One of the most obvious things I will take away from this IMC course is my appreciation for emerging media. New tools are in a constant state of development which is more than great; it’s life changing. However, there is a lot of emerging media ideas out there that just don’t make it and I find it interesting how some of these ideas are so similar to tools that go on to be highly useful.
Take Airtime for example. Airtime was a late 2011 start up company created by the co-founders of Napster, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning. This video chat company that these two invested over 33 million dollars in has sadly never lived up to the hype it was expected to have. Similar to a fairly popular social tool, chat roulette, Airtime lets you directly video chat with your friends on Facebook without plug in or downloads.
Since the company launched, Airtime has only 10,000 current users and has had to layoff most of their employees. What this tells me is how important originality is. And even with money and fame, this proves how difficult it is to get a start up business off the ground. Especially when it involves emerging media.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/daily-report-sean-parkers-start-up-struggles/
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