Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No. • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by Canopy » Fri, Jul 22, 2011, 11:10 AM UTC

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.

And to enter in negotiations of this kind is usually to divert most of your energy from actually building your company. You end up with a team only working on this topic, only working on the contract and the visible surface of the project, and after weeks or months of very hard meetings, you sometimes have bet so much that you think you don't have any other choice than sell.

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

#112

Post by hobolobo » Fri, Jul 22, 2011, 11:16 AM UTC

param wrote: post #7

nkassis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too feel like there something there people think has value but the average person doesn't see. But maybe there is nothing and this is really as irrational as it looks.

Agreed. Either Color has value, or it doesn't.

Perhaps a more precise way of saying it is:

Either Color has enormous value or it doesn't.

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

#113

Post by corry » Fri, Jul 22, 2011, 11:35 AM UTC

If the average employee of Color didn't already know this... wow, talk about an upsetting topic. Imagine doing the math on your options, seeing that you could have made a killing, then thinking about how the founders said 'no' to the deal, then thinking about how some of the guys who made that choice jumped ship... it all would make for some bad morale.

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

#114

Post by josefresco » Fri, Jul 22, 2011, 11:47 AM UTC

joshu wrote: post #71

ojbyrne wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We use the the article as the basis for the debate here. Sometimes that debate stays on topic, sometimes it does not. For the sake of timeliness we mostly have to assume the article is accurate, however sometimes the debate itself is regarding the authenticity of the publisher, author or sources (or lack thereof). The HN system is quite healthy IMHO

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

#115

Post by jrmg » Fri, Jul 22, 2011, 12:32 PM UTC

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…

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[...]?

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.

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

#116

Post by 18pfsmt » Fri, Jul 22, 2011, 1:24 PM UTC

sparky wrote: post #96

DarkShikari wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication ). This is what also makes NFC more suitable for mobile payments than RFID.

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.

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

#117

Post by hammock » Fri, Jul 22, 2011, 2:52 PM UTC

mark242 wrote: post #105

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…

"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 n…

* 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.

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

#118

Post by neutronicus » Fri, Jul 22, 2011, 6:08 PM UTC

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…

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

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

#119

Post by moheeb » Fri, Jul 22, 2011, 11:58 PM UTC

Wouldn't Color be the worst copyright/privacy infringer ever created unless they setup some system to blackout certain areas? Sounds like a nightmare.

What happens when Tool and Madonna don't want photos at their venue?

http://asmp.org/tutorials/property-and-model-releases.html

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

#120

Post by SODaniel » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 4:39 PM UTC

$200 million for a start up excluding hard patents is almost always a clear sale. Yeah, it's a good idea but not by any means something completely revolutionizing.