
Wow. ChaCha Is Raising Another $30 Million  - prakash
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/26/wow-chacha-is-raising-another-30-million/
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mdasen
This is one of those services where you have to ask: what's the business
model? Basically, ChaCha is providing a free service where users can text
message questions to them and they pay other people to do searches to get the
answer. So, how do they make money? In a decade, we might all have phones good
enough to google things for ourselves (rather than texting someone else to do
it for us). I can't see why an iPhone or other smartphone user would text a
question rather than getting an answer themselves.

Their plan seems to be building their network into a quasi-SPAM like
environment where some questions get paid-for answers: "your advertisement
will be integrated naturally into the answers users receive". Maybe they mean
that in addition to "organic" answers (appended to the end), but SMS only
carries 160 characters so that's a tight squeeze.

It's a cool service and great for settling fun bets with your friends or
finding information when on the go. However, I guess I don't see how it will
become viable especially as more and more people move to smart devices that
they could google things on themselves just as easily as asking someone else
by text message.

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ia
i know this has been discussed ad nauseam, but when will "they" learn that
forcing a user to create an account is a bad idea? i was intrigued until i
tried to ask chacha a question ("will chacha survive the recession?") and it
bogarted my answer with a sign-up screen. that's the first and likely the last
time i'll make an attempt to try the service.

~~~
mdasen
ChaCha is mostly for use by mobile phones - it's kinda a "will you google this
for me and get me the answer" service when you aren't at a computer, but can
send a text message. In that case, it doesn't require any signup and can be
useful enough.

