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Social Network Gets Color

The industry is buzzing about Color -- a new proximity- and photo-based social network with no privacy settings, that just debuted on the iPhone and Android.  Rather than "friending" or following people, a Color user simply posts pictures. "Users see pictures posted recently and nearby their current location," NetworkEffect explains. "This concept seems fitting for events -- say, a sports game or a wedding -- where lots of people who don't necessarily know each other are taking photos of the same thing."

"It's the ultimate voyeur app for those who simply want to know what's happening with their close friends or that cute neighbor that just happens to live next door," Mashable writes. With Color, "Augmented reality and nuanced social graphs may finally come of age," writes entrepreneur and blogger John Battelle. "If Color is used by a statistically significant percentage of folks, nearly every location that matters on earth will soon be draped in an ever-growing tapestry of visual cloth."

The brainchild of Bill Nguyen -- who most recently sold Lala to Apple for about $80 million -- Color as already raised $41 million in seed and Series A funding Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital and Silicon Valley Bank. The money is significant enough for BBC News to cry "social bubble!" Not unlike 1999, "Now you can build an app in your back bedroom for virtually nothing, so it's not exactly clear what all that money is for, except recruiting lots of staff and opening a big office."

Does Color even have a business plan? Though early days, the startup "eventually plans to offer businesses a self-serve platform for running deals and ads as part of the Color experience," writes TechCrunch. From there, "Color hopes to eventually start recommending nearby points of interest, and maybe even interesting people."

Will Color live up to this sudden burst of hype? "The real test, of course, will be not how many employees it can hire and how much money it can raise, but how many people actually find the product useful," NetworkEffect adds.

Read the whole story at All Things D »

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