I still think that there’s a good idea–or at least an interesting one–at the heart of Color, the iPhone app that had a catastrophic launch. So I’m hoping it successfully reboots. But the big news at the moment is that it’s lost its chief scientist.
Tag Archives | Color
More Pointless Privacy Trolling Over Color
As if the Chicken Little “the sky is falling” privacy recriminations over the Color photo-sharing app since last week’s launch weren’t enough, privacy advocates are ready to pounce once again. This time a security researcher says that the application is vulnerable to “geolocation spoofing,” essentially meaning a user could fake his location to view images at that location.
Veracode chief technology officer Chris Wysopal is the man behind this latest statement, and said the spoof is done by use of a unofficial third-party app on a jailbroken iPhone. Of course, the whole flaw is dependent on that — normal iPhones would not be susceptible to this as Apple would never let such an app in the App Store. Most iPhones aren’t jailbroken.
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Color’s First Fifteen Hours: It’s Revolutionary! It’s Pointless! It’s Brilliant! It’s Terrible!
I don’t like writing about stuff I haven’t tried. Plenty of products that look swell in demos to tech journalists don’t work very well. Sometimes, in fact, they don’t work at all. So I sometimes pass on covering new gadgets, apps, and services until I can spend time with them–even as other sites are expressing opinions based largely on having the items in question described to them in glowing terms by tech execs.
Yesterday, however, I wrote about Color, a new smartphone app that automatically shares photos and videos with people near you. I thought it was a nifty idea. It comes from a company cofounded by Bill Nguyen, whose previous startup Lala was definitely a nifty idea. And I did get to fool around a bit with the app during a demonstration in a real-word setting–a restaurant, which is the sort of place that Color is supposed to be fun and useful. That’s a major step beyond just having it explained via PowerPoint.
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Color: Share Photos With Those Around You–Automatically and Instantly
Back in November, entrepreneur Bill Nguyen–the founder of Lala and other companies–bought himself a cool domain name: Color.com. Now his new startup is announcing a cool free app to go with it: Color, a photo- and video-sharing program for iPhone and Android handsets. It should be available for both platforms tonight.
While I’ve met with the company, received a demo, and played with the app a bit, I haven’t had extensive hands-on time with the service. So this isn’t a review. But I’ve seen enough to know that Color is a fresh take on the seemingly well-trodden concept of photo/video sharing; it’s nothing at all like Flickr or Instagram or Path or other services you might be using. And if it lives up to its potential it could be a big hit.
Like umpteen other apps, Color lets you snap and share photos and videos. But instead of sharing them with people you specify, it shares them with people near you–and if those people are using the Color app to capture stuff, you can see it, too. It all happens in real time in one shared stream, without anyone involved having to do anything except shoot photos. And it creates a group-created visual record of events large (like a concert or a conference) and small (a birthday party or a dinner out).