
Aim Higher: Stop Building Photo Sharing Apps - flynnwynn
http://www.cristinajcordova.com/2011/03/aim-higher-stop-building-photo-sharing-apps/
======
neutronicus
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.

~~~
thinkcomp
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.

~~~
neutronicus
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.

~~~
thinkcomp
Barriers to entry include, but are not limited to:

1\. Building a scalable accounting system that works for merchants and
consumers

2\. Keeping good enough records to get audited financial statements for as
many years as it takes you to build (1)

3\. Building mobile applications on 3 or more popular platforms with
completely different SDKs

4\. Applying for 43 state money transmitter licenses

5\. Getting enough money to be able to afford (3) and (4)

6\. Complying with the changing USA PATRIOT Act, Bank Secrecy Act, Federal
Reserve Bank and U.S. Treasury / FinCEN directives on an ongoing basis while
maintaining profitability

7\. Convincing people and POS vendors to sign up and develop for a new system
en masse...

8\. ...without allowing malicious hackers to sign up en masse

9\. Not moving so slowly that Apple, Google, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard,
Discover, American Express, Intuit, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or any other startup
trying to break into mobile payments can copy you

10\. Not moving so quickly that everything breaks, because it can't

It's a hard problem.

------
brown9-2
_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
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
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>

------
issaco
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...](http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-
bin/drupal/system/files/assignments/Paparazzi4.pdf)

"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
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.

------
famousactress
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.

------
jkincaid
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.

------
MJR
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?

~~~
cristinacordova
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.

~~~
MJR
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.

~~~
flynnwynn
oh... so because you have a patent... it must be REAL technology???

~~~
MJR
You're drawing conclusions outside of my argument. Please re-read what I
wrote.

She said _I just don't happen to find photo sharing to be a big problem
requiring $41M to solve at the moment._ And my comment regarding the patents
was based on the $41M investment being in their technology, not a photo
sharing app.

I made no other comment on the validity of the patents. I believe the
investors based their investment on the underlying technology used to create
the app and not the app itself. They valued the technology and the team that
created it worthy of a $41M investment.

------
felixchan
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.

------
danielayele
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.

------
charlesju
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.

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

~~~
charlesju
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.)

~~~
keiferski
I don't disagree with you in that entrepreneurs choose software because it's
cheaper.

My question was: what's inherently derivative about software startups? Why is
everyone making photo-sharing software and not software to solve other
(unaddressed) problems?

~~~
nbashaw
What unaddressed problems do you think they should be solving? All in all, the
consumer web is a pretty over-served market. I don't see a problem with there
being ~5 serious competitors in a big, fresh problem area.

~~~
keiferski
1\. According to that line of thought, every problem has been solved already.
Are we really at that point? There are _hundreds_ of problems that are more
relevant than "how do I share images of my location with people in my same
location".

2\. ^What real problem does a company like Color solve? Is there one?

3\. Maybe the problem is that startups are targeting _consumers_? B2B has a
way of culling the herd: if you don't solve a problem, no one buys your
product.

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

~~~
flynnwynn
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.

------
wladimir
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.

------
PaulHoule
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/>

------
rboyd
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.

~~~
cristinacordova
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-...](http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110324/video-the-pulse-
boys-to-men-talk-about-huge-growth-of-visual-news-reading-app/?mod=ATD_rss)

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

------
stickhandle
amen

