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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.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/04/shawn-fanning-and-sean-parker-team-for-yo-a-new-video-chat-project.html

Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker team for Yo, a new video chat project | Technology | Los Angeles Times

Napster is a name given to two music-focused online services. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files, typically music, encoded in MP3 format. The original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement , ceased operations and was eventually acquired by Roxio . In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until it merged with Rhapsody on 1 December 2011. Later companies and projects successfully followed its P2P filesharing example such as Gnutella , Freenet and many others.

Napster

Plaxo

Plaxo is an online address book and social networking service originally founded by Sean Parker , Minh Nguyen [ 1 ] and two Stanford engineering students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring. [ 2 ] Plaxo, based in Sunnyvale, California , [ 3 ] is a subsidiary of cable television company, Comcast . [ edit ] History 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.

Facebook

US$ 3.71 billion (2011), up from $1.97b (2010) [ 2 ] 2 (April 2012 [update] ) [ 4 ] Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. [ 1 ] As of February 2012 [update] , Facebook has more than 845 million active users. [ 5 ] Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends , and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other.

Causes was founded in 2007 as an online advocacy and fundraising application within Facebook , an online social network site. It is a for-profit business. [ 1 ] Causes is the world's largest online platform for activism with 100 million installed users and $30 million raised for nonprofits.

Causes

Founders Fund is a San Francisco based venture capital investment firm. The firm’s six partners, Peter Thiel , Sean Parker , Ken Howery , Luke Nosek , Bruce Gibney, and Brian Singerman have been founders of or early investors in numerous companies, such as Facebook , PayPal , Napster , and Palantir Technologies . Founders Fund was formed in 2005 and has launched four suites of funds to date with more than $1 billion in aggregate capital under management. [ edit ] History The firm was organized by Peter Thiel and Ken Howery in early 2005 and raised its first fund of $50 million from individual entrepreneurs and angel investors in January of that year.