airtime

Sean Parker's Airtime video chat service launches

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

Stealth startup Airtime raises $25M, buys Erly

Airtime, the video startup founded by Napster duo Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, announced today that it had closed a second round of funding and had purchased another startup.

The mysterious company raised $25 million, according to a TechCrunch report. The startup also announced the acquisition of Erly, a company founded in 2011 that claims to provide a "new social platform for organizing and sharing your personal content." Terms of the deal were not revealed.

Erly was founded by CEO Eric Feng, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which led Airtime's round of financing. … Read more

Sean Parker books 'Airtime' to talk about his latest startup

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

Parker, Fanning: Napster was still better than what we have now

AUSTIN, Texas--Despite the success of Spotify and its competitors, music sharing still hasn't caught up to what Napster offered before being neutered by the courts, that service's founders, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, said today.

During a on-stage discussion at South by Southwest here, Parker and Fanning argued that though new technologies and licensing models finally allow music lovers to legally access and discover vast collections of songs online, even the best new services are still philosophically behind what Napster originally offered its users.

Parker, who appeared earlier this week alongside former U.S. vice president Al Gore … Read more