More likely: Google offered a few bucks for Color and millions if they met milestones 1, 2, 3...; Color knew they couldn't so they turned it down.
Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
61–70 of 124 posts
Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
#62I 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…
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…
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.
Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
#63I 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 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.
Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
#64I feel like I live in a different universe. Can please someone explain to me what rational thinking might be behind such offers?
You do live in a different universe if you think there are hidden patterns of rational thinking behind everything that looks dumb on the surface. There are often hidden patterns of selfishness and incentives, sure, and that's probably true in this case (if the acquisition went through and didn't pay out, who would get fired for it?).
And then sometimes stupid is just stupid. This is Earth.
Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
#65I 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…
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.
Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
#66I feel like I live in a different universe. Can please someone explain to me what rational thinking might be behind such offers?
People with cash to burn will do crazy things with it.
There isn't necessarily rational thinking behind it.
Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
#67I agree with most here that it's a good idea, but it's been out for months, so maybe this idea was another dime in a dozen. I guess Google has lots of cash to spare on a domain name and a hype machine.
Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
#68Color's service would be a killer feature for Google+. Color is an excellent idea assuming that there are users who are willing to post pictures and share location data. Unfortunately for Color, it will be a long hard road to get these users. Google, on the other hand, already has a ton of users, the beginning of a social network, and a really strong presence in the phone market. If Color-like functionality was built into Android, Google would find themselves with a very valuable service right from the get-go. A lot of the hard work is behind them.
Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
#69I 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…
There is no bad PR!
Re: Google Tried To Buy Color For $200 Million. Color Said No.
#70I didn't try the iPhone application, but it has 1411 ratings with 2 stars. How is this a good idea if people don't actually like it?
The idea was good, it was just the execution that was bad. The app itself was really buggy and the proximity-limit for near photoes was way too limited. Even in tech centers like SF it was empty.
http://cinch.fm/scobleizer/194769