Just one day after Apple inked a deal to purchase the media consultancy group, Particle, rumors of another acquisition are afloat. This time, the Cupertino California company is reportedly on the verge of buying video sharing company, Color Labs. According to The Verge, who claim to have gotten information from “trusted sources” that are familiar with the matter, Apple has agreed to acquire Color Labs, a photo and video-sharing social network.
The Cupertino California company has supposedly paid in the “high double digits” for the company, alluding to a multi-million dollar deal. The necessary documents which make the deal official are still yet to be signed though.
Color Labs, a company originally founded by Bill Nguyen and Peter Pham in 2011, was at the center of some controversy after netting $41 million in a pre-launch funding round. This number was a massive investment compared to the usual $1 million in seed money seen by most comparable startups. The company ended up releasing a photo-sharing app, which failed to draw users, causing Pham to exit three months after launch and Chief Product Officer DJ Patil to do the same one month after that. At this point, Nguyen changed strategies and created a new video-sharing app that allows users to record and post 30-second silent video to Facebook. This direction helped Color net a deal with Verizon in May.
As of right now, it is unclear what Apple plans to do with Color if it is acquired. The folks over at The Next Web speculate the purchase could be for intellectual property including “one for a file format that they were working on to record HD video.” Color reportedly has six patents pending before the company launched, “including its ‘elastic’ social graph and patents related to GPS location and battery saving.” If this rumor turns out to be true, Color Labs would be the second start-up was created by Nguyen to be purchased by Apple (with the first being music streaming service Lala in 2009). We'll have to wait for more concrete information to see if Apple really did go though with the acquisition.
Source: The Next Web, The Wall Street Journal
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