Aim Higher: Stop Building Photo Sharing Apps

http://www.cristinajcordova.com/2011/03/aim-higher-stop-building-photo-sharing-apps/

by flynnwynn • 15 years ago

58 37 15 years ago

thefahim• 15 years ago

Facebook started basically as a photo-sharing app. Look at it now.

flynnwynn2• 15 years ago

She's not saying that the idea is wrong in and of itself, but that we should all be focusing on ideas that go beyond sharing photos - solving hard problems.

PaulHoule• 15 years ago

I think it's more interesting to enable people to share other people's photos. I can certainly take more creative commons photos that other people took than I can take myself. See

http://ookaboo.com/

charlesju2• 15 years ago

Companies like those do get funded, but they are usually run by industry veterans that cut their chops on consumer internet companies the like. ie. Tesla Motors. I do not think it makes sense for internet entrepreneurs to go after markets with such heavy capital restrictions, it's not reasonable, it's much more reasonable to start small and slowly mature/graduate up to the more complicated and advanced problems/companies.

keiferski3• 15 years ago

True, but I don't see any reason why low capital = low innovation. Cheap internet companies aren't derivative by default.

charlesju2• 15 years ago

My second reply is simply: free markets.

If there was a better ROI for young entrepreneurs, they would do it. There is nothing that scales like the internet/software that can be built with such a low cost. Michael Lewis said this best in his book, the last 20 years have been the largest legal value creation in the history of mankind in Silicon Valley (measured by normalized job creation, revenue, new businesses, etc.)

brown9-2• 15 years ago

These aspirations are depressingly low. Where are all the entrpreneurs trying to compete with Google over self-driving cars? How about competing with SunRun’s solar energy systems to power homes across the country?

Just because you don't see them on TechCrunch doesn't mean they don't exist.

vecter• 15 years ago

Reference? When I do a search, all I get is Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=self+driving+cars

Granted, there could be three competitors in stealth mode ... but I'm not getting any whiffs of any.

greendestiny• 15 years ago

There have been many entrants to Darpa's Grand Challenge over the years, and that's unlikely to be the only development in the area: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

bmcmanus• 15 years ago

Amen. I think an information shortage is at the root of all of this outrage.

For example, check out resources like LiveScience or MobileActive.org every once in a while.

Wonderful people are solving big problems as we speak, I promise.

felixchan• 15 years ago

There's a reason people all over the world are building photo-sharing apps.

1. It's a huge opportunity. Huge market. 2. No one has nailed it yet. (No, Instagram has not yet won.)

It's perfectly reasonable to build a photo sharing app if you think you have the right formula.

MJR3• 15 years ago

First, the domain of knowledge to create a photo sharing app is far different than the domain of knowledge required to compete with Google over self-driving cars or solar energy systems to power homes across the country. Both of those examples are clearly physical products which require teams with far different skills than creating a team to develop a piece of software.

I understand the point here, but I disagree with it completely. Let people build what they're passionate about. Fund passionate people. If there's a market for the product it will be successful. If not, the investors made a poor decision. The money went into the ecosystem, it didn't disappear, it wasn't wasted.

We hear a ton about the venture firms that fund internet and software businesses because of what we read and pay attention to. Because we don't hear about all the bio-med and energy companies on TechCrunch or HN doesn't mean that they're not out there building the exact same products and getting funded by VC firms specializing in that space. They are getting attention, you're just not looking in the right places to see it.

All I've been reading lately are opinion pieces on what people should and shouldn't be doing with their lives, their businesses and their talents. If you're so passionate that you need to tell everyone what to do, quit complaining about about what should be happening and go make it happen.

Edit - Plus the author is currently head business development at Alphonso Labs, which develops iPhone, iPad and Android applications. What sense does that make? Quit making apps and do something else, but I'm going to keep working for a company that makes apps?

cristinacordova2• 15 years ago

I never said to quit making apps and do something else. There are many, many apps that solve big problems. I love apps and work at a company that makes apps for mobile devices. I just don't happen to find photo sharing to be a big problem requiring $41M to solve at the moment.

MJR3• 15 years ago

It's been clear from the first article about Color that the investment was not about a photo sharing application, but about the underlying technology. The recent information that they are applying for six patents supports this.

neutronicus3• 15 years ago

It's a lot harder to break into solving real, hard problems.

For instance, consider the market I know: neutron physics modeling of nuclear reactors. The existing solutions represent a ton of accumulated domain knowledge, but they're none of them very user-friendly or well-integrated into either the reload design process or the document creation process, nor were they designed with certain improvements in technology infrastructure (distributed computing, GPU computing) in mind.

Getting into this type of technology is hard, though - you need to pay for access to nuclear data files, and vast reserves of historical data are essential for validating your code's predictions, as well as reams of experimental thermal-hydraulic data for building empirical correlations. Information about modern neutron transport algorithms is scattered throughout academic journals, and unbiased comparisons, to say nothing of sample implementations, are so rare as to be nonexistent. Once you've done all of this work, then you need to produce all of the documentation required to convince the NRC that your algorithm is accurate enough for design calculations.

And after all of that, chances are the utilities will just buy the fuel vendors' codes because why deal with two companies, and the fuel vendors will keep using their in-house codes, because fuck you, that's why.

