A New App Shares Photos With, Well, Everyone
When Bill Nguyen was in kindergarten, he probably got top marks for sharing.
Mr. Nguyen was the lead person behind Lala, a music-sharing service that was acquired by Apple in 2009. After spending about a year at his new parent company, Mr. Nguyen left to found a new start-up, Color, which introduces its first application on Thursday. (more after the break)
Color is a photo-sharing app, but it takes the practice in a new, more open direction, in that it shares your photos with whoever else is using the app in close proximity to you. If popular photo-sharing apps like Instagram are like Facebook, where closed networks of friends share images, Color is more like Twitter, in that it is far more public.
“The question we wanted to answer,” said Mr. Nguyen, “is ‘Who are you?’ How can we use technology to make connections between people in the real world as opposed to just the virtual one?”
The app, which is free for iOS and Android (other versions are expected soon), works with your smartphone’s camera to broadcast photo and video. It doesn’t matter if you know the other app users or not — Color shares your photos with them and their photos with you so long as you are within a couple of hundred feet of each other.
Once you take a photo or video, it is sent to Color’s cloud-based servers that stream the photos to other Color users in your area. Walk through Times Square with other Color users, and you can swipe through the app’s sliding interface to see not only the photos you took, but all the photos taken by Color users around you. Not only that, you can see other people’s entire photo stream, arranged in chronological order.
In a test last week, the app worked as advertised. You could take photos and see what you took, but you also had the odd and fun experience of seeing yourself in photos that other people (in this case, staffers from Color, since the app is not out yet) took when nearby.
Why would someone want to look at a stranger’s photos? “In the Web world, content is created by the individual,” said Mr. Nguyen. “I write something on Blogger, I post videos on YouTube and photos on Facebook. We want the content to be created by all those around you.”
And what about people who may feel uncomfortable sharing all their images with the outside world?
“I think the reasons that people desire privacy is because we don’t know what’s out there,” said Mr. Nguyen. “We see another person and wonder: ‘Is that a good person or a bad person?’ If you see the photos that someone took, you will know more about them.”
Mr. Nguyen was the lead person behind Lala, a music-sharing service that was acquired by Apple in 2009. After spending about a year at his new parent company, Mr. Nguyen left to found a new start-up, Color, which introduces its first application on Thursday. (more after the break)
Color is a photo-sharing app, but it takes the practice in a new, more open direction, in that it shares your photos with whoever else is using the app in close proximity to you. If popular photo-sharing apps like Instagram are like Facebook, where closed networks of friends share images, Color is more like Twitter, in that it is far more public.
“The question we wanted to answer,” said Mr. Nguyen, “is ‘Who are you?’ How can we use technology to make connections between people in the real world as opposed to just the virtual one?”
The app, which is free for iOS and Android (other versions are expected soon), works with your smartphone’s camera to broadcast photo and video. It doesn’t matter if you know the other app users or not — Color shares your photos with them and their photos with you so long as you are within a couple of hundred feet of each other.
Once you take a photo or video, it is sent to Color’s cloud-based servers that stream the photos to other Color users in your area. Walk through Times Square with other Color users, and you can swipe through the app’s sliding interface to see not only the photos you took, but all the photos taken by Color users around you. Not only that, you can see other people’s entire photo stream, arranged in chronological order.
In a test last week, the app worked as advertised. You could take photos and see what you took, but you also had the odd and fun experience of seeing yourself in photos that other people (in this case, staffers from Color, since the app is not out yet) took when nearby.
Why would someone want to look at a stranger’s photos? “In the Web world, content is created by the individual,” said Mr. Nguyen. “I write something on Blogger, I post videos on YouTube and photos on Facebook. We want the content to be created by all those around you.”
And what about people who may feel uncomfortable sharing all their images with the outside world?
“I think the reasons that people desire privacy is because we don’t know what’s out there,” said Mr. Nguyen. “We see another person and wonder: ‘Is that a good person or a bad person?’ If you see the photos that someone took, you will know more about them.”
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