Last year at SxSW, I discovered Twitter, which has since grown tremendously and continues to gain momentum. My discovery at SxSW this year? ChaCha.  ChaCha is a free service that adds a human factor to a search.  Where it really comes in handy is on your phone.  Basically, you can text any question to ChaCha and, within 5 - 10 minutes, you'll get an answer, which is usually spot on.  For those that don't have internet access on their phone, this is great.  But even if you do have internet access, the responses you get from ChaCha are better because they are filtered and parsed by a human. I found their answers quite good and often with a sense of humor as well.  Checking out their website, I found out that anyone can become a guide for ChaCha, making $0.20 per answer, which works out to between $4 - $10 an hour.  So that is how they scale and how they have people answering questions 24/7.

Posted on March 17, 2008 10:47
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Scott Seely

Scott Seely

March 16, 2008 20:35

Karsten-- I wonder how they plan to make money. Do they charge you for sending the text? Do you get extra ads on your phone? Also, it would be interesting to see if you see a rise in text messaging spam after using the service.

Sorry, I'm just trying to figure out what the business model is. If they have an organic search engine, they need to make good on the offer to pay for answers to that search engine.
          


Karsten Januszewski

Karsten Januszewski

March 17, 2008 11:00

Their business model is ad driven but only on the web, not on the phone.  And the service is free on the phone.
          


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