by Jesse Kirshbaum
Sean Parker teamed back up with his old Napster Co-Founder, Shawn Fanning, for the launch of their next venutre, Airtime, this morning at Milk Studios in NYC. I respect that Sean Parker is a true entrepreneur and clearly a “go-big” risk taker. However, today was not his brightest day as he launched his new venture: Airtime.
Although, unquestionably this was one of the flashiest tech launches in NY in a long time, the event started very late. There was a 9:30 AM call time, but we were all jammed in the waiting room til about 10:15. I did see some familiar faces there though, like Rachel Sterne, Jenna Wortham, AJ Calloway, and Shaina Moskowitz.
When the doors opened, the event started out with Jimmy Fallon greeting the crowd and cracking a few jokes. “Sean Parker and Fanning this time around have set out to launch a company that isn’t going to make the whole music industry hate them,” he quipped.
Then he brought out the founders, Sean Parker and Fanning for a fun series of Q & A. How did they meet? On the internet. Why did they launch Napster? etc etc. It felt like, in true entrepreneurial fashion, they were looking for something to do together, and came up with this new venture as a project.
Then Sean Parker took the stage and walked us through the power point slide show of his vision for Airtime.A few noticable things: He started by setting the stage with his thought process. As true serial entrepreneurs think, him and Fanning were looking at problems that needed to be fixed in the industry. He was going through the evolution of the Internet. Questions of issues he wanted to solve. Trends that were taking off like webcams, increasing broadband, social graph… and then came up with the concept for Airtime.
Airtime is essentially a web-based platform that allows users to video chat and also watch online videos together in real-time online. It runs harmoniously with Facebook (which makes sense for Parker for various reasons) and allows you to share videos. It also has a Chatroulette-esque feature where you connect with people at random as well so users could, “break out of the Social Graph.”Then he started to bring out some high profile guests… guests like Ed Helms, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Joel McHale. Unfortunately, this is where the technical difficulties really began. The whole thing started to feel like a parody of the launching of a tech company. If Sean Parker ever hosts SNL, this could be the skit. The product didn’t work, the stars were out of place, and the technology never really connected. Everyone ended up just sitting on stage and watching the demo reel of what the product was supposed to do.
Despite this, Airtime achieved it’s goal today, as after the presentation it turned into a media frenzy. People were logging on, on the spot. Bulbs flashed and filming was happening in every direction, and “#Airtime,” “Jimmy Fallon,” and other Airtime-related terms were trending on Twitter. All in all, they made a splash.
The product is now live, I just hope that the Seans are working hard to have the tech up to speed…. because I think this one has a chance if the technology can keep up with the hype!
Comments are closed.