Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker team for Yo, a new video chat project | Technology | Los Angeles Times. Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, who worked together in 1990s during the early days of the music-sharing application Napster, have teamed up again and are building a new video chat project called Yo. A source close to Fanning and Parker told The Times that Parker has been devoting a lot of time to Yo. Parker was previously Facebook's president and was recently played by Justin Timberlake in "The Social Network," a movie about the start of the world's most popular social media site. Fanning is also involved with Path, former Facebook executive Dave Morin's photo-centric social networking start-up.
Parker, who is a managing partner at the Founders Fund venture capital firm, also works with Joe Green's Causes, a Facebook app that connects users with various causes and organizations so they can donate time or money. The website TechCrunch reported Friday that its co-editor and founder, Michael Arrington, is one of Yo's investors. Dave Morin rejects Google's $100-million offer for Path. Napster. Later systems successfully followed and elaborated on Napster's file-copying methods, including Gnutella, Freenet, Bit Torrent and many others. Some systems, like LimeWire, Grokster, Madster and the original eDonkey network, were shut down or altered under similar circumstances. Origin[edit] Napster was co-founded by Shawn Fanning, John Fanning, and Sean Parker.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Initially, Napster was envisioned as an independent peer-to-peer file sharing service.
The service operated between June 1999 and July 2001.[10] Its technology allowed people to easily share their MP3 files with other participants.[11] Although the original service was shut down by court order, the Napster brand survived after the company's assets were liquidated and purchased by other companies through bankruptcy proceedings.[12] History[edit] These reasons aside, many other users simply enjoyed trading and downloading music for free. Macintosh version[edit] Legal challenges[edit] Promotional power[edit] Plaxo. Plaxo is an online address book and social networking service originally founded by Sean Parker, Minh Nguyen[1] and two Stanford University engineering students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring.[2] Plaxo, based in Sunnyvale, California,[3] is a subsidiary of cable television company Comcast. History[edit] The company launched[2] on November 12, 2002, and was funded by venture capital including funds from Sequoia Capital.[4] Plaxo announced May 14, 2008, that it had signed an agreement to be acquired by Comcast.[5] The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Comcast completed its purchase of Plaxo on July 1, 2008.[6] Plaxo provides automatic updating of contact information. Users and their contacts store their information in the cloud on Plaxo's servers. When this information is edited by the user, the changes appear in the address books of all those who listed the account changer in their own books. In May 2008, the website reported 20 million users.[7] Partnerships[edit] AOL[edit] Comcast[edit] Facebook. This article is about the social networking service. For the type of directory, see face book. Facebook (formerly [thefacebook]) is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[7] The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University.
It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to high-school students. Facebook now allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.[8] Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to it by American universities students.[9] History College-only service Service available to the general public Initial public offering. Causes. Causes.com is the world’s largest online campaigning platform. Causes connects people who support a common cause and empowers them to take action together. Causes members have raised over $48M for nonprofits, collected 34M signatures for grassroots campaigns, and organized thousands of awareness campaigns.
Since launching in 2007, Causes has helped over 186M people in 156 countries connect with their cause.[1] Causes' stated mission is "to empower people to create change in the world through online organizing. Any user can create a campaign on Causes, whether they work for a nonprofit or are an activist, interested in a certain issue. Causes is a for-profit business.[5] Investors include Sean Parker, Founders Fund, the Case Foundation and NEA. Causes launched in 2007 as the first social advocacy application and one of the first 10 Facebook apps. In 2012, Causes launched Causes.com[7] and appointed Matt Mahan as CEO. Official site. The Founders Fund. San Francisco-based venture capital firm Founders Fund is an American venture capital fund formed in 2005 and based in San Francisco. The fund has roughly $17 billion in total assets under management as of 2025.[1][2] Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Palantir Technologies, and an early investor in Facebook.[3][4][5] The firm's partners have been founders, early employees and investors at companies including PayPal, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries and SpaceX.[6] Notable partners include Peter Thiel[9] and Trae Stephens.[10] Former partners include Brian Singerman,[9][11] Keith Rabois,[12] Cyan Banister, Ken Howery,[9] Kevin Hartz,[13] Sean Parker,[14] and Bruce Gibney.[15][16] In 2010, the firm raised its third fund, with $250 million in committed capital,[19] and in 2011, a fourth fund with $625 million of committed capital was raised.[20][21] Founders Fund (official website)