But it was for all the wrong reasons. I say that because the only attention any app needs is from the end users. After reading Jason Kincaid’s write-up, I downloaded the location- and socially-aware photo-sharing app, but found it as barren as the endless sands of the Sahara. Some say that will change in time as more people show up on the service.

But lost in this back and forth is a bigger problem encompassing the entire web and mobile ecosystem. The Color app faces the same challenge as many of today’s mobile apps: How can it earn a user’s attention in a world that is increasingly crowded with options? In fact, you can extend that argument to any consumer service: new appliances, new devices and media entities new and old.

These services are like the flickering, flashing and constantly changing billboards that plaster the buildings around Times Square: It’s almost impossible to focus on any one of them. Some are bigger, some are brighter, but most are completely forgettable. That, unfortunately, holds true for today’s web and mobile services.

Many entrepreneurs and their backers don’t quite give the proper weight to “attention.” If a new startup can carve out time in our Facebook- and Twitter-dominated, CityVille-playing, Lady Gaga-listening, Rebecca-Black-video-sharing day, then it should really be the one to watch.

Instagr.am is one of those apps that managed to figure out a way to squeeze itself into our busy lives. It has several million users now, and only a few thousand of them are what would be described as technology insiders. Similarly, Beluga (acquired by Facebook), Spotify, Evernote and Instapaper have found a way to draw attention (and thus usage) from its users.

Do they need to displace something from our daily web/mobile app die? I don’t know. I do know that I have not opened PicPlz for nearly a month, despite the service sending me repeated email notifications. Compared to Skype, Nimbuzz gets more of my attention because it allows me to send instant messages to my colleagues via Google Talk. As a result, I end up using its call-out service more often than Skype to place long-distance calls.

Looking at all of these examples, I see two clear reasons why these services have my attention:

• Happiness (alternately, enchantment)
• Utility (alternately, solving a problem)

I am currently reading two books that address these issues. Typically, these aren’t the kind of business books I read; I like books that are about explicit learning. Nevertheless, these books were from two guys who are extraordinarily nice and thus worth a read.

Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple evangelist turned self-evangelist has a new book out, Enchantment. When you take away the marketing babble, what Kawasaki is saying is that as long as you delight your customers, they are going to reward you with their attention, and hence their dollars.

Guy learned that lesson from Apple. Most of us think Apple is in the business of making hardware. Nope; Kia and Dodge are in the business of hardware. Apple is in the business of happiness. It’s the first and foremost emotion associated with an Apple product. The rest of the business is just the formality of handing over your credit card to the annoyingly smug guy at the Apple store.

This also applies to Bose audio systems. As an audiophile, I cringe at the very idea of Bose speakers. My brother-in-law hears a simple way to find audio bliss. The world, fortunately for Bose, is full of people like my brother-in-law.

One of the reasons Instagr.am works is because it has that “happiness” attached to it. When I see my friend’s baby boy, it brings me joy. I see Mathew Ingram at an ice hockey game, and it warms my heart to see him enjoying time with his family. I reward Instagr.am with my attention because it makes me happy. That is its utility.

This is the emotion at the heart of Gary Vaynerchuck’s idea of The Thank You Economy, in which the companies that provide the most value to their customers win. It’s a quaint notion, as old as the first bazaar, but somehow it got lost in postindustrial over-commercialization.

When I use Marco Arment‘s Instapaper, I quietly thank him, pretty much every single time. Why? Because he solved a problem for me and made my life more manageable. As a result, I gladly upgraded to the paid version of the app. And when I’m not saving or reading articles using Instapaper, I’m telling everyone I can tell: Try it. That’s what the “thank you economy” really is: me doing marketing for a product I have only an emotional or utilitarian connection to.

I look at all these great tablets coming to market. They are feature-laden, power-packed, and have bundles of computing oomph. And yet, they will all struggle because the makers are all looking through the wrong end of the telescope. My friend Pip Coburn emailed me, pointing out that people with iPads are the ultimate commercial for the device. The more people who have them, the more people want them. “People will trust other people who do not carry an agenda to build revenues and manipulate you,” Pip wrote. Bing!

Don’t believe me? Put all the things that are part of your daily routine into these two buckets — happiness and utility — and you will see it for yourself that in the end those two are the driving forces behind a successful app, service, device or media property.

So when it comes to services like Path, PicPlz and now Color, I’m not a hater. It’s actually worse. I don’t really care. Why? Because these apps lack the empathy that drives constant interaction. You can’t buy empathy with a $100 million valuation or $41 million in the bank. And you certainly can’t ensure happiness with a resume and an executive team.

