Showing posts with label chatroulette. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chatroulette. Show all posts

Friday, August 03, 2012

AirTime: Gone Bust?



AirTime has not delivered on the fundamentals. Frankly, it does not work the few times I have tried it. Or I'd use it often. The vision is compelling.

After Splashy Introduction, Airtime Seems to Deflate
Right now, people do not seem to be loving Airtime .... Airtime has around 20,000 daily active users and 110,000 monthly active users ..... In early July, the site had around 200,000 daily active users, but that number has gradually tapered off since then
I hope they fix it so it becomes usable.

For now shows Sean Parker might have gone a little rusty as an entrepreneur. But kudos for making the jump.

I think AirTime still has a shot.


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Friday, December 23, 2011

My Take On AirTime (4)

Sean ParkerImage via WikipediaGoogle Hangouts is not it, not by a wide margin. And Chatroulette was more like Lycos. AirTime might end up the Google of the random connections space. But there is no given, even if the founder is Sean Parker. But I think this team has a shot.

Happy Holidays

You see a big screen, a full screen, a near full screen. And in there you see a random person on the service. Could be anybody from anywhere. That randomness has got to be the starting point. I mean, we are talking world peace. The social graph that Facebook has mapped is like the solar system. The random connections space is the size of the Milky Way. But it has to be done right. There is enough broadband globally that this application could fly.

So you start with that random person, and the option to click next and move on to the next random person. But you also want the users to have the flag option to not end up with Chatroulette like penis problem. If you got flagged by 100 users, chances are you have been flashing. The flag option, the block option. You block when you don't want to see that person ever again, you flag when you think that person should not be on the service.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

FoodSpotting's Tech Has Been Stagnant

Ecuadorian ceviche, made of shrimp, lemon and ...Image via WikipediaYesterday as I spotted this exotic Ecuadorian dish I realized I had not blogged about FoodSpotting in a while. I guess the service had some good news at the last Facebook conference (I have not yet seen the video). (The HTML5 Whimper At F8)

Is it just me or FoodSpotting has looked the same since its inception?

I feel like I am done spotting the Desi dishes and now I want to venture out and spot global dishes. My next dish to spot might be Afghan.

What I feel is lacking is when you spot a dish you should have the option to show up for an eatup that is in direct relation.

A Small, Historic EatUp

The critical mass might not be there yet. But it will get there. An eatup self-organized around a particular food type or restaurant. You meet people who are passionate or curious about a particular food type.
Image representing Foodspotting as depicted in...Image via CrunchBase
FoodSpotting should become social and become an excuse to meet people, strangers. It should become a little bit like Chatroulette. Only there is no video camera involved. And it is offline, it is real. It is local.

My FoodSpotting Photos Are Being Viewed
FoodSpotting API
Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting
FoodSpotting's Dish As Starting Point

Or maybe even take it online. You get to video chat with people who are passionate about similar kinds of food, passionate or curious. I was not passionate about Ecuadorian food, but I was curious. That was a nice dinner.

Sean Parker's AirTime Could Net Him Tens Of Billions

Saturday, October 08, 2011

Sean Parker's AirTime Could Net Him Tens Of Billions

Sean Parker is a billionaire already at a net worth of over two billion. The guy is 31.



Napster, Facebook, Plaxo, Causes, Spotify, AirTime. Before today I did not even realize Causes was his thing. You live and you learn. Plaxo was annoying, don't you think? And yet that is the company he is most proud of.

I learned of AirTime very recently. But you only have to do a search on the term Chatroulette at this blog to get a feel for my passion for the topic. Just like the Google guys gave jobs to people like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, Sean Parker should rope in the Russian dude, give him a small cut, not legally required, but might be beneficial.

Chatroulette Is For Real
ChatVille Is Live Now: "What ChatRoulette Should Have Been"
Chatfe Happy Hour With Paul Orlando
Penises For Sale: The Russian Mafia Is On It
Chatfe: Audio, Interest Based Random Connections On Skype?
Paul Orlando In The New York Times

The social graph that Facebook has mapped is not really all that cutting edge. I mean, I already knew these people. I did not need help knowing them. But I do need help, a lot of help, getting to know people I don't know, I might never meet. AirTime could help map that uncharted social graph, and that is big.

The Color Social Graph Might Work Better For Books, Movies, Music
Finally Facebook Lets Me Reach Out To Non Friends

In many ways I am looking at AirTime as Sean Parker's first startup. This is the one he gets to do his way. This is the one he gets to own a big chunk of.

I really like this guy. He is always thinking big. He paints in broad strokes. His visions tend to be sweeping, panoramic. Not for him is incremental innovation. He is always wanting to do the next big thing. And now through AirTime he is trying to tackle the most virgin aspect of the web. The landscape of what he is trying to navigate is so shapeless right now.

