Chatroulette is a website that pairs strangers from around the world together for webcam conversations. It was one of the most popular websites in 2010. Visitors to the website begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor who is chosen at random.
The Chatroulette website was created by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old school dropout from Moscow. Ternovskiy says the concept arose from video chats he used to have with friends on Skype, and that he wrote the first version of Chatroulette in “two days and two nights”.
In early November 2009, shortly after the site launched, it had 500 visitors per day.One month later there were 50,000. Around the beginning of March, Ternovskiy estimated the site to have around 1.5 million users. As of March 2010, Ternovskiy was running the site from his childhood bedroom, assisted by four programmers who were working remotely, and the site was supported through google adsense advertising links to an online dating service. He created the site for “fun” and had no “business goals” for it in the beggining. He’s had to rewrite the code several times in order to allow it to scale. Chatroulette runs on seven servers in Frankfurt, Germany.Website generates about $100,000 monthly. With $1.2 million coming in every year, and only 3 people working on the site, it’s certainly looking like a legitimate long-term business.
And Andrey still hasn’t finished the school.
About Andrey:
He was born on April 22, 1992, less than four months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and grew up in a small apartment in a typically Moscow high-rise. His mother, Elena, is a talented mathematician who works at Moscow State University. His father, Vladimir, is an
associate professor of mathematics at the same university. Andrey started with games, usually of the reality-simulating. By fourth grade, he was writing codes. Like many young Russians with programming skills, Ternovskiy turned to hacking. When he was eleven, he came upon zloy.org (which translates as angry.org), a hacker forum led by a young man named Sergey (a.k.a. Terminator), who trained his followers in cyber warfare. Using the handle Flashboy, Ternovskiy soon mastered the art of the denial-of-service attack, wherein a target system is paralyzed by a mass of incoming communication requests. Next came Web-site and e-mail hacking. By 2007, at the age of fifteen, Ternovskiy had learned about what hackers call “social engineering”–getting what one wants through deceit or manipulation. Posing as a teacher, Ternovskiy got access to some practice tests before they were delivered to his school. ….and then by fun he created Chatroulette….
