Well my friends, there’s a new Instagram fork in the app store call Instacolor, and it seems to actually be giving the ridiculously over funded Color some competition:
If photo sharing apps Instagram and Color would mate and have a baby, it would likely look something like the Instacolor app made by tinkerer Rakshith Krishnappa.
Now lets be clear that when I say “competition,” that may well be the overstatement of the century (ok, not quite, but can you let me get my point across?). As we all know, the vicinity-based photo sharing app Color received $41 million in VC funding. The concept of the app is to automagically share photographs amongst a common group of users. The hope is that you and your friends would all be at, say, a party taking pictures using Color and that all people there would be able to see the pictures others are taking in realtime. No need to share them through email afterwards. They had a rather rickety launch, and, well, do you know anyone that uses it ? They’re trying to take a step back and try again at this point, but they’d better get it right next time.
Instagram on the other hand now has over 5 million users, and has the far simpler premise of simply taking a picture, giving it a quick caption, and sharing it with your friends. Oh, and it was able to do that with about a seventh of the funding that Color had: $7.1 million.
As more and more people are using Instagram, the odds that a real life friend of yours is using it are getting increasingly higher. Enter Instacolor. It pegs users of Instagram in your neighborhood on a map. Live. You can see who of the people that live in your area are currently taking photos and follow them with just a tap (or two). Of course, the catch is that these people have enabled geo-tagging on their photos — something I’m apparently almost alone in never doing. But still, it’s a really nice idea. It certainly seems better than Color, and because it’s built on Instagram, it already has a guaranteed huge user base.
Sure, Instacolor isn’t exactly the same as Color. Instacolor lets you see anyone’s pictures in a rather large radius while Color is meant for sharing pictures at a closer proximity.
But is a slight technical difference worth $41 million?
Color HQ sure hopes it is.
While Color is struggling to get off the ground, Instagram has already established a huge number of users, and now has developer support. So much so that apps are being created that may well do better what Color was never able to do. I mean, look at Instacolor’s icon!
Mushy life lesson time: Money isn’t everything. You remember that, Color.
Source: Tech Crunch