Maybe the guy should rope me in in some kind of an advisory role. I could not think of a better preparation as I gear to launch my own microfinance startup. I think I am in a position to contribute.

Sean Parker's 2009 Email To Spotify
Sean Parker: Mystery Man
Sean Parker, F8, HTML5, Android
Sean Parker: Video: Facebook, MySpace
The Sean Parker Analogy
Sean Parker, Billionaire, Was Really Poor Once
The Day I Got Called Sean Parker
Paul Graham: Wrong About NYC
White Male Conspiracy To Drive Me Homeless

Monday, November 22, 2010

Paul Orlando In The New York Times

Image representing New York Times as depicted ...Image via CrunchBaseTalk about the devil and he appears. I talked about Paul Orlando (Chatfe Happy Hour With Paul Orlando) at this blog on Friday, and here he appears in the New York Times on Monday.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Saturday, October 09, 2010

Did New York City Just Buy TechCrunch? I Think We Did

Image representing TechCrunch as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBaseThis is more than putting a few million dollars into Mike Arrington's pocket. The bad boy of Silicon Valley is going to be keep being the bad boy of Silicon Valley, but now he is bought.

"All your chats are belong to me," the Russian founder of Chatroulette said at one point. Well, Mikie, all your blog posts now belong to us. We are New York City. We own TechCrunch now.

Mashable was already here. Now we got TechCrunch. What's left? (Mike Arrington's Big Day)

We should let Larry and his boys out there in Silicon Valley duke it out with hardware. Let's not get into hardware. (Putting My Money On Larry Ellison)

New York City has the lead on the mobile web and we need to keep that and grow that. Web services have gone global by now, and that is swell, but that is another soccer field we can keep munching on.

Facebook's Location Patent

New York City is number two right now. Silicon Valley is number one. What will it take to become number one? We just bought TechCrunch. Hell, ya!

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Thursday, May 20, 2010

ChatVille Is Live Now: "What ChatRoulette Should Have Been"

Image representing Digsby  as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase
http://apps.facebook.com/chatville/

A Make Use Of Interview with Digsby's Steve Shapiro


http://apps.facebook.com/chatville/

Chatroulette Clone ChatVille Launched For Facebook By Digsby Team
Twitter /ChatVille: Hello world!
Chatville is Facebook's answer to Chatroulette - News - THE DRUM
Chatroulette for Facebook = ChatVille

http://apps.facebook.com/chatville/





Chatfe: Audio, Interest Based Random Connections On Skype?
Venmo Could Make Moves
Adam Smith And The Inbox Space
Venmo And Frictionless Payments
Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?
Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
The FourSquare Appeal For Me
FourSquare Must Cut A Deal With Yahoo
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments
Chatroulette Is For Real
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Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Chatfe: Audio, Interest Based Random Connections On Skype?


Paul Orlando

I got to meet Paul Orlando at a Microsoft event towards the end of January: his startup won an award. I hung out for hours after the formal event was over. We then exchanged a tweet or two over the weeks. We were angling to meet again. Finally we met near his office in Chinatown.

We went to two dumpling places after that. Eating dumplings is the best thing I learned in Kathmandu where I did a bunch of my schooling. Paul introduced me to a place - Lan Zhou on 144 E Broadway - that I have revisited many times after. Great quality, super low price, how do you beat that? 50 frozen dumplings for $8. That is cheaper than if I were to buy the ingredients and make them myself, only I would not know how to make them.

I am mayor of that place on FourSquare. But since I check in through text message on my prepaid, I have ended up mayor of another establishment of the same name. But who is counting?

Paul is married to a Taiwanese. The dude has spent a few years in Hong Kong. He has a MBA from Columbia.


Chatfe

Chatfe: Start a Conversation
Chatfé on Twitter
Chatfe.com - Talk With Strangers Over The Web | Visit chatfe.com
chatfe' on Vimeo
Chatfe - Start a conversation | Facebook
Web2NewYork | Networking for post-internet media, advertising and...
Talking with Chatfe at the recent BizSpark camp for Windows Azure...
Chatfe Conversations (New York, NY) - Meetup.com
Chatfe Wins Microsoft BizSpark Award for "Best Viable Business"
Chatfe: Equalizing the Chance for Interest Based Conversation...
Chatfe Blog
Chatfe.com – Talk With Strangers Over The Web | Startup Websites
Chatfe: Start a Conversation
YouTube - Chatfe's Channel
Chatfe: Start A Conversation With Someone New
Chatfe Conversation - ThisIsLike.com
Chatfe Inc. - Company Profile on LinkedIn
Chatfe.com – Talk With Strangers Over The Web - Programming Blog
Bringing Omegle and Chatroulette to plain old telephones: Chatfe...
Chatfe.com – Talk With Strangers Over The Web « Startup Ranking
Chatfe Blog: Fantastic Data
Chatfe.com - Talk With Strangers Over The Web - Moopz
Web2Barcelona | Networking for post-internet media, advertising...

