"Video chat without the perverts" - Giulia Piu talks about BuddyBounce at the UKUPA

"Why do some people like to show their intimate parts online?"

That was without doubt one of the funniest captions I've ever seen in a presentation, given last night by Giulia Piu at the UK UPA's event to celebrate World Usability Day.

Giulia was talking about BuddyBounce, her start-up. The basic premise is that Chatroulette is great fun when you bump into people doing something interesting, but "you meet a lot of perverts". She wanted to develop a service that retained some of the serendipity of the Chatroulette experience, but which featured a significantly lower number of half-naked men touching themselves inappropriately.

What was particularly interesting about her talk was the focus on using the business design tools that she had previously developed. Her tool kit had split out exploration and ideation into two distinct phases, and included the explicit concept of co-design. I liked the idea of your process forcing you into multi-disciplinary design activity.

The questions afterwards were interesting, with the audience trying to really define the distinctiveness of the service, and expressing a slightly pessimistic view that surely Skype or another big video-call competitor would be able to implement a similar idea at much greater scale and "gazump" BuddyBounce.

Another question said that video phone calls and video chat had been around for years - why would it suddenly catch on now?

Giulia made the point that devices and connection speeds are ready now, and also made a compelling argument for the experience of video chat. She said that in a one-to-one video chat you spend time looking at the other person, and that means you can't help but engage with them. "My grandmother cried the first time she saw me on Skype" she added.

Giulia was a very funny presenter. When pointing out that they had won "Start-up most likely to make a million pounds" at London Startup Weekend, she couldn't help but wryly note that "we haven't seen the money yet".

And a final note of respect to Giulia's boyfriend. On the night Inter won the Champions League, he spent half hour on Chatroulette simply waving his replica shirt at his webcam and singing "José Mourinho lalalala" to celebrate.

Next...

As well as Giulia's talk on BuddyBounce, I featured on the bill for the UK UPA's World Usability Day event myself. Next week I hope to publish a long-form essay based on the talk I gave last night. In the meantime, you can find a linklog round-up of all the things I mentioned in my presentation.