Radar.net

» see radar.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i missed radar over what a photograph cost to send. in 2006 a picture on my phone reached another person as an mms, billed per message at a rate you noticed, and the decision was always whether the picture was worth the charge. an application whose entire premise was firing pictures off a handset all day long was an american premise written for an american tariff.

radar.net came out of tiny pictures, a san francisco company john poisson started in 2005. the service opened in beta in september 2006. you were given an address to mail or message your pictures to, they landed in a stream that belonged to you, and the people you had let in could reply on the picture itself. there were clients for a spread of handsets, including a java one that could drive the camera directly so you did not have to pick the file by hand.

the money behind it was not small. draper fisher jurvetson and mohr davidow supplied most of eleven point two million dollars, with reid hoffman and joi ito on the angel list. shutterfly bought tiny pictures on 14 september 2009 for one point three million in cash plus restricted stock, a number that tells you what the preceding two years had been like without anybody having to describe them.

shutterfly ran radar for another eight months. users were told first that the site would close on 30 april 2010, then given a short extension, and it went dark at noon pacific on 26 may. there was a migration tool for pulling your pictures into shutterfly before the deadline. after that the account was simply not there.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

radar's argument was that a photograph taken on a phone is not a publication. it is a thing you show to about eleven people. so the product was small groups by default, with the conversation attached to the image rather than to a public gallery you had to perform in front of. flickr at the time was a public archive and facebook was a public wall. radar was making a claim nobody else in 2006 wanted to make.

the trouble was underneath it. a phone camera then shot around a megapixel through a plastic lens, and getting the file off the device meant mms or a java client that half the handsets ran badly. radar had worked out the behavior years before the equipment could support it, which is a harder failure to survive than being wrong.

~ eleven million in, one point three out ~

eleven point two million dollars went in and one point three million in cash came back out. that is a ninety percent loss recorded in public, and it was not the result of the company being run badly. it was the result of being early, and early is expensive when the thing you are early to depends on a device that has not shipped yet.

it also mattered who bought it. shutterfly was a photo printing business acquiring mobile talent, not a social product acquiring a social product. that is the whole reason radar had eight months left rather than eight years. the buyer already had somewhere for those features to go and no reason at all to keep a second brand alive beside its own.

~ four months ~

instagram opened on 6 october 2010. radar had been switched off for a little over four months by then. the gap between the two products was never really the idea, which was close to identical. it was the handset. by 2010 the phone in your pocket had a camera worth using and a data plan that did not price you by the picture.

this is what the graveyard looks like when nothing goes wrong except the calendar. no lawsuit and no scandal. radar was built correctly for a year that had not arrived, and by the time the year did arrive the company had already been sold and switched off.

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