To compete in a market like that, you need connections, and you need experience, probably way more than 4 or 5 people's worth of either. A minimum viable product is probably a man-decade or so of labor.

thinkcomp2• 15 years ago

It's especially difficult because investors aren't interested in funding long-term projects. I've put in that man-decade of labor (I've been working on my current project in various forms since 2001), but no one in the Valley's elite circles could care less. This is okay in that I own 100%, but it sure does make it difficult to get things done sometimes.

neutronicus3• 15 years ago

FaceCash looks pretty cool.

What were the barriers to entry? I imagine competing with the credit card oligopoly at point of sale is pretty tough.

jamesrcole2• 15 years ago

Why isn't photo sharing a real problem? Why isn't it hard? I think it's easy to be dismissive of things like this, especially from a purely technical viewpoint.

I'd like to see the other pics people take at get-togethers or on camping trips, but the effort of uploading them to something like facebook doesn't seem worth the effort for many (most?) people (that i know, at least), and there's no way easy way to collate the pics taken by diff people.

neutronicus3• 15 years ago

I thought "hard" was meant in a purely technical sense.

But anyways - three smart guys in a garage can build a minimum viable photo sharing application using knowledge and technology obtained from the internet.

You can say "oh, it's hard to do photo sharing right, it's a hard problem", but the fact is there are technological problems out there that are hard to do at all, that are completely beyond the reach of three smart guys in a garage using only knowledge available on the internet.

issaco• 15 years ago

My theory as to why so many photo sharing apps:

(2007-2008 CS193P) Stanford Apple iPhone app project involves twitter api -> many twitter clients created.

(2009-2010 CS193P) Stanford Apple iPhone app project involves flickr api -> many photo sharing apps created.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/system/f...

"By this point, your Paparazzi app looks up real users on Flickr, finds and lists their photos and lets you view them up close by zooming and panning. It also plots these photos on a map and lets you browser photos by location."

dotBen• 15 years ago

Theory only works if the majority of these apps were built by Stanford CS Alumni who took the 2007-2008 or 2009-2010 iPhone class.

That's not the case for Path, Color or Instagram.

stickhandle• 15 years ago

amen

rboyd• 15 years ago

While I don't disagree, I did notice that the author works for a company that develops a mobile news reader app. Not exactly breaking new ground there either.

cristinacordova2• 15 years ago

Actually, when we launched many did call our design revolutionary - we were the first visual news reading application on the iPad and iPhone. Steve Jobs even pointed out our app at WWDC -http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110324/video-the-pulse-boys-to-...

danielayele• 15 years ago

Aim Higher: Stop Building Group Buying Services

Aim Higher: Stop Building Location Based Services

Aim Higher: Stop Building Social Networks

Aim Higher: Stop Building Search Engines

Aim Higher: Stop Building Online Retailers

If its a big space with lots of potential people will try to fill it. Remember, people build the future, it doesn't just "happen." All these services and large funding rounds are just proving that photosharing is a big unsolved space (just like group buying, LBS, social networks, search engines, online retailers, computer manufacturers, operating systems...). Relax and let the market do its thing. Or jump into the market. But please don't complain about the way innovation works.

rokhayakebe• 15 years ago

This photo sharing phenomenon reminds me of PG's ideas. http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html [9]

jkincaid• 15 years ago

For what it's worth, Color (the company) does not see itself as just another photo sharing app.

When I was in their office, the executives kept making vague references to how they would be doing some heavy data crunching and creating recommendation algorithms. They really didn't elaborate, but it sounded like the photo-taking was very much just a Step 1. Almost like an excuse to get people to pull out their phones so that Color could collect a bunch of data beyond just the photo itself (the implicit social graph, location, time, audio, etc).

Maybe they were just saying this stuff so that I wouldn't put them in the same bucket as Instagram and the rest, but this is a really smart team, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Also, I don't think Sequoia would have poured this much money into just another photo sharing app.

famousactress• 15 years ago

Okay, look. Worth 41 million? Sheesh, I dunno. But I think comparing Color to Instagram is probably a mistake.

Instagram is a photo application. Just like Flickr is a photo application. They're about Photography. They're shrines to images, where the image is paramount. These are apps where energy and attention is poured in, and photos come out.

I think Color might be a valid attempt to invert that idea. I think it's possible that Color is no more about photos than Twitter is about words.

Maybe photos are a real medium. This isn't a masturbatory attempt to tag and glorify false-attempts at art with a camera phone. The photos are visual information, and frankly I don't really think we've figured out how to deal with that elegantly. Youtube, Google Image Search, Flickr.. these are all really brute 'Search for something to look at' kinds of ideas.

I've been waiting to see someone think differently about visual information, and I'm hoping that Color is doing that.

Or whatever. Maybe they're a bullshit bubble-canary that's gonna spend the money making grunge-photo-filters and hooking iPads up to beer kegs. I dunno. Just hoping.

wladimir• 15 years ago

I agree with the sentiment. If we only worry about the social, society gets tied up in trivialities. It extends the echo chamber for the same old things.

On the other hand, this is simply what the media is obsessing over. It's easy to understand convenience apps, but not new technology for which the implications on large scale are still pretty unknown.

It's all still happening: Better and smaller chips, commercial spaceflight, more efficient solar energy, interesting developments in DNA sequencing. Real high tech. Just look past the attention whores.

Aim Higher: Stop Building Photo Sharing Apps

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