The website launched five months ago and is in its current test stages, as Chaplin and Ringelheim and their Toronto-based partner Rehman Baig, and Chief Technology Officer Carlo DiCelico of Brooklyn, plan to make improvements by next month. “We will give users their own profiles, have both public and private conversations, be able to record the conversations and hope to give organizations, non-profit and special interest groups, their own channel to host discussions,” Chaplin said.

Launching Vonvo, which incorporates ‘convo,’ short for conversation, and a ‘v’ for video and valuable conversation, proved more difficult than Chaplin and Ringelheim had anticipated. “It was a wild two-year journey, it came with a variety of struggles,” Ringelheim said. “We had programmers who stopped working for us and we had bad experiences working with web development firms and international programmers. It was quite an experience but overall we were able to get it done.”

The hardest part about launching the site, according to Chaplin, was that they were not able to develop the website themselves. “Neither of us are technical co-founders so it was difficult to get the website up and running because we couldn’t build it ourselves,” he said.

In the future, Chaplin wants to see Vonvo be the second screen experience to news. “People tend to sit in front of the television with their computers or tablets so after they watch the news and learn about an event, they can immediately go talk about it and share their opinion on the site,” he said. “We want to link people around the world.”

Visit www.vonvo.com.