Guest Post: Why you should talk to strangers

(This post was written by Sandeep Sankarankutty)

Ever since we were young, we were told never talk to strangers. As children, this makes sense, it's for your safety. But as adults why do we still follow this practice? It seems as if there is a lingering fear carried on from childhood, if you talk to a stranger something bad will happen.

We are social beings, so it only makes sense that we are hardwired to form a social network. If you think about it, successful people don't reach the top by sitting in a room by themselves. They are passionate and will talk to anyone who is willing to listen. Social networks are key to success and expanding your network increases your chances.

In the world of startups the word serendipity is used quite often. I believe serendipity occurs when one steps out of their comfort zone and begins to learn from experience, meet people, share your thoughts, share what you have learned.

Here's a tool to let you take that first step to conquering your fears of talking to people. Check out Chatfe

Chatfe lets you have anonymous meaningful conversations, via phone, based on your topic of interest. It is certainly a great tool to help you get over your conversational nervousness.

Chatfe was also recently mentioned in the New York Times.

-- Thanks, Sandeep!

Scamming the Scammers, or Creative Problem Solving

When an education customer asked us for a solution to voice connect schools in the US with schools abroad where there was poor infrastructure we knew we had to test quality. The international schools included those in Kosovo, Qatar and Nigeria so we set out to make some test calls via our system using different international wholesale telecom providers. The problem was, we didn't know anyone in Nigeria to do a test with and we needed the test done the same day. I tried calling Nigerian hotel phone numbers to test voice quality before I realized the program would be run on cell phones and remembered that the country's mobile network was of much better quality than the old fixed line phone network. How could I find a Nigerian cell phone number to call... right now?

To the spam folder!

A search on "234," which is Nigeria's country code, produced scammer emails talking about financial offers I couldn't refuse. For the modest price of $20K, I could get a $1M return, or something like that. So I made the first call -- good quality. After unsuccessfully negotiating down the $20K, I then asked if I could call back to let me check a secondary wholesale telecom provider. That call was good too. I called a second scammer as well, also with acceptable voice quality. I didn't get anywhere in negotiations there either, but I had shown that we had access to good quality voice in Nigeria.

There's usually a creative solution when you're in a bind. Being in a startup makes you find it.

And later, when our customer decided to remove Nigeria from their school list it didn't bother me at all.

Tell 'em that it's human nature

Why did we do it this way? Why did we take a different approach from other services, showing no user profiles, pictures or other personal identifiers? While the site looks fun (if we do say so ourselves) it is kind of a reaction against the data overload common today. We did it this way because it's our belief that this results in better voice conversations. You see, voice has always been tricky online. Sure, there are plenty of voice services out there, from your cellphone to Skype. But few people actually use these services in ways other than calling their close friends or international contacts where cost pushes them online. Here on Chatfe we're switching things up, making users start with the topic they want to discuss and then matching them with someone else who they cannot choose, but who shares the same interest.

We hope you'll like talking to your stranger. Ask questions, answer questions, debate, argue, laugh. Like a pleasant wrong number.