Instagram-color revelation: Community Building French

Color Labs The first round of financing up to $41 million trillion, a number of controversy. Many users reflect that Instagram is better than Color, and the effect of image processing is also more dazzling. But why Instagram only get 7 million? 41 million is nearly 5 times times higher than 7 million, Color has what kind of killer, worth so much money?

The difference between Instagram and Color is embodied in different ways of community building.

Instagram itself does not create a community, he uses the ability to play, using Facebook and Twitter and other ready-made communities, to maintain their own user base. Instagram may have two purposes:

But the flaw in this approach is also obvious, in the event that Facebook and Twitter develop a mobile camera similar to Instagram's, "take someone else's way, let others have no way to go," Instagram how to counter the system? Instagram's core technology advantage is image processing algorithm, but the algorithm is relatively easy to replicate, and the stable user base is the foundation. The foundation is not stable, even if the prosperity of the moment, it is a flash in the pan.

Figure 1. The Song Dynasty "to create French" is the first Chinese history of the official code of construction.

Instagram is well aware of his weakness, and its countermeasures are the United front. Signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the National Geographic magazine, allowing Instagram mobile cameras to become "National Geographic" mobile clients, encouraging "National Geographic" magazine's potential users to take photos of human landscapes and share interactions around the world. In the active "National Geographic" magazine District, while firmly Instagram their own user base. This strategy, through the United front of "co-prosperity and humiliation", alliances to compete against strong Facebook and Twitter.

It is more subversive to view Color. Color builds the community's approach, saying simply, "in any location, automatically focus on the other Color users within a 100-foot radius, sharing their photos". This seemingly simple function actually contains two areas worth analyzing.

First, we reflect on the purpose and means of the community. Community users build links between people through "attention" and "attention". "Human chain" to achieve personalized content transmission and filtering channels. The content that the user obtains through this channel, basically is the content that he is interested in, while shielding the content that does not interest.

Color lets people who are geographically adjacent, automatically pay attention to each other and share photos taken by each other. The implicit assumption here is that people who are geographically close to each other naturally share a common interest, such as sharing a perimeter service facility and so on.

For a new product, "automatic attention" is conducive to the rapid development of customer base. But unfiltered information, unavoidable academics, bad will cause the rubbish content overflow. Five years ago "community

The message "from the noisy moment [1], to be banned, is proof."

When mobile phone users enter a wireless base station coverage, "cell text message" will automatically send text messages. Regardless of the needs of users, "cell short message" To send a large number of real estate, merchandise promotion and so on information. After the mobile phone users have complained, the cell text gradually withdrew from the stage [2].

Color will not repeat the "Community text message" Of the mistakes, we wait and see. But the introduction of the position into the community, in the composition of the human chain, the introduction of neighbourhood relations, is indeed the general trend. The potential for this is to be able to link online virtual relationships with offline real-world relationships, and with offline physical stores. From a commercial point of view, to achieve "online pull people, offline shopping" profit model.

Lbs,location-based Service, is not inseparable from the latitude and longitude, without GPS?

You need to turn on the GPS every time you take a cell phone photo. Starting GPS takes a few 10 seconds, and even with AGPS, the startup time is shortened, but usually it takes 10 seconds to 20 seconds. Photography is often the action of Hing, if the user must wait 10 seconds, so that the GPS to start, "Hing" will become "hing".

Nor can GPS be kept open because of the considerable power consumption of GPs.

Another way to estimate the location of a mobile phone is to rely on the field strength of the wireless signal to speculate on the distance between the phone and the base stations around it. Assuming that the longitude and latitude of the base station are known beforehand, the latitude and longitude of the current position of the mobile phone can be estimated by means of triangular positioning.

The flaw of this method is poor accuracy, not only because of the wireless field strength, to calculate the distance between the phone and the surrounding base station, this approach is relatively large error. The bigger problem is that the latitude and longitude of the base station are only known to mobile operators. On the one hand, when the base station was installed, workers in the determination of the base station latitude when the work attitude is rigorous, not sure. On the other hand, whether the mobile operators are willing to publish the latitude and longitude of each base station, also is not sure.

How to get the latitude and longitude of the mobile phone's current position seems to be a difficult problem. We might as well take a step back to think, location business is not bound to be inseparable from latitude and longitude degree?

