April 2011
7 posts
March 2011
11 posts
Kitchen Door Blues
Geoff Muldaur
“Kitchen Door Blues” by Geoff Muldaur is one of my favorite things.
The title and lyrics are taken from a bit of doggerel by Tennessee Williams:
[My] old lady died of a common cold.
She smoked cigars and was ninety years old.
She was thin as paper with the ribs of a kite,
And she flew out the kitchen door one night.
The second verse, you’ll have to hear for yourself. If you’re at all like me, it will put you in a mood.
Translation of Selected Portions of Business Insider’s Interview with Color Founder Bill Nguyen
BN: We could have done a way better job of creating a tutorial. We did a lot of the UI things that will be the right paradigms early, but they’re a little bit challenging right now. Like not having labels — that’s because we want to be international from day one.
“Because we were afraid that everyone wouldn’t understand our UI, we made it so no one understands it.”
BI: How many downloads have you gotten so far?
BN: I’m not going to comment, but if you look at social networks as an app, we’re number two. We’re only behind Facebook now.
“Not very many. A few thousand, probably. Nowhere near as many as we actually need for this whole thing to make sense. But the important thing is that we got almost as many downloads on our big launch day as a very old app whose last update was before Christmas.”
We had a crazy one where someone was taking photos in an office building in New York, then Jimmy Fallon jumped into their photo stream and offered tickets. That was pretty cool.
“It’s a good thing there are so many celebrities standing by to jump in and let software companies soak up their relevance. Just ask Tumblr.”
So for example, if there’s a game going on at AT&T Park, I bet it’s really interesting to people two or three blocks away, not just inside the stadium. So we dynamically extend the range of our technology. When people are in a situation that’s more of a natural disaster, we extend the range up to 4 or 5 miles. So it’s not fixed, it’s not always 150 feet.
“Haha, good luck if you live two or three blocks away from a stadium. We’ll be sending your baby photos to quiiiiiite a lot of people!”
So for example if you’re at CES, you can click on a map, expand the range, and every photo taken at CES will now be linked to that article you wrote. That can be an amazing tool for people to collect news and share data in real time.
“I don’t have any idea what a photo editor does or why it matters, but this particular Powerpoint slide paid for the hyperbaric aromatherapy break room, so we’re keeping it.”
We’re going to build a intelligent system that allows businesses to participate with their customers. So when you walk into a restaurant and you use Color, and they’re also customers through a self-service Web interface — or actually a self-service iPad interface — every time you walk into the restaurant, your [first] name will show up with your picture. The maitre d’ or receptionist will know who you are, they’ll be able to welcome you, they’ll know the last time you were here, they’ll be able to see pictures if you took them here.
“Yeah, I don’t even know. Are these words that are coming out of my mouth? Whatever, I don’t listen to them.”
It’s kind of funny because we’re right in downtown Palo Alto, dead in the heart of Silicon Valley, and we wrapped our entire building in paper so literally no one knew we were here for a period of seven months.
“Oxygen deprivation, mostly.”
Photo sharing is not our mission. We think it’s cool and we think it’s fun, but we’re a data mining company.
“Fuck everybody in the eye. —Wait, no, I take that back. Both eyes.”
Reddit made me cry and laugh today
Two of the most poignant online conversations I’ve ever seen, and for completely different reasons.
