Shawn Fanning And Sean Parker Talk About Airtime And “Smashing People Together”

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to... ? Learn More

The last company Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker started together was Napster, over a decade ago. Now they are teaming up again to create a new startup called Airtime (previously codenamed Supyo). The two have completed an $8.3 million series A financing from Founders Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am, Scott Braun, and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.

Fanning will be CEO and Parker will be executive chairman. Parker will be spending more time in California to take an active role in the company, and changing his position at the Founders Fund from Managing director to a general partner. “I had to figure out a way to step back from the venture fund in order to dive full time into this,” he tells me. Parker also has a “quasi-operating role at Spotify,” where he is a board member and helps with everything from product design to negotiating with the music labels and its recent Facebook integration. The third founder is CTO Joey Liaw. The company has about a dozen employees already and is looking for a founding engineer with experience in scaling a high-availability site that can handle a ton of realtime, concurrent users.

Inspired by Chatroulette, Airtime will be random, realtime and include a live video chat component. Fanning and Parker are still vague on specifics, but don’t expect it to look too much like Chatroulette. Parker originally helped recruit Fanning from Path, where he was CEO, to work on Chatroulette at the behest of Yuri Milner, who is now one of Airtime’s investors. “They lacked a clear vision and a management team. Yuri asked me where would you take this thing and who should run it,” says Parker.

The collaboration with Chatroulette’s young founder Andrey Ternovskiy didn’t work out, but it got Fanning and Parker thinking about a larger problem. “With all due respect to Andrey,” says Fanning, “it was just scratching the surface of what it could be—a universal host that is introducing people, smashing people together.”

“It was fascinating to watch in the sense that it was not a virally engineered product,” says Parker. “Here you have a product growing through organic word of mouth. It looked like Napster in 1999.” Chatroulette also eliminated the anxiety of meeting new people by randomly pairing users. It ended up being too extreme and attracting a lot of naked dudes, but there it was obviously tapping into something essential.

“We are trying to address the problem of what has happened the last 10 years of social media,” says Parker, who was also the founding President of Facebook. “Your social network has become more rigid and constraining.” Airtime, it seems, will be more about meeting new people. “Facebook is about identity, the people you already know,” says Parker. “It has little to do with people you don’t know.”

So how will Airtime help you meet new people? Fanning and Parker won’t say. But if I had to guess, I’d bet that it will be around interests. Think about it. If you combine the random smashing together of people that Chatroulette was so good at with an interest graph that matches up people based on topics and activities they care about, you’ve got the beginnings of an online party with Airtime playing the host. The name Airtime, though, suggests that it could also be a platform for personal broadcasting as well. Will these live video chats be one-to-one, group chats or public broadcasts like on YouNow, a live video startup that launched at Disrupt SF? Stay tuned.

The new stealth project by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. It is believed to be in the video chatting space. Originally codenamed Supyo, it will launch as Airtime.

Learn more Companies: Founders Fund, ooma, Causes, Plaxo, Facebook, Napster, fbFund, Yammer, Asana, Element Payment Services, Spotify, Airtime

Sean Parker is a serial entrepreneur and a managing partner at the Founders Fund. As one of the two founders of Napster, Sean helped architect and manage the peer-to-peer file sharing application to become one of the largest on the net. Parker subsequently helped found and manage Plaxo, a VC-backed contact management application company. More recently, Parker worked as the Founding President of Facebook before moving on to join up with Peter Thiel at The Founders Fund,...

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Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1998 while attending Northeastern University. He is currently the GM of Rupture at Electronic Arts. Fanning has since founded SNOCAP, a B2B Music Distributor, in 2002, and Rupture, an MMORPG social network in 2006. Both companies were sold in 2008 – SNOCAP to imeem, and Rupture to Electronic Arts.

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Microsoft Is Getting More Serious About Daily (Bing) Deals

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

Microsoft appears to be readying the formal launch of a Bing-branded daily deals website powered by white-label group buying platform service provider Tippr, a well-informed source tells me. You don’t have to take my word for it: Microsoft and Tippr are testing the service right now, and the Bing-exclusive daily deals site is hiding in plain sight (see here and here, or check screenshots below).

For the record, this offering is notably different from Microsoft’s earlier launch of Bing Deals, which basically features links to aggregated deals from a number of partners, including group buying service providers like Tippr, Groupon, LivingSocial, Zozi and Gilt City but also over 2,000 merchants through Bing Shopping, including Target, Nordstrom, and Zappos.

I haven’t found any mention of, link to, official videos or screenshots of the Bing-exclusive daily deals site powered by Tippr. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Microsoft has never made any announcements concerning the Bing.com/daily-deals website whatsoever.

As you can tell from the screenshots embedded below, Bing’s group buying destination site will be familiar to you if you’ve ever visited the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial for deals.

You can use your Facebook account or Windows Live ID to log in, browse and share current deals, past deals, and read more about how it works. The latter page notes:

Subscribe to Bing Deals and we’ll e-mail you a new deal every day from a great local business. You can also search at Bing.com or browse for deals at Bing.com/daily-deals.

