Will Color Be Bigger Than Google or Facebook?

In one’s quest to be entrepreneurial one often ponders new products and ideas. This week I started playing with an iPhone application call Color . This is a photo-sharing application like Instagram, but with a twist. Instagram enables you to take pictures with your iPhone and then share it with friends on a social network like Facebook, Twitter etc. Color is different – first of all it allows you to join a group within a certain distance of where you are physically located. Second, any pictures that you take are shared with that group. Third, and I have not tried this part yet, you can receive messages from group members! It’s a strange application, primarily because it is so different from social networks that we know – Facebook, Twitter etc. In a conventional social network, you join a network. In Color you join a group without joining a social network. Still don’t get it? Me too

Two weeks ago Silicon Valley and by extension the tech world, was abuzz about Color – one reason, and probably the main reason, being that venture capitalists injected $41 million into a series A round into the company. Once I heard about the investment I became curious, downloaded the app and started experimenting. Then I read that the $41 million is part of the quest for “the new Facebook”. I can see why the search for the new Facebook has begun. It appears that Google is having problems, Twitter is having challenges and Facebook is highly valued – so, no time like the present to search for the next big thing. After all, this is Silicon Valley where tech innovation never stops.

While I certainly do not fully comprehend everything about the Color app, I admire the thinking outside-the-box of the founders. In some ways, Facebook is becoming predictable and boring. Maybe now is the time to “friend” someone you do not know, as long as she or he is physically near you – wow! how cool would that be?? That’s just one aspect of Color. There are other angles such as data mining – for example, how does a person behave when in a certain group? Well, just study the data gathered from that person’s interactions in that group…

These are exciting times in this age of mobile, social and cloud!

Any outside-the-box ideas that you are pondering?

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