Color, a new app that makes social connections and captures events “in the round” through the medium of location-based photographs, has officially launched, with major VC firms putting an eye-popping $41m into the six-month old company behind it.
That’s the snapshot on the Silicon Valley startup, but the bigger picture is that Color makes possible new forms of automated, ad hoc content-sharing and social networking.
Anything that can possibly break the stranglehold of the Facebook paradigm is going to get attention in these parts and Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Silicon Valley Bank have piled in to back Bill Nguyen, chief executive, and his seven co-founders. The $41m they are providing is possibly the largest round of pre-launch funding in start-up history.
Mr Nguyen (pictured below) is the serial entrepreneur whose last venture, the music-streaming site Lala, was bought by Apple.
Clearly, working in Cupertino, the home of the “magical and revolutionary” iPad, has influenced him and the Color team, as they describe their app as nothing short of “miraculous”.
Doug Leone, the Sequoia partner who is joining Mike Krupka, Bain managing director, on Color’s board, is rather taken by it as well.
“Just as the iPhone changed everything about mobile phones, Color will transform the way people communicate with each other,” he says.
“Once or twice a decade a company emerges from Silicon Valley that can change everything. Color is one of those companies.”
Personally, I thought it was pretty cool and rife with possibilities when Mr Nguyen and his team came round to demonstrate Color’s smarts.
Wait though, colour me stupid. I shouldn’t get carried away here – it is just an app, and it doesn’t work unless someone else is running it close by.
“So what precisely does this miraculous thing do then and how do I get it?”, you scream.
Color is immediately available as a free app for the iPhone, latest iPod touch and Android smartphones. Download it, open it and take a photo to begin the experience.
Warning! Everything you take using Color is public, that’s the whole idea, with your photo immediately being uploaded in the background to Color’s servers.
Once you’ve taken that first pic, Color’s patent-pending proximity algorithms go to work to pull in all the other photos taken on devices using Color in your close neighbourhood around the same time and show them to you in an attractive timeline.
Color calls this Multi-lens. Mr Nguyen showed me how other members of his team had taken pictures of us as we talked and our conversation was being pictorially displayed almost in real time from several camera angles inside the app.
This was a prosaic example, but imagine being at a wedding or a concert and benefiting from an instant photo record of the experience taken from every angle.
Imagine the social networking and dating possibilities as well – taking a photo of yourself in a bar and seeing who else is there or has done the same and then linking up with them.
If people do choose to identify themselves and create profiles, you can see their profile pictures next to their photos and see who was with you at a particular moment, as well as explore their own “moments” elsewhere.
Although I was not able to get a hands-on trial of Color before its launch today, it appealed to me in the way it created a slice of life and made social networking seem more natural – photos (and videos as well) were being automatically collated in real time to capture and preserve in a panoramic way something that was otherwise fleeting and ephemeral.
Facebook is far more deliberate and structured, Color’s structure relies mainly on its timeline.
The company hopes to make money from businesses wanting to promote themselves using its locational strengths. But it first needs to grow its user base and that seems to me to be its biggest challenge.
Can I persuade you to install Color to see the picture I’ve taken of you and for me to to see the picture you’ve taken of me? If not, I am sure there are plenty of viral marketing plans afoot. Color is a startup to watch and take a photo of.
