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Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

techcrunch.com

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Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

#71

Post by joshu »

ojbyrne wrote: post #56
joshu wrote: post #46

i feel like HN is fascinated by but has relatively little understanding of how deals work. 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.

I think HN is much better than TechCrunch/Mashable/etc in that regard. The big tech blogs seem to have a vested interest in promoting the idea of huge acquisitions. People here seem genuinely interested in the details and the detailed outcomes.

I dunno. It feels like a lot of the comments are either angry/chip on shoulder/etc or are presenting opinions as fact for puffery. Hardly any better.

There's not even a glimmer of doubt in anyone's mind that the reporting might be incorrect, etc.

Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

#72

Post by nextparadigms »

In Groupon's case ($6 bn offer), Twitter's case ($10 bn offer) and now Color, I feel as if Google got lucky those companies didn't want to sell, because it seems they would've been a huge waste of money. Google seems to be pretty happy about over-spending on these companies, but is extremely cautious about over-spending for patents that could save Android in the long term.

Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

#73

Post by derefr »

DarkShikari wrote: post #63
natural219 wrote: post #45

I might be the only person in the universe who thinks Color is a fantastic idea, but not because it's trying to be an uber-cool new social network. 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 ca…

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…

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.

Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

#74

Post by trevelyan »

vnchr wrote: post #40
trotsky wrote: post #35

Nobody pays $200MM for nothing. It's exceedingly hard to believe google valued a small pre-funding startup at over low eight figures. While most of the time I look at tech crunch leaks and believe they're real albeit spin infused, this just doesn't pass the wtf test. Arrington has appeared to have a grudge against color in the past based on the tone of the TC coverage. I'm inclined to believe this is entirely made up…

-->"It's exceedingly hard to believe google valued a small pre-funding startup at over low eight figures." But Sequoia did when they made the $40mm investment. That's what's so odd about it.

This "de-bubbles" Color in my mind. Not crazy to get a high valuation when you have Google interested in buying you for significantly more.

Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

#75

Post by [deleted] »

DarkShikari wrote: post #63
natural219 wrote: post #45

I might be the only person in the universe who thinks Color is a fantastic idea, but not because it's trying to be an uber-cool new social network. 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 ca…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

#76

Post by seunosewa »

pclark wrote: post #48

I think that Color is an incredible idea for an application, and when I read their pitch I wanted to bang my head on the desk for not coming up with that concept because it is so beautifully simple yet obvious yet useful ! 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 im…

Doesn't Facebook solve this problem already?

Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

#77

Post by rdl »

rudiger wrote: post #29
rdl wrote: post #24

Remember Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo for $45 billion back in 2008? It is worth about $18 billion now (less, actually, especially if alipay goes badly)

Well, an acquisition would have to be for a premium of Yahoo's publicly-traded market capitalization, so it's tough to say how much they "lost" by scuttling the deal.

And there's always the counterexample of Larry + Sergey wanting to sell to Yahoo back in the day for $1mm, and Mark Zuckerberg turning down $1b from Yahoo later. (I sense a theme here...)

Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

#78

Post by pclark »

seunosewa wrote: post #76
pclark wrote: post #48

I think that Color is an incredible idea for an application, and when I read their pitch I wanted to bang my head on the desk for not coming up with that concept because it is so beautifully simple yet obvious yet useful ! 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 im…

Doesn't Facebook solve this problem already?

no, not at all. Facebook exacerbates this problem if anything.

Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

#79

Post by SeoxyS »

For me, the brilliant idea behind Color, (which they did absolutely not realize in their app), is the idea of an elastic social network.

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...

Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.

#80

Post by calbear81 »

SeoxyS wrote: post #79

For me, the brilliant idea behind Color, (which they did absolutely not realize in their app), is the idea of an elastic social network. 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 yo…

Absolutely, I think this is exactly the BIG idea that the VCs saw that others didn't really get. I would add that I don't even think it's about "friends" in your elastic social network, it is that the social network exists based on the context (where you are, who you're with, what you're doing) regardless of whether the other person knows/friends you or not. There is a shared thread that is tied together by a shared experience and Color was trying to capture that.
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