From street level in Palo Alto, California, the headquarters of Bill Nguyen’s new startup appears to be an abandoned storefront: A sign on the door instructs you go to elsewhere, and the windows are covered with brown butcher paper.

But those permitted to enter find a bustling high-tech operation. Dozens of energetic young people work on long tables loaded with computer equipment. It's like a black and white photo exploding into vibrant color, reminiscent of the scene in The Sting where a nondescript door leads to a busy and luxurious gambling joint.

The stealth ends. Nguyen, a fabled serial entrepreneur whose last company was the cloud-based music service Lala (bought by Apple), is launching Color, a photo-based social networking mobile app. It's available in the Apple app store now.

Like another recently announced social app called Path, Color ties people together by the camera lens of a smartphone. But in other respects, Color couldn't be more different.

Whereas Path limits distribution of your visual "moments" to those in your social cohort – following the theories of Robin Dunbar, who postulates that people have meaningful connections to a relatively small group of associates – Color augments your experience by unlocking the newly captured memories of the people sharing your physical space. It’s the anti-Dunbar app, welcoming people into your circle, even if you don’t know them and don’t intend to.

This puts it squarely into a problem space that many sharp minds in tech are trying to solve: How can you create instant local communities among those who occupy the same place at the same time? Solving the problem not only makes for a compelling experience that alters human interaction, but offers a huge revenue opportunity by being able to sell to everyone at a given spot, at just the right time.

Here’s how Color works: Once the app is installed on your iPhone or Android phone (it’s available on both, free, beginning March 24; eventually it will find its way to Blackberry and Win 7 phones), you simply open it and thus are provided entry into a transient cohort of everyone else in the area snapping pics via Color. Color calls this a “multilens” experience. Anyone in that group who takes a photo or a video instantly shares those images with everyone else.

And once you take a picture yourself, you can take those shots with you. In the most mundane aspect, picture a birthday party where a half-dozen people take photos or grab some video. Instead of passing the camera around – look at this one! – or sharing files the next day on Facebook or even sending them in a complicated e-mail circle, everyone has access all at once.

There are some truly fascinating aspects of Color. The first is that your personal photo log will be transformed into a collective work created by all of those who shared a space with you. What’s more, once a photo taken by another Color user is included in the massive “personal diary” you will accumulate, you can get a glimpse of their lives – actually viewing the photo stream of the moments they have captured.

That’s right, you can see their personal diaries. If some unknown dude snapped a picture of a performer at a concert you attended, two years later you can click on it and instantly get access to his wedding pictures and his obsessive documentation of barbecue joints.

But it isn’t a exercise in pure voyeurism: Those whose diaries you view will get a notification that you’re perusing their stream. And then they might be inclined to look over your diary. Color sees this all as a public service, with Kumbaya-like effects of people getting to know each other.

Being able to glimpse into the lives of the strangers around you, and vice versa, pulls back a social curtain with consequences that remain to be seen. This may become of the most effective social icebreakers of all time. Or just creepy.

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Color boasts a number of innovations that help make the service work well. One is an ability to figure out the proper geographic bounds of a community. It supposedly can figure out that the walls of a small restaurant contain one temporary community, while a spacious sports arena contains another, larger community.

In cases like that, where there may be thousands of photos posted, Color will use sophisticated algorithms to determine a subset that will wind up on an individual’s daily album. This photo log can be quite voluminous over time, with no strains on the phone’s storage, as everything is kept in the cloud.

Another algorithmic accomplishment is Color’s determination of “an elastic network.” The app figures out which people you are most in contact with and sends you recent photos taken by them in its version of a news feed. So the moments of a co-worker or family member with whom you often share locations will show up more often in your feed. (OK, Color isn’t completely anti-Dunbar.)

On the other hand, your feed might include some pictures of a random person who shot the Trevi Fountain when you were there – but only for a few days, before that person fades from your network.

“We’re the only stepchild of Google and Apple,” says Nguyen of the company’s mix of algorithms and emotional content.

If Color fulfills its ambitions, millions of users will adopt it, thus assuring persistent views of almost any given location. If that happens, even more interesting effects can be triggered.

One feature contemplated by Color is called “peeking,” where you can dial up a location and see what’s happening there through people’s smartphones. (Perhaps this will be limited to news operations at first.) “Every camera will be a lens in real time,” says Nguyen.

Obviously, Color’s ambitions bring up all sorts of concerns about privacy and decency. As for the first issue, the company has declared that all the photos taken with Color should be considered public. If you post them, by definition you are relinquishing privacy – think of them, Color tells us, like open posts on Twitter.

Color instructs users to save their private moments for apps that don’t share. You can delete any photo you’ve taken and it will disappear. (Of course those who aren’t Color users but are simply caught in the “multilenses” of others might have their own objections.) And to make sure naughty users don’t post, um, off-color photos, the company vows to punish such pervs by permanently “bricking” that app from their smartphones.

Who owns the photos? Photographers do, despite their promiscuous distribution. By default, photos are regarded as protected by a Creative Common license. Right now, there’s no capability to print.

On the eve of the launch, Nguyen had other news to report: The initial funding of $14 million from Bain Capital and other investors had been augmented by others, including a $25 million investment from Sequoia Capital. The total funding now stands at $41 million.

What will Color do with all that money? Nguyen says that it will fund sophisticated data analytics that will help it recognize its users, the better to monetize the app. He uses an example of a restaurant that will be able to know who you are without your having to log in or explicitly identify yourself. “They’ll know when you come in and make you feel welcomed,” he says.

That doesn’t sound nearly exciting as the ability to peek into the moments of those around you – or those with whom you temporarily shared a space. But these are early days for software that binds together strangers in the night. It’s going to take years for us to learn how to Color by the numbers.

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