Social game company executives should be looking at Airtime and thinking about ways it could be used to leverage their businesses. To make a long story short, Airtime is a video chat service (Airtime article in Bloomberg Businessweek) started by Napster co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning (you may know Parker also as the billionaire former President of Facebook).
Why it has a good chance of working
- Parker and Fanning are two of the strongest serial entrepreneurs out there; they know what they are doing.
- Airtime has raised $33 million from some of the top venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz
- The business model was already proven by Chatroulette, a Russian service that showed great traction but failed largely because they were unable to keep the product clean (an issue that Fanning and Parker have solved)
How it affects social game companies
It is still up in the air (pardon the pun) on how you can use Airtime to accelerate your business (or even compete in the future). You will see many interesting integrations of Airtime with social games, but at a minimum it can be a great way to help people discover your app, find new people to play with, interact with players, and build a community. If you have other ideas, I would love you to post them in the comment section below.
The Business of Social Games and Casino 