Figure 2 depicts the 2G GSM mobile network architecture and 3G WCDMA mobile network architecture. In GSM mobile network, mobile phone and base station communication between the protocol stack is Um, and in WCDMA, mobile phone and base station communication between the protocol stack is Uu. Whether it's 2G or 3G, the protocol stack is different, but the same thing is that the phone can know the ID of the base station that is currently communicating with it.

If every minute, every cell phone to a website, the current communication with its wireless base station ID, then based on these IDs, this site can know what the current mobile phone, with a wireless community. Even if the site does not know the latitude and longitude of the base station, also do not know the location of the mobile phone latitude and longitude, but the site still know which mobile phone adjacent.

When mobile phone users walk or drive, the mobile phone moves from one base station to another. The website will get a series of base station IDs time series. According to a large number of base station IDs time series, the website can be used to measure the topology of the relationship between the base station and the base station.

With this topology, as long as you know the latitude and longitude of a few base stations, you can reverse the latitude and longitude of other base stations.

Figure 2. 3G/UMTS/WCDMA Release 4 mobile network architecture, compatible with 2G/GSM/GPRS.

February 10, 2011, Kleiner, leader of the Silicon Valley venture World, published an analysis of "mobile internet trends (top mobile Internet Trends)", written by Matt Murphy, and Mary, the leading mobile Internet industry analyst in former Morgan Stanley. MEEKER[3]. The report mentions that Kleiner's boss, John Doerr, predicts the mobile internet, Social + Location + Mobile, abbreviated as Solomo, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Top Mobile Internet Trends, Solomo = Social + Location + Mobile.

Color perfectly embodies the combination of these three elements, but, ironically, the color venture is not Kleiner, but Sequoia (Sequoia), and Bain Capital and Silicon Valley Bank[4].

Why didn't Kleiner vote? Anecdotal speculation, Sequoia and Kleiner bid, the results of the bid all the way up to 40 million, Kleiner feel that Color is not worth this price, so quit bidding.

This speculation is not very credible, because Sequoia and Kleiner are the world of the Wind investment industry veteran, what kind of company value of money, two have their own judgments. Usually not because the opponents drive up, their own brain fever, what to do bidding investment.

If both are optimistic about a start-up company, most of the joint investment, such precedents, such as 1999, two companies are bullish on Google, so the joint investment of 25 million U.S. dollars, accounting for Google 20% shares [5]. Google listed in 2004, today (5/23/2011) Google's market value is 168.9 billion dollars. Investment 12, income 1689/0.25 = 6,756 times times, how a "crazy" word!

Will Color become the next Google? Or more broadly, the mobile internet industry cloud windy, a large number of companies you sing my debut, the head of the Change King flag. How to keep green leaves evergreen?
There is no alternative but to plough deep and consolidate the foundation. The so-called solid foundation, or technology to win, or content to win.

Google's cloud computing platform, represented by GFS, is not only huge, but far more than its rivals. And after more than 10 years of actual operation, in the wind and rain bully not fall, open the human history of the precedent, Google rammed the technical foundation.

Google's servers store pages of more than half of the world's web sites, as well as some historical pages. And Google's coverage is growing every minute. With the world's first massive web page information, Google rammed the content Foundation.

Instagram and Color, of course, have very good ideas, but whether it is technology or content, the foundation is still shallow, it is easy to imitate. To maintain their competitive advantage, we have to accumulate content advantages as soon as possible, expand their technical advantages. It remains to be seen when Instagram or Color will be able to make the future camera as imagined in the video below.

Video 1. Imagine the future of smart cameras.

Reference,

[1] Brief introduction of cell short message.

Http://baike.baidu.com/view/571006.htm

[2] Small-cell SMS ads, convenience or harassment?

Http://www.cnhubei.com/200705/ca1355203.htm

[3] Kleiner released "Mobile internet Trend Report".

Http://wenku.baidu.com/view/9f0deac49ec3d5bbfd0a740f.html

[4] Color Looks to reinvent Social consortium with their Mobile Photo App (and $41 technologists in funding)

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/23/color-looks-to-reinvent-social-interaction-with-its-mobile-photo-app-and-41-million-in-funding/

[5] Introduction to Kleiner.

Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiner_Perkins_Caufield_%26_Byers

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Source: http://www.ifanr.com/41866