airtime

LinkedIn had a rough week on the security front.

Hours after LinkedIn members reported that their passwords were on a list of stolen passwords, the business-networking site confirmed that some 6.5 million of its members' passwords had been stolen and uploaded to a Russian hacker server. At this point, it's not clear how many of the passwords were cracked.

The damage appears to be somewhat limited in scope of data, the post says, but it's also still unclear how many of the site's more than 160 million users may have been affected. After realizing the problem, … Read more

Now that the oohs and ahhs of Airtime's launch this week have settled, it's time to look at the nitty gritty of this new browser-based video chat service. One of the company's policies involve user privacy.

The way Airtime works is by using Facebook as its log-in platform. At its basic level, Airtime allows simple video chat with users' Facebook friends, but take it up a notch and it lets people chat with strangers that have common interests.

So, as a way to keep its users safe, the service takes random secret photos of video conversations between … Read more

Confession time: I loved Airtime, when it launched Tuesday.

This was after I was prepared to hate it. A little more than a day later, I've settled in the middle. I'm ignoring it. I wish it was better, and until it is, I can't really recommend it. But it has potential. Here's what it needs.

Friends-only mode (Updated!) Airtime is a very good person-to-person video phone app for connecting to Facebook friends. I like it better than Facebook's. But if you run it, you're always visible to the system for random connections from people … Read more

In today's show we're changing our passwords, talking to strangers and pretending we can fly:

Google Maps are going 3D. Google announced new features it's building into maps, and it gives the perspective of what you might see if you could fly between buildings. Multiple photos are taken by airplanes, and then it's automatically stitched together to look like a 3D model. The demo was of San Francisco, but no word on which other cities will be the first to get this feature. It is expected to cover 300 million people by the end of the … Read more

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

I was prepared to hate Airtime, the new video chat service that connects you to both friends and strangers. The last thing I need in my life is random, time-consuming video chats with distant friends of friends. And for connecting with people I already know, I have instant messaging, Skype, and the phone.

But the moment I fired up Airtime for the first time, an old friend called me and blew me a kiss. Made my morning. Then, a few minutes later, when I pressed the random "Talk to Someone" button , I got connected to Lee Jacobs of … 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