Again, this site is the only one I can find on the Web that has ever made any mention of the URL / website Bing.com/daily-deals.

The website also mentions something called a ‘sweetened deal’, which is described as follows:

What is a sweetened deal? It’s a deal that gets better over time. Some of the deals that appear on Bing Deals will get a better value as more deals are purchased.

For example, a deal may start off as $10 for $20 at Some Corner Bakery. If enough people purchase the voucher, the deal hits the sweeten point and it becomes $10 for $25! No matter what, you will always pay the same amount for the deal you purchase, but what you get for your hard earned dollars goes up!

The cool thing about Sweeten Deals is that as more people buy, the value of the deal gets better for everybody who purchased and will purchase the deal. This is why it’s a great idea to share the deal you bought with your friends, so you and everybody else get the biggest bang for your buck.

As you can tell from one of the screenshots below, daily deals are / will be available in 12 markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.

When reached, Tippr CEO Martin Tobias declined to comment on the partnership between Microsoft and Tippr. A Microsoft spokesperson tells me he believes this is part of something they’ve talked about before, then referred to as Bing Exclusive Deals for some cities, which are deals you can only get through Bing, but that the team is still “getting it up and running and working out kinks”.

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft last week expanded its Bing Business Portal, adding the ability for local businesses to run group deals – rather than regular deals – on Bing (among other things).

Search Engine Land offers an excellent run-down of everything that’s new.

Other daily deal sites in the U.S. include Groupon, LivingSocial, Google Offers, BuyWithMe, AmazonLocal, HomeRun and Dealster, among many, many others.

Bing is a decision (search) engine from Microsoft officially announced on May 28, 2009. It combines technology from the Farecast and Powerset acquisitions, as well as new algorithms and a more colorful page design, to attempt to understand the context behind the search, which Microsoft claims gives users better results. Bing as a brand is also an attempt to eliminate the confusion caused by Microsoft’s “Windows Live” branding. Bing is now everything “search” related, whereas Windows Live encompasses the remnants...

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Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market. Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...

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Tippr.com leverages collective buying power to fulfill consumers’ daily cravings for the guaranteed best deals on goods, services, and events, while supporting local businesses and communities. Tippr.com is the only collective buying site to offer our patented accelerating deals, which means the deal gets better as more buyers opt in. Tippr is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kashless Inc.

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Keen On… Connected: The Movie About All of Us (TCTV)

Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award. As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur,... ? Learn More

One of the most interesting movies of the year launches tomorrow. Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death and Technology is the work of the award-winning filmmaker Tiffany Shlain and it deals in both a personal and idealistic way with the impact of digital connectivity on all of us.

“All these technologies are just extensions of ourselves,” Shlain reminded me when she came into the TechCrunchTV studio to talk about Connected. The Bay Area based filmmaker – who founded the Webby awards in 1996 – believes that “in our lifetime,” everyone will be connected. And that’s why she made Connected – to confess what connectedness means to her and what it could mean to all of us as an increasingly connected human race.

Connected is a must see movie. But before you see it, watch Shlain, a woman who has captured the ambiguity of our connected future with unusual clarity.

Watch the trailer:

Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award. As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur, Andrew founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. He is currently the...

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Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is a filmmaker, artist, founder of The Webby Awards, co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences and a Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute. Tiffany’s work with film, technology and activism has received 44 awards and distinctions and her last four films have premiered at Sundance. Her films include “Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness,” about reproductive rights in...

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Former HP Global Gaming Head Rahul Sood Talks About Acquisitions, Brands, And Palm

Curious to find out the possible thinking behind HP’s recent actions, we began to look at the parallels in past behavior by tech giant HP. The most interesting example comes from VoodooPC, one of the first high-end gaming PCs for the mass market. Led by Rahul Sood, HP bought VoodooPC in 2006 and the last product to come out of that branch was launched in 2009.

In short, we wanted to know if HP really was where good ideas go to die.

Mr. Sood was kind enough to answer a few questions.

TC: We at TC have been talking about how great VoodooPC was. We all loved the hardware and I remember unpacking the boxes and hearing the drums. It was consumer done right. I also think there are a lot of parallels between Voodoo and Palm in this case. Do you agree?

Rahul Sood: I appreciate the kind words, and I know my friends at HP will also appreciate them as well. Let’s just say if you’re going to make a strategic acquisition, no matter how large, you need to have patience to blend cultures and allow the companies to mutually flourish.

It’s been less than a year since I left HP – and about 1 year since the Palm acquisition was announced. One year goes quickly in a large organization. It takes the average person 8 months to “on board” themselves into a new organization.

I think these acquisitions should be protected by people who can effectively blend cultures and who can curate a vision that people can rally around. …and did I mention patience? If you don’t have patience you risk blowing up the strategy.

Yes there are plenty of parallels between Palm and Voodoo that could be drawn. If future Rahul could go back to 2006 Rahul I would have some good advice for him — but believe it or not I still would have gone through with the deal, but I would have managed it differently.

TC: What could have HP done to save the TouchPad? Anything?

