By Kelly Faircloth 1/02 1:05pm

Apple in Your Eye

Kimmie! You should have waited! (Photo: Instagram)

Apple Rumored to Be Developing iPhones in Colors You’ll Regret in Six Months

Were you thinking of buying a new iPhone for yourself? Well, if you’re willing to wait it out, you might have a few more options with the release of the iPhone 5S. Barron’s reports that analyst Brian White is predicting that the company will soon debut a new line of iPhones–in glorious Technicolor!

This’ll be just like the time you bought that red sofa you now despise. There’s a reason HGTV is always harping on neutral furniture accessorized with “pops” of color. Read More

By Steve Huff, Jessica Roy and Patrick Clark 11/20/12 11:29am

Exit This Way

Mr. Nguyen

The Startup God of Wealth Destruction: Color Officially Shut Down

A day after we learned about a lawsuit alleging Color CEO Bill Nguyen inflicted “emotional distress” on an employee with a guy sporting a Glock, Color has announced it is shutting down. The news posted at the top of the company’s website is succinct: “Alert: We hope you’ve enjoyed sharing your stories via real-time video. Regretfully, the app will no longer be available after 12/31/2012.”

As PC Magazine notes, regardless of what kind of craziness went down in Color’s offices, the app held little interest for potential consumers: Read More

By Kelly Faircloth and Jessica Roy 11/19/12 5:34pm

Legal Issues

Mr. Nguyen, looking innocuous. (Photo: flickr.com/scobleizer)

Employee Sues Color, Alleges Bill Nguyen Intimidated Employees With a Dude Wearing a Glock

The long saga of Color, the ill-fated, infamously over-funded photo-sharing startup, just gets weirder and weirder. After rumors swirled that it was shutting down for good, the company’s assets were acquired by Apple; now, TechCrunch reports that former employee Andrew Witherspoon (who was laid off) is suing both Color and former CEO Bill Nguyen for a host of shocking reasons, including “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

If even a handful of the accusations in this complaint are true, there’s been major misbehavior happening at Color Labs. And if Mr. Witherspoon has made them up, well then he missed his calling as a novelist. Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 10/18/12 7:29am

Linkages

Rise and shine! (Photo: flickr.com/aloshbennett)

Booting Up: How Did Color Go From Wind-Down to Apple Acquisition in Just One Day?

Twitter is blocking its first account: Tweets from the neo-Nazi group Besseres Hannover are no longer viewable in German. [Quartz]

For a company that hasn’t done a damn thing, Color Labs inspires a lot of rumor-mongering. Yesterday the talk was all about whether the startup was winding down. Today, the scuttlebutt suggests Apple might buy the ill-fated photo-sharing startup. [The Next Web]

Pour one out for the concept of “going online,” which is increasingly archaic and soon to be utterly foreign to the youngs, like cassettes and modesty. [AllThingsD]

Please share Betabeat’s delight in this collection of “wonderfully ridiculous” movie computers. Obviously, the supposedly state-of-the-art hunk of junk from the 1974 classic The Towering Inferno takes the cake. [Wired]

Silicon Valley has its very own cover band, composed of VCs and entrepreneurs. But what did you expect? We live in a world where Dennis Hopper once did an Ameriprise commercial. [Wall Street Journal]

By The Editors 9/28/12 5:35pm

shameless rumormongering

Jakob Lodwick

Rumor Roundup: Apple Aggressively Recruits Devs to Fix Maps, Jake Lodwick’s Office Ball Pool

It’s a gloomy, rainy Friday in New York, but we’re about to serve you a piping hot bowl of gossip. Bon appetit!

Map-maker, Map-maker, Build Me a Map! If Tim Cook‘s mea culpa wasn’t enough to demonstrate how hard Apple is scrambling to fix its iOS 6 mapocalypse, then how about its last ditch recruiting techniques to find Ruby developers? Mojo Talantikite, a cluster engineer at Engine Yard in New York City, said he (and a number of his technically talented friends) have been hit up by Apple recruiters recently.

“I don’t think it’s too out of the ordinary for a company to scramble to soak up talent once they figure out their product is deficient,” he told Betabeat by email. “But considering that the beta of Apple Maps was terrible three months ago, you’d think they would have started the aggressive recruitment phase then,” he said, adding, “It’s pretty easy to realize they are in put out the fire mode.” Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 5/23/11 1:03pm

App for That

Color

Color Relaunching With More Traditional UI, and Photos Are Just the Beginning

It’s been a while since we heard about Color, the public photo sharing app that got $40 million from Sequoia Capital before it even launched. But yesterday Betabeat glimpsed a sweatshirted hacker posting a photo to Color from the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon who turned out to be Andre Charoo, an engineer who started working at Color just over a month ago.  Read More

By Ben Popper 4/28/11 11:36am

Bubbling Up

paparazzi

Photo Sharing Overload Powering Pixable’s Growth

The marriage of great cameras and instant uploads made possible by the modern smartphone has led to an explosion in photo sharing. Between services like Flickr, Instagram, Foursquare and Facebook, the average person is presented with three to four thousand pictures each week, says Pixable CEO Inaki Berenguer. “Not many people have time for all Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 10:16am

Viral Marketing

New Work City

New Work City Hosts Fake Start-Up Party for Color, to Include Demo

 

New Work City’s Tony Bacigalupo and Sara Chipps won the internet yesterday with their fake slide decks for the $41 million mobile social photo sharing app Color. The decks were circulated around the New York City tech Twitters and then made their way to Hacker News and then to TechCrunch; the team at Color even gamely retweeted it.

But NWC’s not done yet. The joke continues with a real party for the fake Color.xxx, Color’s brutally honest alter-ego, which already dropped an Android app, Color.xxx (which is easier to find in the app store than the real thing and has 5/5 stars compared to the real app’s 1.5/5 stars). Read More