The web has transformed the way we communicate with each other, and until recently, there’s been a lot of worry that online correspondence is making things less personal. But with things like Skype video chat, Apple’s FaceTime and even Chatroulette, talking with someone—anyone—in “person” is as easy as sending an email or carrying on a text chat conversation.
So when Chatroulette found itself in the throes of popular geek culture, vChatter founder Will Bunker said “I can do that.” And so he did. Only better. vChatter launched over the summer, in the wake of Chatroulette’s negative press on voyeurs and Tosh.0 stints. vChatter’s claim to fame was safety, a major feature missing from Chatroulette’s risky take on on-demand video chats.
Now that we’ve all gotten over the Chatroulette thing, vChatter is still growing, even though Bunker has since downsized advertising around the tool. He wanted to know if people were using the service because they found value in it, instead of some incentive pushed through Facebook, where vChatter’s app resides. So far, Bunker is validated in his efforts, as vChatter is still growing. “This is real, not growth on sustained advertising,” he tells me in an interview last week.
It seems a foreign concept in this day and age, where startups still worry about reaching critical mass before solid business plans, seeking venture capital to execute, instead of developing a proof of concept. As the man behind One-and-only.com, the dating site acquired by Ticketmaster, later blossoming into Match.com, Bunker knows a thing or two about launching a website, learning about users’ needs, and growing as a result of that interaction—not in spite of it.
That’s not to say Bunker is pouring his own cash into his startups. With vChatter, his latest go-round in this latest wave of social media expansion, the startup received an initial round of angel funding, amounting to $250k. But Bunker’s experience from the 2.0 days carries over quite well in this new era, especially as demand rises around video services.
“Our biggest push over the next five months is figuring who would be best for you to talk to next,” Bunker explains. “Anywhere there’s a camera and a microphone, you could drop into a conversation that’s going on somewhere in the world. Smartphones with cameras are making people able to connect anywhere, anytime. It doesn’t always have to be an event, but maybe you need someone to talk to about a snake bite. I want vChatter to be a Pandora for people.”
It’s a concept that resonates with ongoing patterns in social media recommendation tools, the reallocation of analytics, and shared preferences amongst socially oriented sites and services. Already knee-deep in Facebook’s network, vChatter can leverage your social graph there to get a head start on more inclusive recommendations, based on things like the amount of time you chat with a person, and their characteristics. Noting the importance of a relationship obviously has a place of significance for video chat as well.
Monetizing this interactivity is another area of interest for Bunker and his team, noting that industries where people are already getting paid for their time will be amongst the first to find value in the future of video chatting and subsequent recommendations. “Psychologists and tutors, or any profession that facilitates [the exchange of money for time], enabling them to reach people on a broader area, would be a business opportunity.”
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