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Trey Ratcliff, creator of 100 Cameras and I

The Oscars are over, but we will all be talking about the winners — and the losers — for days and weeks to come. Why? Because we love movies. We love movie stars. What’s not to love? They have the drama, the glamour, the shiny bright lights and, not to mention, fantastic amounts of money. No wonder everyone wants to be like them!

And while not everyone gets to be Angelina Jolie or even Jesse Eisenberg, we can pretend that we are living inside a movie. Today we have easy and free access to platforms that help spread the word about the movies of our lives — quickly. The Internet makes easy work of distribution.

The concept of “followers” and “subscribers” is another way of saying “audience,” and by sharing carefully crafted words, a handful of shared links and artistically snapped photos and videos, what we’re doing is essentially performing for this audience. We are all Lady Gaga — be it for one person, or a million people.

Strange? Trey Ratcliff, a celebrated photographer, author and creator of one of the top-selling iPhone apps, 100 Cameras and I, doesn’t think so, pointing to the photo slide show at the top of our Facebook page as a signpost of a society that’s making its own movie reels.

I Want My MeTV

Before I met Ratcliff, I always thought millions of us were living inside our own weird version of reality television. But reality television can be ugly and sometimes too stark. Movies are curated, edited and have a sense of polish. That is one of the main reasons why Ratcliff believes apps like his and Hisptamatic are selling briskly on the iTunes store.  “The filters can turn ordinary into extraordinary,” Ratcliff said.

To Trey’s point, many of the photos I take are actually pretty mundane, but thanks to filters, they become magical. The picture of clouds that’s as flat as a week-old bottle of Pellegrino takes on a wistful look just by adding a filter. The 8MM app can turn a clip of a boring, sleepy tech conference into a scene out of a 1970s Bollywood movie.

These tools add a certain mystique and drama to these photos and our lives, making them look more interesting, more like movies. It’s perhaps one of the main reasons why we’ve seen Facebook quickly become the greatest repository of photos — memories, if you may — on the web. “Not everyone can write, draw or paint, but everyone can press a button,” said Ratcliff.

Platforms, Platforms, Platforms

I don’t think we should be surprised at all by these developments; it’s part of the bigger cultural shift. In our 21st-century society, we all want to stand out and get attention. Narcissistic? Perhaps, but we’re living in this century and defining the ethos for the new Internet-connected age as we go along.

I’m not a philosopher, so I’ll live these heavier matters to people with a higher intelligence quotient. What I can tell you is that the technology companies that benefit from these big trends are those who provide platforms for sharing our lives.

SixApart’s MoveableType, Flickr and Blogger were early proponents of sharing, but they never really got to realize their full potential because they grew up in an era limited by relatively low broadband penetration and lack of mobility-driven computing.

Subsequent platforms — YouTube, WordPress (see disclosure) and Tumblr — have had more success, thanks to faster, cheaper broadband connections. Twitter and Facebook are the big winners of this sharing.

The emergence and growing popularity of San Francisco-based Instagr.am (over three million signees since its launch last year) is yet another sign that in the end, this cultural shift benefits the platform providers.

Next time you are thinking about building a product, evaluating a company or just wondering why early adopters are so crazy about Instagr.am or Quora, keep in mind we’re playing a role in a movie: edited, directed and starring us.

App of the day:

The Internet Wishlist. My app of the day isn’t really an app. Instead, it’s a website that’s a collective list of apps and websites the Internet people are wishing for. It will take you less than five minutes to scan this website, which collates masterful and moronic ideas all in the same place. You should follow its creator, Amrit Richmond on Twitter. (Via Laughing Squid.)

What to read on the web:

• Economist: The secret of IKEA’s success
• Boston Review/Onnesha Roychoudhri: Books after Amazon
• Organizing the bookcase animation

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. I am also a venture partner at True.

While it’s unclear if there is gold buried in these pixels, one thing is for sure: The mobile photos could be better – in fact, a lot better. Pelican Imaging, a Mountain View, Calif.-based technology start-up wants to change that, thanks to a radical new approach to mobile cameras and sensors, which depends more on software than megapixels.

The company was co-founded by Aman Jabbi (CEO) and Kartik Venkataraman (CTO), life long chip-heads and former colleagues at Micron Imaging (now a standalone company called Aptina) in May 2008. Since then, it has raised $17 million in two rounds of funding from the likes of Globespan Capital Partners, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and IQT. Jabbi says the company has a simple mission: bust the megapixel myth and make mobile imaging a radically new experience.

