Paltalk CEO on Fox Business discusses Firetalk

She is among a growing number of Vietnamese who use the free service to improve their English proficiency.

A student in Ho Chi Minh City, Linh is improving her spoken English with the help of online 'teachers' on Paltalk who are either native speakers or Vietnamese living in an English-speaking country.

She first joined the online classes - known as 'rooms' on Paltalk which are set up and operated by volunteer 'teachers' - with a modest knowledge of the language and could not communicate so well in English. But she now speaks decent English after six months.

"I log on to Paltalk to study English whenever I have free time," she says. "The 'teachers' there are always willing to correct me no matter how many times I mispronounce a word."

The Internet chat website is also a 'haunt' for even people with a good English background, like Thu Trang - a 24-year-old graduate in English.

A translator at a newspaper in Hanoi, she manages to find time to sharpen her language skills almost every day.

Trang says her listening, speaking, and pronunciation improve significantly thanks to the interaction she has on Paltalk.

Those online classes are offered free of charge by unbelievably devoted 'teachers.'

BacDon, a nickname very familiar to many Vietnamese Paltalk users, have spent most of his time during the last seven years teaching English with the chat tool.

Donald Elwood Degerstrom, his real name, is a retired army officer after many years serving in the US Air Force.

He now works eight hours a week as a sales clerk at a store in the US.

Sig, the nickname of a Vietnamese living in the US for twenty years, wakes up at 6 am every day during the past five years to teach English to his Vietnamese compatriots back home before going to work two hours later.

Luc Chi, a Vietnamese construction worker living in Canada, once taught 16 hours straight just in order not to disappoint his students who had 'queued up' to learn with him.

And there are still many other 'teachers' like Dailynews or Thoangbuon, both of whom are educators in real life.

"We all hope Vietnamese people can speak fluent English," Chi said.

Now you can creep on potential hookups without giving up your cover.

Vumber is a new service that gives you a second, anonymous, untraceable phone number on your current cellphone.

Just pick an area code, and Vumber supplies a new number. When people dial your Vumber number, it'll go right to your everyday cellphone.

Answer it, send it to voicemail, or pull sneaky stunts like giving them a busy signal or a "this number has been disconnected" recording.

"But what about calling back," you ask? You can place calls from your Vumber as well - just dial your fake number from your cell and you'll get the option to dial out, using your Vumber as the callback number. 

They thought of everything. 

It's only $10, and if you want to give it a shot, there's a free 14-day trial to get those digits out there.

Falzone does a good job on the interviews and doesn't resort to the insulting kind of snarky nerdbaiting you so often see when the non-fanboy media attends this sort of thing. I'm not sure what kind of service Paltalk.com is selling over at their Web site, but whatever they do, they get the COMICS 101 "Seal of Approval."

A couple of new start-ups, Spreecast and LiveLead, are focused on the social side of video, working on helping groups of people broadcast themselves or enjoy videos together, respectively. They both have a lot in common with Google+ Hangouts.

San Francisco-based Spreecast is StubHub founder Jeff Fluhr's next act, and it offers live group-video sessions that are instantly archived. It's focused on people who want to be broadcasters -- like bloggers or offline personalities -- and who can attract an audience.

Spreecasts, which are by default public, have up to four people on camera at a time, while others participate in text chat through their choice of Facebook, Twitter or Spreecast account. The person who starts the conversation gets access to a producer control panel that brings in new questions and speakers.

All sorts of companies have tried this sort of thing with varying degrees of success, like Tinychat, Paltalk, Livestream (now more focused on events), Socialeyes (haven't heard from them in a while) and Operator11 (now defunct).

Spreecast has gone after people with high Klout scores to seed its user base -- but then, Google+ recently got the Dalai Lama to do a Hangout with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. (His Holiness's Klout score is 82!)

What I'd love to see is something who starts out with a multiplatform approach to social video, but Spreecast is built for just the Web, and all its video runs in Flash. Now that Adobe is halting development on Flash for mobile devices, that gap is only going to get harder to bridge.

(Tango does a pretty good job of spanning platforms, but it is not on Macs yet, and it's for one-to-one video calls.)

Another new company in the space is LiveLead. Where Spreecast is about public Webcam conversations, LiveLead is about private sharing of video and photo content.

LiveLead, which currently requires a Facebook account to join, sets up private rooms where friends view content and text chat about it. Anyone in the room can take the lead and push something new for everybody to watch.

Again, this isn't that novel an idea. Others, like ClipSync, Google Hangouts, and even the new Flickr "Photo Sessions," provide communal content-viewing experiences. LiveLead's angle is that it focuses on people who are already friends.

New York City-based LiveLead has a team of three -- a former Wall Street finance guy, a graduate student in computer security, and a former privacy-focused social network researcher -- and is angel funded.

New York Comic Con welcomes professionals across the full spectrum of the pop culture industries and is happy to provide a Professional Pass to artists, buyers, creators, editors, educators, librarians, licensors, producers, publishers, retailers and writers.

The first event was held in 2006 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Organizers stated the attendance was far more than anticipated (with the convention floor even being shut down and exhibitors and convention goers locked out at one point) and that they were arranging to have sufficient space for the 2007 show.

The second annual show was held February 23-25, 2007. While lines were long, the show did not suffer the same problems of the previous year's outing, as the convention organizer was noticeably better prepared and had more than double the space available.

The New York Comic Con is a for-profit event produced and managed by Reed Exhibitions, a division of Reed Business, and is not affiliated with the long running non-profit San Diego Comic-Con, nor the Big Apple Convention, now known as the Big Apple Comic-Con, which is owned by Wizard World.

Some big names included: Adam Kubert, Al Plastino, Andy Kubert, Axel Alonso, Brian Azzarello, Bruce Timm, Dan DiDio, David Finch, Steve Scott, and Frank Miller

About Paltalk - Paltalk is the premier provider of software and technology for real-time, rich media, interactive social networking with over 70 million downloads to date. The Paltalk platform powers the largest collection of video-based communities and has continued to grow since it was launched in 1998. Paltalk now boasts millions of active members with nearly 100,000 people simultaneously chatting in rooms engaged in lively dialogues, meeting new friends, singing karaoke and attending family reunions. Paltalk has a long history of technical innovation. Paltalk owns 13 patents that cover core technology related to multiplayer online video games and video conferencing. Paltalk supports IM pals on Facebook, Google Talk, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and ICQ and is available as a free download.