RS: I find it interesting that the TouchPad went from a total failure to selling out just by changing the price. It proves that there is a market, somewhere between $100-$300 for this product. It also brings up some fundamental business rules that go back to the days of Sun Tzu;

“When strong, avoid them. If of high morale, depress them. Seem humble to fill them with conceit. If at ease, exhaust them. If united, separate them. Attack their weaknesses. Emerge to their surprise.”

In the case of the Touchpad HP tried to go head to head with Apple, probably not the right approach, especially since they launched it when it wasn’t fully baked. Either way, you should not go head to head with Apple, there’s no need to.

They could disrupt the market at a lower price to gain significant adoption of webOS, and then work to build some back-end recurring revenue via applications, partnerships, search, shopping, etc.

They could eventually turn up the heat and scale the business by open sourcing webOS and building a solid app model that caters to their enterprise customers.

There’s plenty of ways the TouchPad could have become a success – but it takes time, patience and vision to figure it out.

TC: Where is HP headed? Do you have any idea? Will they go the IBM route?

RS: By “IBM route” I assume you’re comparing HP PSG to Lenovo (or what once was IBM’s PC business). I disagree with this widely quoted comparison.
HP PSG is a giant with an insanely large footprint. Their biggest strength is the number of “ports” they have in the market The world needs hardware to make money on software. There is no bigger hardware company than HP. If only they could better leverage their footprint in a meaningful way they’d be almost unstoppable.

So if they choose to go “the IBM route” HP risks missing the winning formula of IBM and they could end up forgetting about the consumer and focusing on the enterprise. In my opinion catering to the “enterprise” is such an old school way of thinking.

Companies should cater to people, and the enterprise will follow, because real people run the enterprise. RIM is having a tough time because the competitor that displaced them is catering to real people.. not Wall Street… not the enterprise.

I also find it telling that an officer of the company was quoted on CNBC yesterday saying, “HP’s board of directors will make the final decision in the best interest of our shareholders”. I believe if you build beautiful products that excite your customers then shareholders will ultimately benefit. I believe if you cater to shareholders then customers will suffer.

So if you ask me where HP is heading, I would tell you listen to what the leaders are saying and try to make sense of it. I think they have giant problems to solve, lots of complex internal issues, and when you’re under stress you sometimes overlook things.

TC: It’s amazingly frustrating to see good products give up the ghost. How did you feel about Voodoo? Do you miss the brand?

RS: I still have a Voodoo tatt on my leg. I have Voodoo branding throughout my home. Voodoo will always be a part of me, it was once a huge part of HP’s strategy and I can’t help but feel bad about it. Yeah I miss the brand, the people, the culture. …but I made the right decision to move on, I was too emotionally attached to it. I love Microsoft’s entertainment business, it’s such a fun place to work. It reminds me of Voodoo in many ways.

TC: What does a company need to be successful in branding and consumer sales?

RS: A company needs to know who they are and where they came from. They need leaders who dream about their products and experiences creating the vision with people who dream about rows and columns supporting them. They need to establish a clear vision and strategy that people understand and can rally around.

They should live, eat, breath, sleep the brand – and they naturally become evangelists for it. The successful brands establish a soul, the brand becomes a living breathing entity within the DNA of the organization.

They also need great people. The best of the best… Finding and retaining these people is difficult — especially when you are in the Valley. Never has there ever been a better time for cool start-ups to get their juice. The acceleration for growth on tech start-ups is so slick that we’re seeing companies go from 0 to hundreds of millions or billions in valuation in less than 5 years. It’s unbelievable.

So the talent pool for great “Tech DNA” is getting smaller and smaller – and the Valley is easily the most competitive area on earth for attracting and retaining great talent. Think about it, you’ve got Facebook, Google, Apple, Zynga, then you’ve got companies who haven’t upgraded their facility in decades. As a college grad you can go to Facebook or Google and work in a beautiful inspirational environment — it’s hard to compete.

As companies mature, people start to look elsewhere to expand their horizons. HR and Recruiting could be one of the most important strategic functions of any business in the tech space….and yet in some cases they are probably the area that get the least investment because they are setup with the wrong charter.

This is why I find Microsoft fascinating. Microsoft is the oldest, most established tech company, they have done a great job of keeping up with the times. You should check out our facility in Seattle… It’s pretty sick…

TC: Can you buy Palm and run it for all of us? You have that kind of cash, right?

RS: I think HP should open source webOS. I think the vision of breaking up HP is cloudy at best. I did ask HP many times to sell Voodoo back to me, even came up with a couple of proposals. If they open sourced webOS and gave me back Voodoo then we might have something. Maybe Arrington can pull some strings and we can go into business together?

I would like to end by saying that HP treated me with the utmost respect. I was super stoked when we were building cool products like Voodoo ENVY and HP Blackbird and helping to shape HP’s overall strategy. I was sad to leave the company, but I was left with little choice. I’m very happy where I am now. Microsoft’s entertainment business is such a cool place to work — I mean really cool.

I would encourage your readers to check my latest post on HP, I’m going to write a series of them in the next week or so.

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