What’s Really Going on With Color: A Small Apple Talent Acquisition

"You’d be forgiven if you were confused by the swirl of stories around the social video start-up Color in the past 24 hours.

 First, a leaked internal memo said the company was winding down. Then we were told that Color was not shutting down (and further, that some at the company had no idea where the memo came from — turned out it was from the VP of finance). Then Color was being bought by Apple for “high double-digits” millions.
I’ve been reporting alongside these events, and heard all these conflicting tales, too — but while I couldn’t figure out how all of them could possibly be true, I held back from writing my own story. Now, having talked with numerous people about the situation, here is a storyline that actually checks out.

What’s really happening is that Color’s engineering team — about 20 people, comprising almost the entire company — is being “acqhired” by Apple at what’s being called a “nominal” price of something like $2 million to $5 million, according to multiple sources familiar with both sides of the situation."

  CONTINUE READING at allthingsd.com: A Small Apple Talent Acquisition

Color Russian Photos Taken 100 Years Ago!

Color film was non-existent in 1909 Russia, yet in that year a photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii captured hundreds of photos in full, vivid color. His photographic plates were black and white, but he had developed an ingenious photographic technique which allowed him to use them to produce accurate color images. Tsar Nicholas II fully supported Sergei's ambitious plan to document the Russian Empire, and provided a specially equipped railroad car which enclosed a darkroom for Sergei to develop his glass plates. He took hundreds of these color photos all over Russia from 1909 through 1915. Amazingly, this is the same technique used today on the most recent Mars lander, Phoenix. It has a black and white camera what uses several filters to approximate a color image.

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