It’s not often an app receives $41 million in start-up funding but when an all-star team is asking for it, people listen. Elsewhere, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery debuts in the App Store this morning. What’s that? The developer explains below.
The Color of money
Hopefully you’re not sick of social media apps just yet because there’s a new one on the horizon that just received quite a bit of funding, as in $41 million dollars worth, care of tech-friendly firms Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank in order to help its development along.
The app in question, Color (also available for Android), has quite the pedigree according to VentureBeat. As the article states, Color’s leadership team includes the founder of LaLa, Bill Nguyen; former CEO of BillShrink, Peter Pham; and DJ Patil, formerly the chief scientist at LinkedIn.
But all those names don’t mean much if the app is just another derivative social media cashgrab. Color seems to be aiming for something more, however. It’s a sort of photo collage app, but one that’s based on the location where photos are taken, not by who’s taking them.
That means you could go to your favorite bar and see all the photos that everyone has taken there. And yes, you’d see all the photos, as apparently there is no sort of privacy options included in Color.
Pham apparently believes transparency when it comes to the lack of privacy will make it more acceptable, but I’d be surprised if there are very many photos being uploaded of entertaining scenes if the lack of privacy remains.
Regardless, Color certainly sounds more interesting than your average social media-inspired app.
The magic of Sword & Sworcery explained
Today also saw the release of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery on the iPad. The adventure game app that’s a little bit Legend of Zelda, and a little bit old-school text sim, has been generating some buzz in the indie app game world.
But not everyone has their ear tuned to the sound of the underground. Luckily, Mashable has posted an interview with the game’s creator, Craig D. Adams, to help shed some light on the project.
Of particular interest is how integral sound design seems to be to the game. Rather than music being created once the game was completed, Adams makes it sound like the music inspired the game’s design and vice versa. That’s certainly not something you hear every day.
While a genre adventure like Sword & Sworcery might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it’s always intriguing to see what clever developers are creating while they look for new ways to stimulate gamers on the iPad.
