On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker the original founders of the peer-to-peer music sharing service Napster. have teamed up again to launch another project that has all the potential to go viral. Called 'Airtime' the service is modeled along the lines of Chatroulette with a huge difference. It will be Chatroulette with a social network attached.
Unlike other social networks and we are not going to mention the names out here. Airtime will introduce random strangers to each other and group people according to common interests.
The funding money comes from Founders Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am, Scott Braun (Justine Bieber's agent), and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Look at the star studded list of people who are investing. will.i.am must have learnt a lot from all the hangouts he has been doing on Google+. This seems to be a venture that can sure get a lot of interest and people who would want to try it out.
What is Airtime and how does it work
Complete details about the startup are still not clear and the founders do not want to give anything away. It however seems that it will all be around interests and what people like. The ability to find and network with random people and add them to your group and circle of friends. This is all speculation right now but this is the way this project seems to go.
Check out their website now although there is nothing much to greet you other than 'airtime coming soon'. You can however signup to gain early access.
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