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Former Color employee talks about Apple's Lala deal
Aubrey Johnson is a former employee of Color, the startup recently acquired by Apple and founded by Bill Nguyen, who sold another company to Apple called Lala. Over on his personal blog, Johnson has put up a post that walks right through the story of how Apple picked up Lala, from the reasoning behind the buy to how the purchase was actually negotiated. The whole process sounds very exciting -- Nguyen's company (which had nailed down a lot of search results but was flagging in profitability at that point) got a buyout offer from Nokia that even Nguyen wasn't impressed with. But he successfully sold that offer up the line to Google, and then got Apple interested, essentially pitting Apple and Google against each other for this little company that threatened to be the musical lynchpin of either service. Finally, Nguyen sat down with Steve Jobs and other Apple higher-ups, Jobs passed a number across the table, and Nguyen nodded -- and that was it. The company sold for $80 million with about that much more in bonuses for the remaining employees. And as Johnson points out, a lot of those employees then went on to work with Nguyen again at Color, and Apple bought them again. At a price, Johnson says, that was so nice (given these employees' talent and experience) it was worth it twice anyway. That's how you do business like Apple: Pay for what you need whatever it costs, and be glad you're building the best company around. [via MacRumors]
Former Color Labs employee suing the company and CEO Bill Nguyen
In the wake of social media startup Color's shutdown, a former employee is now suing the exorbitantly funded startup and embattled CEO Bill Nguyen. TechCrunch reports Adam Witherspoon filed a lawsuit alleging "intentional infliction of emotional distress" and is seeking an unspecified figure in damages. Among various indiscretions described in the suit are allegations that Nguyen was not only using a portion of the startup's $41 million in venture funding to pay directly for his family's nanny as well as a ski instructor, but that he made "vindictive threats" against those who opposed him. Last month we learned that Color's talent was headed to Cupertino, and although a lot of misinformation was making the rounds, today's suit also confirms that the company's assets have been sold to Apple. The lawsuit, which you can read in full at TechCrunch, goes into detail regarding Color's engineering talent being moved to Apple, and how Witherspoon's severance offer to move on was significantly less than the rest of Color's staff who would not be joining Apple's ranks. Even as the Color ship sails into the sunset, it's fairly obvious that this tale isn't over yet.
The Engadget Interview: Lala and Color founder Bill Nguyen
Bill Nguyen radiates enthusiasm. It's constant and infectious, and when he attempts to sell you on his latest project, it's hard not to get excited -- this alone seems reason enough to want the guy on your team. Nguyen also has more than his share of experience heading startups -- some have even gone so far as describing the Houston native as a "serial entrepreneur," certainly not a stretch, having founded Onebox.com and Seven Networks early in his career. It was the creation of Lala, however, that really put Nguyen on the map. The service was founded in the mid-'00s, around the concept of CD swapping, users mailing physical discs to one another in little red and white Netflix-like envelopes. The site shifted gears soon after, being reborn as a streaming service. The concept was born from Nguyen's typically utopian vision of free music streaming, in hopes of spurring purchases amongst a dedicated audience -- the actual product, not surprisingly, was far more of a compromise, limiting the streams of users who didn't already have that music stored in their PC. Read our full interview after the break.
Color abandons app independence for Facebook, hopes you'll pay someone a 'visit'
Color launched to a fair amount of fanfare back in March, and it's not surprising, really -- the company was spearheaded by Lala founder Bill Nguyen, with ten of millions in backing from some top venture capital firms. The hype surrounding the photo-sharing app didn't take long to die down, however -- over the past several months, we haven't heard much from the startup. Turns out the Color team was rethinking the project from ground up. The company used f8 this week to launch a new version of the app built entirely around Facebook. The new Color harnesses updates to the social Network's Open Graph protocol to introduce the concept of "visits," a social gesture that prompts a user to request a live video feed from a Facebook friend upon seeing an interesting photo in their feeds on the social network or in the iPhone / Android app. The brief video stream can be attended by multiple users, becoming something of a mini UStream built into Facebook. The new Color is currently in a closed testing phase, though interested parties can sign up to take part below.
Former Lala CEO says Apple bought them 'for the people'
Lala's Bill Ngyuen had a short video interview with Fortune, and in it Nguyen says that Apple picked up his company specifically "for the people," not for the streaming cloud music service or any of Lala's other assets. Fortune confronts him on the idea of Apple running its own cloud music service (as has been rumored for a while), and Nguyen suggests that instead of building its own service, Apple's actually provided the hardware and software platforms to let any number of companies, from Pandora to Netflix, do what Lala did and provide content over the air to whatever devices people happen to use. That's an interesting take for sure -- from Nguyen's perspective, it sounds like Apple is already doing what it wants to do with Lala, which is just use its employees' knowledge of how services like this work to provide help for other companies on the App Store. We've all expected Apple to run a streaming service of its own, but maybe it just wants to make things easier for other companies to jump in and provide content. Who knows what we'll see with that data center in North Carolina.
