprised that social networks do this? Really? "Oh! so that's what they are really doing?, Aha!' I would think that's has been established as the status quo for a awhile now.

a 42$ million investment, I would be curious about any thoughts on how a company would make a profit from that investment. Other than selling information about it's users.

I think the gotcha would be "Oh the company is NOT selling customer information!" So that's how they are doing it. This article seems like they just uncovered some new revelation.

Just what I've been saying...

And if the data mining stuff is good, they don't even need you to download their trojan horse. They can just license the tech to Facebook and leverage their installed base.

EDIT: Perhaps Twitter is the best fit as a licensee - huge installed base on smart phones, and apparently can't data mine their way out of a wet paper bag, if the #dickbar fiasco is any indication.

One shouldn't forget about exif data on images.
Actually, I think it will be much worse than that. Think: location based advertising. In order to use color you have to allow GPS for the app and, optionally, push-notifications. A perfect combo for pushing ads when you're within X range, etc.

I sent a tweet to them yesterday, but got no response. https://twitter.com/#!/tenaciousJk/status/51033367050846208

edit: group response to the below

No geo-ad platform has this low barrier to entry with this high of an incentive. Simply snap a pic and it's recorded and you're "checked in" if you will. You're doing something you want to be doing: recording your event, people you're with, etc. With 4S and Gowalla you have to want to check-in. Checking in is the app - not recording your memory by way of a picture/video. Sharing pictures is the biggest social app on the web.

What a lame commentary. He's surprised why? What about google search, gmail, facebook and twitter? When the "product" is free, YOU are the product.
How much time we need to understand, that the big business is surveillance of human resources (google, facebook). There always be a ton of cash for data mining and selling it to governments, political parties, advertising companies etc. If governments try to do it, its a privacy problem. But when corporations put a cool, color(ful), free app, you will give them your data, they can sell it. And its perfectly legal. Thats why they have all the money. But you are decision maker. And only by conscious action and wise choice you can make difference. Big elites(politicians,corporations,big investors) listen only in two cases, when they loose money, and when they are afraid for their life.
No one has mentioned their business model (page 3 of the interview). Basically they expect venues to pay for the ability to know the names of their frequent customers so that they could be greeted... but I thought they don't collect personal info.
To actually get the data they are going to mine, people have to actually use the thing. This is where I think color will fail... plus they spell colour wrong! (sent from Canada)
I rewatched The Social Network. I just realized that Timberlake's final rant as Sean Parker in that film was essentially the premise of Color.com- to wit:

"The next transformative development, a picture-sharing application. A place where you view pictures that coincide with your social life. It is the true digitalization of real life. You don't just go to a party anymore. You go to a party with a digital camera, and then your friends relive the party online. And tagging."

Odious creep factor aside, they deserve credit for securing both color.com and colour.com.

It's just amazing what you can do with $41mm, right?

The tech explains the funding, but I still question whether Color will be widely used. I'm thinking Segway: amazing technology that didn't translate into an experience people enjoyed / wanted enough for mass adoption. This is why Apple does so well: they get both the technology and the experience right.
Color is not the sonic scanning mobile device in Dark Knight, it was the multi-lens visual scanner Lucius Fox threatened to quit over and self-destructed when they found Joker.

Bruce Wayne is Nguyen and we are Lucius Fox, but in this case there is no Joker to catch.

(from the linked article):

> Then it will select the best picture and put it to the top of the photo feeds of people most interested in that image (like fans at the ballpark)

Great idea, but I don't think I've ever seen a description be so hand-wavey. You might as well put "Then some magic happens" there. Some details on how this happens (face recognition? social voting? views?) would be nice.

edit: I guess I should RTFA. It's still really high level, but later in the article Nguyen explains that they use views to measure photo quality.

What kind of a shock. The color app is unsuable, the user experience is the worst i ever had with an app. That's beein said, if data mining is there "goal", then i suspect they fail because when your goal is expressed in this way not in a way that match "user's" goal then you're going to fail. Google never said: "Hey our project i about collecting as much informations on people as we can". There goal is to satisfy some needs of their users.

On the other hand i need to say i was shocked to read what Color was about because it was so close to my start-up gold "idea" (don't ask what? :-) ). But more the time pass more i feel their project is so far of what we'd be doing.

I whish they understand that they can't succeed in this way, they can collect user's data like all those social networks does, but in exchange they need to provide something in exchange.

It's interesting that in a different article, I think it's Sequoia that said something along the lines of "something as revolutionary as this comes around once a decade. It's the next Google".

Seems like the goal of color is to aggregate vast amounts of real world data, like the Google of physical life.

If you ignore the photo-sharing capability for a moment, it sounds like they're trying to create a more accurate alternative to GPS. In the 1700s Britain awarded about £100,000 in "Longitude prize" money to people who contributed to the development of [accurate] longitude. I tried to figure out what that is in today's pounds and found a calculator that said it's £147,000,000.00 today. So if Color really can create an alternative to GPS for $41 million, it would be cheaper than what it cost to develop longitude :)

No idea if they can actually pull this off, but thought the Longitude Prize story is cool (thank you, "Stuff You Should Know" podcast, for mentioning it earlier this year).

There will always be people who will post pictures publicly at different places. (similar to Youtube) There will always be people who will check out who are the crowds in different places. (similar to Youtube) With almost every phone being equipped with camera in the future, there will be even more pictures than video stored in Youtube. They probably will let you find people who have similar interests in each location. When they have a huge stored pictures and people's location preferences, I am sure they'll have ways to generate revenues. If college kids love and often use this application, they should have a chance (I think). Otherwise, ...
I uninstalled it the moment I realized i can't remove my photo from the app. I guess it will be stored permanently public in Color.

(Yes, you can slide the photo left to remove it, but it'd still show up in my stream!)

They got the funding because the investors think there's a small but non-zero chance that Color will become "the next twitter/facebook". The ROI could be 100 fold.

This is almost the opposite strategy to Yuri Milner, who is spreading his bets out over many companies. However, this strategy is no less valid. I say almost because the investors can make many (tens of) bets this size and still succeed in making money.

relax, it's just so they can send Groupon-style offers to people more likely to want them (Groupon would be great... if I ever actually wanted spa treatment, highlights, or weekend breaks)

on the other hand, suprised I haven't seen the obvious 'paedo/stalker threat' brought up yet. it's not data mining you'd need to worry about, it's individual predatory users

How does one profit off of this data. Are there agencies which sell it, or is it marketed to companies in some sort of package?
I was wondering why it received such a huge investment.

That`s brilliant :) Great post john.

color & image recognition = decentralized police state
I think if nothing else this is proof that if you have a clear way to generate value (evil or not), there is large investment to be had for tech start-ups.
Not to mention that most 'mobile' photos are 'geotagged' with the GPS coordinates.

I think this 'data mining' revelation could just well be the 'death knell' ?

"or filenames, meta-data, facial recognition dataming data, geo-data etc'

Yeah there sure is nothing there that 'marketers' could use right?