So while the rest of the world was busy making Chatroulette clones, French start-up ToRoulette decided to kick-it up a notch; that’s right, the company decided it was time to develop a professionally-oriented version of Chatroulette destined for Facebook Fan Pages.
Sure, there are already a number of Chatroulette applications hiding out on Facebook, like Chat-o-Rama or what-have-you, that simply leverage users’ personal profiles to create a more secure (aka clothed) environment. Well, ToRoulette goes a little further. The start-up’s platform essentially allows you to integrate Chatroulette into your Fan Page and to organize chat-events with your community of fans. In other words, if successful, ToRoulette believes it should ultimately help to develop a stronger fan base and thus clientele.
Seems the team has even tested their model with several ToRoulette events, one which counted over 500 participants. Naturally, when users come together around a common interest – as they do on a Fan Page – it makes the Chatroulette-like speed-dating or whatever all the more successful. Therefore, the company plans to offer a complete personalization of their tool for brands to host Fan Page Chatroulette events, starting at €15,000. And on the flip side, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the B2C model will be ad-based.
The application – which currently allows strictly one-to-one conversations via Facebook’s platform – counts some 12,000 users per month in France. As the application is now available in English, ToRoulette is hoping the viral tool will see exponential growth.
But let’s come back to the original Chatroulette, whose Facebook application with over 160,000 users still seems to have nudity problems – according to the comments. ToRoulette claims that it’ll be able to identify and signal any inappropriate behavior on the platform via photo – and it won’t hesitate to block users either. Therefore, brands should hopefully be more at ease with regards to the decency of their communities.
The start-up is currently in the process of raising a round of funding and plans to release more collaborative-game features for additional Fan Page interaction later this year.
Guess we’ll have to wait and see who will be the first company to have a virtual summer Chatroulette party on their Facebook Fan Page?