Boston: September 19, 2012

Rubber Duck Debugging

Create a web service like a text chat
Examples:
- Chatroulette
- Omegle
- Airtime (Sean Parker)
Explain your problem to someone whoâs interested but isn’t necessarily knowledgeable
5 minutes max?
Website has a list of topics and the user picks the topic which he wants to discuss/learn.
Connect through Facebook. Idea is to meet new people. The service randomly matches people based on common interests.
Problem: ‘inappropriate’ content
Problem: how to end the conversation?
- enforce time restriction
Problem: how to monetize?
- pay to extend time limit
- context-sensitive ads
- ‘adults only’ section
- charge for keywords in the topic title
- discounts based on reputation, facetime
- pay more to talk to someone with higher reputation than you
- sponsored events, discussions, debates
- pay to watch others’ video conversation
Problem: to disclose or not to disclose identities?
Public or private content?
- public; new visitors will leave if they see an empty website
Model after Speed Dating events
- allow people to reconnect if they both enjoyed conversation and both agree to continue
Problem: need to gather a critical mass
- Start with one vertical
  - Recommended video: Joel (from JoelOnSoftware) tells Google why StackOverflow is better than everything else

Games:
- âinsert a wordâ
- âtabooâ
- 20 questions
- speak in movie titles / song titles
  - type-ahead
  - different categories of songs/movies are worth different amounts of points (Bieber special!)
- fortunately-unfortunately
- T9 score
How to monetize:
- affiliate links next to the songs and movies (rental?) for speak-in-titles games
Suggested name: funversations.com