James Siminoff

Thanks Fred

There are a few blogs that I read every morning, one of them is Fred Wilson’s.  Fred is a VC and has a amazing track record of finding incredible companies before they hit the big times.  One of his tricks is simple, he goes out there and tries everything himself.  He was one of the first people to find PhoneTag and write about it.

Today he wrote about a service that I had never heard of called chatroulette.  When you go there it basically puts you into random video chats with people.  So at 10am this morning I went to the site and this is what my first chat looked like:

I tried to keep the above a bit PG but unfortunately I was able to see the video in its full high definition.  Luckily I did not scream out loud as I was on a conference call at the time I was checking the site out.

Well I continued to check out the different videos, basically you just keep hitting next until you find something or someone you would like to talk to.  The feeling you get is almost like being a fly on a wall, every time you hit next you get a different image of something, someone, somewhere, it is creepy and sort of addicting all at the same time.

Fred’s daughter said this site was more popular then Facebook at her college and I can believe it.  The idea behind chatroulette is very big, while the site might fizzle out I can immediately see the same platform taking off in a more controlled manner for dating.  Single people could go online and with some parameters could randomly engage with potential dates and go to the next one with a click of a button.

So thanks Fred, it is always nice to see new exciting business models and a random guy jerking off all in one stroke of the keyboard:)