parker

When Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning launched their latest startup this morning -- a social video chat service called Airtime -- you can bet that one person hoping for its success was Parker's longtime pal and onetime business partner, Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg wasn't on hand at the celeb-filled launch in New York City -- though Zuck was spotted on Airtime later in the day -- and this wasn't a Facebook event by any means. But the pitch by Parker, who was Facebook's founding president and still owns a chunk of the newly public company, at times … Read more

Years from now, when our children are grown, we'll tell them we were all online when a single Web site changed the way we use the Internet. Unfortunately, Chatroulette stumbled after racking up more than a million users thanks to a certain part of the male anatomy, but Napster co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning have teamed up again for a video-chat pivot called Airtime.

Though it's not ready for deployment yet, Airtime is already getting support from celebrities like Jim Carrey, Alicia Keys, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus who can't wait to start a random conversation with a Facebook user online. The service is different from Chatroulette in that it actually protects the eyeballs of its users from "vulgar behavior, sexually suggestive behavior, violence, and animal cruelty". In other words, nobody associated with The 404 will receive an beta invite.… Read more

I have to admit, the new Airtime video chat service looks and feels cool. Certainly, that can be traced to its founders, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning of Napster fame, among other things. Parker wasn't just the cool guy who lured Mark Zuckerberg to the West Coast in "The Social Network." His playlists on Spotify have also become one of my favorite places to find new music, and his spectacles are... well, I'm sure some people like them.

Given this duo's trend-setting credentials, it is with much trepidation that I express my utter bewilderment at how Sean/Shawn could think that anyone actually wants another video chat app trying to force random people to stare at each other and discuss the latest episode of "Mad Men." … Read more

NEW YORK--To launch his new start-up, Sean Parker should have spent less of his billions on celebrity guests and more of it on fixing his technology.

Parker and Shawn Fanning, his ol' partner from the Napster days, today unveiled Airtime, a Web video chat service designed to take up where Chatroulette left off. The launch event was a glitch-filled disaster -- or a marketing coup by Parker.

As he addressed a crowd of journalists and celebrities, Parker's attempt to demonstrate the service was foiled at every turn. Numerous attempts to connect with celebrities via the Web service failed. Not … Read more

NEW YORK -- After months of hype, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning's latest venture, a video chat service called Airtime, launched today.

Airtime has been described as an evolved version of Chatroulette, a video service that randomly matched up people for chatting. The new venture matches people with common interests and social connections in video chat sessions.

It is the latest undertaking from the co-founders of Napster, which helped revolutionize how music was obtained over the Internet. While Napster ultimately faded away, it fundamentally changed how the music industry operated and viewed online content. Parker and Fanning are hoping … Read more

The clock is about to start ticking.

When Facebook goes public later this week -- potentially commanding a lofty valuation of more than $100 billion out of the gate -- the demands on the 28-year-old Mark Zuckerberg will far outweigh any sartorial silliness about what he should or should not wear.

Not that there is any immediate pressure to perform for Wall Street given the understandable excitement about the huge number of people using Facebook every month -- a customer base now approaching some 15 percent of the world's population. But honeymoons for newly public companies only last so … Read more

The boys who brought Napster to the world -- Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning -- are getting ready to reveal details of their next, still stealthy startup.

It's called Airtime, although a year ago the project apparently was going by the name Supyo, and it has to do with live video. And, naturally, social media -- a familiar world for Parker, who was Facebook's founding president and is currently a backer and board member of Spotify.

Few details exist yet, but last year TechCrunch reported that the startup is a Web-based video chat service that aims to connect … Read more

SecondMarket, which runs a market for shares of private companies, took a big hit when it lost Facebook as a customer, even letting go of 10 percent of its staff.

So who will replace Facebook, which since SecondMarket got into this business has been its most actively traded stock? That's a tall order, and it's unlikely that any one company will make up for all the trading that went on with Facebook.

Moreover, it's hard to assess what's going on with SecondMarket since the company doesn't disclose much. It won't say, for instance, which … Read more

Sean Parker is an enemy of music artists.

That's according to Patrick Carney, drummer of the rock band The Black Keys. Carney offered his opinion of Parker during an interview with radio station WGRD.

"He's an ass----," Carney told the station. "That guy has $2 billion that he made from figuring out ways to steal royalties from artists, and that's the bottom line. You can't really trust anybody like that."

Parker is an investor in Spotify and Facebook, but his connection to Spotify is presumably only one part of why Carney finds … Read more