Parker and Fanning Launch New Video Chat Service Airtime

By emeadows
June 6, 2012

Two of Napster’s founders, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, introduced their newest project on Tuesday, a video chat site called Airtime.
It allows users to chat with Facebook friends or strangers using a webcam. “Users can search for chat partners based on their interests, shared social connections and location. Once connected, they can talk, type messages or even watch YouTube videos together,” explains The New York Times.
“The downside of all our interactions online is that they are constrained by the social graph,” notes Parker. “There is a gaping hole that exists. Facebook shrunk the world and constrained our interactions to the 500 people that you are connected to.”
Airtime was inspired in part by the chatting service Chatroulette, which randomly pairs people together online for video chats. But Airtime is taking precautions against some of the problems that users ran into on Chatroulette, namely the fact that many were paired up with chatters unclothed.
“To combat that, they have built in a number of systems, including facial-recognition software that sends up a flag if no faces are detected on camera, and a ranking system that scores people based on their interactions. People who are frequently ‘nexted,’ or passed over for another partner, will have a lower ranking than those who stay in lengthy chat sessions,” details the article.
Airtime has already attracted financial backers, raising close to $40 million in venture funding thus far.

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