Paul dropped a nugget over lunch that day. Instead of expecting people to talk over their phones, what if Chatfe made a switch and used the Skype platform instead? I got excited. I started having visions of Chatfe exploding to Chatroulette like numbers.

Chatfe is in the random connections space. It is based out of New York City. And it is run by a friend of mine. That's three strikes. I am excited.

There are a few advantages Chatfe has over Chatroulette. Sticking to audio only is a good move. With video you end up with a hugely distorted male-female ratio and some roudy behavior, it seems. Also with Chatfe, it is not completely random connections. You register a topic you want to talk about. But maybe Chatfe is tightening that noose a little too much. It should be a little more random than that.

I should be able to insert my location into my profile and topics and subtopics I am interested in talking about. And I should be able to similarly do searches based on location and topics of interest. Also, you probably want to be able to specify your language(s). In my case that is more than half a dozen. And you want to be able to arrange talks for later. As in, I want to talk in Hindi to someone in Mumbai about Amitabh Bachchan's latest movie for about 10 minutes at 10 PM NYC local time. Any takers? And if I have more than one person interested, I want that to be turned into a conference call on Skype. I would like it medium rare.

This much tweaking and I think Paul Orlando is going to be running all over Chinatown for server space.

Chatfe: Audio only, interest based random connections on the Skype platform. And Chatfe takes off into the stratosphere.

Venmo Could Make Moves
Adam Smith And The Inbox Space
Venmo And Frictionless Payments
Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?
Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
Dropio's Indian Cofounder Darshan
The FourSquare Appeal For Me
What Are You Doing Monday? Come Meet Al Wenger
FourSquare Must Cut A Deal With Yahoo
Digital Dumbo: Here I Come
FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology
4:16 PM @ FourSquare
I Have Been Quoted In Fast Company
Not Union Square Ventures
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments
Fred Wilson: A DJ
Chatroulette Is For Real
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Monday, April 26, 2010

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments


I am not suggesting all four spaces carry equal weight; they don't. Location carries more weight than all the rest put together. 2010 is location's year. By now that is conventional wisdom. I can see why, and I buy into it. But these strike me as spaces to watch for this year. One of the other three might claim 2011 as their year. And I am open to adding other spaces to the list if I can find them, read up on them, imagine them. This list of four is by far not exhaustive. Charlie (@ceonyc) had a blog post a few weeks back (my comment) that ranked high on my vision grid, and he talked about some spaces he would like to see action in as an early stage investor. And he does not even touch upon these four spaces. So what you are looking for impacts what you see. There's plenty of exciting stuff happening in many directions. The 2010s will be what the 1990s should have been but weren't. We will dream big again, only this time there will be less fluff. Real businesses will get built. Old industries will get reinvented. New industries will see light of day. These are exciting times.

(1) Location

I'd be rooting for FourSquare even if it were half the size of Gowalla, but it makes it easier to root for because it is crushing the competition. But like the Google and Amazon people will tell you, don't spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror. Focus on customer feedback more. Grow.

Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius

The mobile web is bigger and is growing faster than the old web. Location is key to the mobile web. FourSquare has itself a sweet, sweet spot. All the best to Dennis (@dens) and Naveen. (@naveen)

(2) Random Connections

Chatroulette Is For Real

We could have had Mark Zuckerberg, but instead we lost him to the Valley. We should try better with Andrey. We want people all over the world to be able to meet random New Yorkers. There's the fun in sharing.

(3) The Inbox

ReadWriteWeb: Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP ....Syphir, which lets you apply all kinds of complex rules to your incoming mail and then lets you get iPhone push notification for your smartly filtered mail.
Rapportive - an incredible GMail contacts plug-in.
Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

Everything is email, if you think about it. When I first started blogging, I was like, great, I no longer need to flood people's inboxes. All I have to do is send them a link to a blog post. Facebook is email. People who don't know you don't email you, and people who email you are only one click away if you want to know the latest in their lives. No need to call them up, or ask them. Twitter is the ultimate email. Eric Schmidt even called it that, but he was a little miserly in the description. A poor man's email? I am poor, everyone is poor by Eric's standards, but hey! FourSquare is email. I am emailing you my location.

Don't give up on email. Email is here to stay. There is so much that can be done with the inbox. I am glad some startups are looking into it.

For now all I want is about four different inboxes. Inbox 1, emails only from individuals whose addresses I have saved. Inbox 2: emails from those people that are going out to more than me. Inbox 3: emails from mailing lists I have subscribed to. Inbox 4: everyone else.

