News of another photography app for the iPhone raising an insane $41M from the likes of Sequoia, Bain Capital and others quickly spread through the interwebs today and has lead to numerous people opine that we have officially entered another bubble.

From a cursory glance, this seems to be just another entry into the already crowded photo app market dominated by the likes of Instagram, Hipstamatic, etc. and its hard to believe that investors would seriously fund another startup in this space (especially the amounts that they have). I mean, no one would seriously throw in $41M for a social, mobile, local, photo-sharing app (as a mock slide of their pitch deck suggests) and say “Not since Google have we seen this.’ Could they??

Sounds absurd and was enough to get me to download the app. Having played around with it over a few minutes, I can see it has potential but certainly not enough to justify a $41M first round after just a few days of launch. The UI, while could use some work, loads seemlessly – images pop up on my iPhone almost instantly and before you realize it, you begin to feel a bit creepy spying on people’s photos. I spent a few minutes looking at the pictures people put up near me (however they define “near”) and even came across a fellow YCombinator mate (@chrysb), whom I havent spoken to in a few years which was kinda cool. The app has all the makings of what made Facebook successful – pure voyeuristic pleasure in browsing other people’s photos and seeing what they are doing at any given time. The difference is – you don’t necessarily know these people and the common bond is location. And it does that job pretty well. I can see this being useful at concerts, parades, revolutions, festivals, sports events, and the like as this grows. Does that warrant $41M? I don’t think so. Especially not without a clear revenue model (which might be present though not immediately apparent – local deals?).

However, given the founders are serial entrepreneurs with a great track record, it’s not a silly bet. In fact, just the mere fact that raising this much money has generated so much controversy, might help them get over the initial chicken-egg scenario required to make this succeed. Time will tell the fate of color.com.

Here is a word cloud of Obama’s speech last night. It’s been normalized by removing some common words found in abundance in all State of the Union addresses such as  ’America’, ‘American’, ‘people’. Obama’s emphasis, as is apparent, was on new jobs (including those created by the government), business, spending and innovation.

Contrast this to the speech given by G.W. Bush in 2007 (his third year), where the emphasis is on terrorism and health insurance.

It’s neat to back and see the difference in the state of affairs, and mindsets and priorities of these presidents.

Word clouds were created thanks to this neat tool, and the transcripts were fetched from here.

]]> http://blog.nihaargupta.com/2011/01/obama-vs-bush-state-of-the-union-speech/feed/ 0 http://blog.nihaargupta.com/2011/01/infographic-the-downfall-of-yahoo/ http://blog.nihaargupta.com/2011/01/infographic-the-downfall-of-yahoo/#comments Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:04:52 +0000 nihaar http://blog.nihaargupta.com/?p=1087

Infographics are so hot lately!

Interesting to see how the demise started with their decision to use Google as the search engine.

Full Article On Techcrunch.

What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York | Magazine | Wired.com.

via generic.

So frightening, yet so true.

Here is a compilation of AT&T’s new global coverage campaign that’s beautiful and engaging. Very similar to HSBC’s
“world’s local bank” campaign.

While sophisticated, do you think its more effective than this?

Official Google Blog: Display advertising: “WATCH THIS SPACE”.

You’re not in Kansas any more – Google’s new name and logo.

xkcd – Not so much a joke as an awesome gimmick that caters well to its core readers

Google Translate For Animals – We can all be Dr. Dolittles now! (Great video in here)

MapThatPad Telepathic Helmets - MapThatPad introduces finding apartments without typing a key or moving a mouse!

YouTube - Watch any YouTube video in an ASCII rendition (TextP) and save Google $1/second in bandwidth costs.

Interestingly enough, I just visited Last.Fm as well and noticed the very same trend:

Music and personality: A fascinating study that looks at how you can judge a persons personality by his/her musical preference. According to this study, people were better judges of a person when listening to the type of music they liked than they were then they met the person briefly face-to-face. I wonder if this kind of information can be used by dating sites to better match personality types or look at someones changes in music preference over time and see how that maps to his/her personality changes. Last.fm provides an API to access this information so it is feasible to try it on yourself or people you have known for a while (who of course have been using Last.Fm for sometime). I imagine this data could get increasingly more interesting for research purposes as Last.Fm ages.

Website credibility: An old (dated 2001) but more relevant than ever study on what users perceive as being a credible website (the key components being trustworthiness & expertise). Recommend everyone working with websites of any kind to look at it if you haven’t already done so.

MapThatPad: Last but not least, a website that helps you with your apartment hunting process on Craigslist. This is pretty much what I wanted when I was searching for apartments a few months ago.