https://www.airtime.com/


They've been building Airtime for two years, raised more than $33 million in venture capital, and they're about to take on a fairly established industry of video chatting. But they're doing it, as you might expect, with a very big twist. Oh, and with a whole lot of passion.

"There is one social graph," Parker tells me. "We are all members of it. It's called real life."

And that's exactly what Parker and Fanning are looking to bring to the Internet today. The real life interaction, the real life responses to the things we see on the Internet and share with people: that's something that can only be done with video.


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"Right now everything in the social space is asynchronous," Parker says. He explains that people either use instant messaging or Facebook or Twitter where the text-based responses aren't instantaneous. "Why isn't more happening live on the Internet?" he asks.

"There is a need for a physical presence and connection on the Internet. It's absolutely critical," Fanning says.

Airtime fills those gaps, they tell me, and the webcam is the answer. There are over 800 million webcams shipping this year, but the two say they feel that none of the current video chatting solutions, including Skype, Facetime, Google's Hangouts, and even Facebook, have got it right.

Services like Skype and Facetime require you to download software onto your computer. It also requires that you log in to a separate account. And discovering people or friends with likeminded interests on those services isn't encouraged. Airtime takes on each of those issues: it is browser-based, you can only sign in with your Facebook account, and it's built around chatting not only with your friends but friends of friends with whom you share common interests.


"Your friends are all on Facebook and it's open," Parker says. Only one social network can rival the real life social network that Parker describes, and that's Facebook.

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