(4) Frictionless Payments

Venmo is my FourSquare in this space. I take hometown pride in Venmo. But then supporting FourSquare and Venmo is like supporting Obama. (Jupiter And Obama) It helped that the guy was outstanding. I get the impression Venmo is also a leader in this crowded space. It was listed in Time magazine as one of the top 50 sites of 2009, along with Drop.io, another hometown goodie. (@lessin)

It is like this, there was barter trade back in the days. Then they had coins, some coins were as big as cart wheels. Then paper money. Then plastic. Then PayPal. We are about to hit the next phase. That is where Venmo comes in.

In my homevillage in Nepal growing up, I saw rice used as currency. Farm workers got paid in rice. Vegetable vendors would give you vegetables for rice. And it was pretty smooth, as in frictionless, enough to give Kortina a run for his money. (@kortina)

What I am telling you, Kortina, is rice as currency is pretty cutting edge, and there was major trust involved.


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Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Chatroulette Is For Real


We are all sold on location, and for the right reasons. But random connections as a space is not garnering the same respect, and I am going to call that a case of adultism. Because the founder of Chatroulette is a 17 year old, a lot of people are having a lot of fun talking about penises that supposedly sprout out during the Chatroulette experience. Guess what, sex is in the mind. Penises sprouting out do not take away from the basic Chatroulette promise, that random connections is a new web space, and Chatroulette has a bright business future.

Once I got a hang of Twitter, I said many times you can take Facebook away. I feel like both a high school and a college dropout. Most people on Facebook remind me of two institutions I do not want to be particularly reminded of. I liked it that on Twitter I could interact with people I did not know. Chatroulette takes that to a whole new level. Note: I have not tried Chatroulette yet, but I don't have to, I am sold on the space.

Chatroulette has to iterate. It is already at 30 million hits. That is a great point at which to roll out the future versions, to add new features. What could some of those new features be?

Once I roll the dice a few times, and I find someone I like interacting with, I should be able to bookmark that person, but only if that person agrees to get bookmarked. Once I build a library of a certain number of bookmarked people - and I don't need to know anything about them to that point - I should have the option to roll the gun only inside my library.

On the other hand, I should also have the option to block people. If I see a penis, and I don't like it that I had to see a penis, I hit a button that says Block For Nudity, and if a person accumulates 10 or more such blocks, they should enter a special zone. As in, people should have the option to say keep me away from people who have been blocked for nudity 10 times or more.

Voila. The penises are gone.

When I am thinking Chatroulette, I am thinking world peace. Seriously. We need more people talking to more people to get at that utopia called world peace. I want Chatroulette on all Israeli and Palestinian screens. Get those buggers talking to each other. And let them show penises to each other when they are pissed instead of blowing each other up. The 2010 version of make love not war?

Ever heard of people to people interaction programs run by governments? This is it. Chatroulette is the ultimate people to people interaction program.

But it is important to keep the randomness intact. You should be able to bookmark me, but I should not have a profile on there, no name, no location, nothing about me. If people volunteer such information to each other during conversations, fine, but Chatroulette should keep the randomness very much intact.

The next big filter jump would be to allow for geographical filtering. So I go on Chatroulette and I want to meet random people from Africa, I should be able to do that. (Nfodjo, is that you?) Or go to the country level. Or maybe even city level. I feel like meeting people from Moscow, how about it? Hello Olesya.

Just a few filters and the bookmarking and blocking options, and a lot of the caricature of the service vanishes.

Fred Wilson (the first person to tell me about Chatroulette, through his blog.... I accused him of now having got into the breaking news business)
What To Make Of Chatroulette?
Some Interesting Facts About Chatroulette

TechCrunch
Chatroulette Founder: All Your Chats Are Belong To Me

AllThingsD
Chatroulette Creator Andrey Ternovskiy Gets an iPad, Gives Us a Peek at Version 2.0
Chatroulette Dude: I Don’t Want to Sell. But I’d Like Google to Pay.
Jon Stewart Plays Chatroulette, And We All Win

New York Times
One On One: Andrey Ternovskiy, Creator Of Chatroulette

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Tech-Talch - Chatroulette
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorTea Party

TechCrunch

Chatroulette Is 89 Percent Male, 47 Percent American, And 13...
Chatroulette! | CrunchBase Profile
TinyChat Launches Grouped Version Of Chatroulette
Chatroulette! Posts on TechCrunch
Oh, The Humanity: My Chatroulette Experience
Andrey Ternovskiy | CrunchBase Profile
The Daily Show Reveals Chatroulette To Be Filled With Creepy...
Chatroulette Quadruples To 4 Million Visitors In February
CHATROULOLZ Collects Great Chatroulette Screencaps So You Don't...
[Actually NSFW] Highlights From South Park's Facebook/Chatroulette...
Chatroulette Founder: All Your Chats Are Belong To Me
PopJam Runs With Chatroulette Idea, Creates Random IM With Strangers
Friends vs. Strangers: What's Next for Foursquare? And ChatRoulette?




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