The MegaPixel Myth

First, let’s talk about the megapixel myth. Many of us believe the more megapixels we have on our mobile phone camera, the better our photos will be. Today, not a day goes by when some mobile phone manufacturer or the other boasts about the megapixels on the cameras crammed into its handsets. Yet, we all end up snapping pictures that are dark, blurry, somewhat discolored and, well, not very cool.

The reason for that is while the mobile cameras might have the megapixels, the overall capabilities aren’t enough for the camera to grab as much light and process the images effectively. At a certain point, more megapixels become counter productive, unless there are certain other capabilities. Let me explain.

The digital picture quality is determined by multiple factors: pixel count, sensor size, lens quality and how the pixels are organized. In case of cellular cameras, the lenses are fixed-focus and sensors are too small. Often, the resolution of the sensor sometimes exceeds the capabilities of the lens, which forces makers of cell-phones to use big lenses, which often leads to ungainly looking cameras on phones. And that’s not all.

Camera manufacturers are cramming more pixels onto a camera sensor without increasing the physical size of the sensor.  Thus the physical size of the pixels and the distance between pixels is going down. With a reduction in the amount of light that hits each pixel and “bleeding over” of light from one pixel to an adjacent one, picture quality is impaired. Hence, the notion that more pixels equals better pictures isn’t always true.  The obvious way to solve this problem is to use a large sensor and a large lens to capture more light, but unfortunately with this approach, you end up with a much thicker mobile phone.

Pelican has found a way to fix all those problems by using smart software and a new camera module design. Pelican solves this problem with its array camera, composed of multiple micro-cameras (about 25) which preserve the required form-factor of mobile phones. Images from the array camera can significantly benefit from the variety of data captured by the camera array, and it’s much thinner than the current generation of camera modules.

Software Is Sharp & Sexy

Pelican’s camera array takes the optical data and processes it using special software (also created by Pelican) to create high-quality images. Dual core processors and special media processors will turn tomorrow’s smartphones into screamers, and Pelican uses that processing power for its special software.

The software allows the camera module to do many cool things. New applications are also enabled by introducing features such as 3-D depth, gesture control, and the ability for users to interact with the image before and after capturing the shot. Think of it as a way to create more realistic visual experiences. It allows the module to add create post-photo processing effects, for example. Think of it as the more advanced version of Apple’s HDR technology – a way to process photos using software that enhances those pictures.

“What we are doing is changing how light is captured on the cameras and allowing the camera modules to capture a lot more raw data, and you can do a lot with this data which is processed by our software,” Jabbi says.

Pelican’s technology is going to enable the thinner and smaller phones to have high-quality cameras. In order to get its technology to the market, Pelican VP of Marketing and Business Development Oliver Gunasekara, formerly of ARM, tells me the company is going to adopt the approach adopted by ARM, the mobile processor technology company that licenses its intellectual property and designs to chipmakers such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. Pelican’s technology will be embedded into the camera modules by manufacturers and phone makers, which will pay the company a small fee in order to use its technology.

Getting a buy-in from a large and diverse ecosystem is not easy; ask ARM, which spent a lot of years in chip wilderness before finding a way to profits and superstardom. It’s a considerable challenge, but one thing Pelican has going for it is actually its technology. Some of the leading academics have signed on to advise and lend their expertise to the company. Professor Marc Levoy of Stanford University, a well-known authority in computational photography, is on Pelican’s technical board of advisers and noted:

“Pelican’s technology has the potential to upset the traditional tradeoff between the sensitivity and resolution of a camera and its thickness. It also brings new capabilities to cameras, including post-capture focusing, foveal imaging and programmable frame rates.  We have been investigating these aspects of computational photography in our laboratory at Stanford for a number of years, through the Stanford Multi-Camera Array, which is big, slow and expensive. Pelican’s solution is small, fast and inexpensive – which makes it a very exciting technology.”

Today, if you asked me what would Pelican do for you, my answer would be, “take better pictures of you when you are misbehaving with a beer buzz.” In the future, it could help develop more realistic interactive visual experience in apps that would make today’s photo-sharing services simply primitive.

To sum it up, I would just say one thing: While it’s nice to see companies like Path and PicPlz get the attention, in reality, it’s technology innovators such as Pelican who really end up making the difference.

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