There have been few articles this morning which talked about the ‘ultra over-hyped’ startup color.com that launched a few months ago. Color somehow convinced their venture capitalists that they were worth 41 million dollars.
Color is an application that I actually tried out after the first major hype started a few months back and after using the applicaiton for a few weeks, it was apparent that color mainly wanted to be “The New” social network/photo sharing/hookup kind of app, it lacked integration with any massive already existing sites such as facebook and myspace, and it was built around the idea that when you took a picture of something cool you apparently always felt the idea to instantly want to share it with a group of strangers near you.
Yes, this was the selling point of the business. Take a picture of something in your bedroom “or near you”, upload it to Color, and instantly everyone within a few hundred feet of you (more or less depending on your location) would get to see the picture and decide to friend you or not.
Doesn’t this seem like the this whole idea was based around the creating a massive Weinergate scandals for us mere non-politicians? Honestly, what else could this site have been used for? Are you going to want to share pictures of your garden or a bug near you to non strangers, or would you rather take a picture of yourself masked in some ‘interesting’ positions, hoping that your neighbors might see it and run right over? I think they could have charged for the latter, merged with the site AdultFriendFinder, and had quite a business model on their hands.
This is my favorite nytimes quote:
“Since then, Color has become a warning sign for investors, entrepreneurs and analysts who fear there is a bubble in start-up investing. They say it shows that venture capitalists, desperate to invest in the next Facebook or LinkedIn, are blindly throwing money at start-ups that have not shown they can build something useful, much less a business that can provide decent returns on investment.”
Really?! It took a 41million dollar investment for you to finally figure out that you shouldn’t just throw money at people with no previous experience?
Morons.
[Src: NYTIMES]
