Can a reasonably successful, U.S.-based mobile content brand find equal success for its English-language service in the UK? It’s a question that could have been asked on the Q&A service ChaCha, and unfortunately it looks like the company has figured out the answer the hard way.
ChaCha, which launched in the UK in September 2011, has now quietly shut down operations in the country after failing to find enough people to use the service to make it cost-effective. → Read More
You could see this one coming from a couple of miles away: ChaCha, the questions and answers service provider, is suing smartphone maker HTC over trademark infringement. The lawsuit is obviously the result of HTC’s decision to name its recently unveiled ‘Facebook phone’ the ChaCha.
Sure enough, ChaCha Search, Inc., as the company is officially named, owns the ‘ChaCha’ trademark in the United States (and Europe for that matter). → Read More
Question and answer service ChaCha has just received a $3 million infusion from Qualcomm’s venture arm Qualcomm Venture Partners. This brings the company’s total funding to a whopping $75 million.
In a statement, Scott Jones, ChaCha’s CEO says that Qualcomm’s “experience and insight into the global wireless ecosystem will help ChaCha continue to expand its service worldwide.” ChaCha has been a roll over the past year, achieving profitability, raising boatloads of money, and reaching record traffic numbers for its Q&A product. → Read More
We’ve just heard that mobile Q & A service ChaCha just raised $20 million in Series F funding lead by VantagePoint Venture Partners and Rho.
ChaCha, founded by Scott Jones, has been around almost five years and has answered nearly one billion questions. This latest financing round follows a $7 million Series E in December of 2009, which means that ChaCha now boasts a whopping $72 million in funding to expand its free text messaging product. → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post is an open letter from Scott Jones, founder and CEO of ChaCha on why the recent “T-Mobile Text Tax” is now a Net Neutrality issue.
While the Federal Communications Commission fiddles with the issue of Net Neutrality, and by extension mobile broadband regulation, Rome has begun to burn. While the fires now are relatively small, they threaten to combust into an uncontrollable conflagration that will leave customers wondering why they don’t have access anymore to their favorite websites or mobile applications. → Read More
I like recent products that let users created personal FAQs one step at a time based on questions from others. You put up a box that invites people to ask you anything. People then ask questions. You answer the ones you want to and publish them. In no time you’ve got an interesting profile of your personality, likes and dislikes.
We wrote about Formspring in January, and Tumblr launched Ask Me a few days later. Now comes ChaCha.me, a new product from ChaCha, where people and businesses can ask and answer questions.
ChaCha.me has good integration with Facebook and Twitter right off the bat, and they’ll allow question asking and answering through their mobile apps and SMS (something ChaCha does well already). But ChaCha is also partnering with celebrities to get them to use the service right away. ChaCha thinks the product is a perfect way for celebrities to talk to fans. → Read More
Mobile question and answer startup ChaCha is on a roll, possibly achieving profitability, raising boatloads of money, and even venturing into social media with a Facebook app. Today, ChaCha is getting into the business listings game with local business search company Localeze. Localeze will provide ChaCha’s website with in-depth information about more than 15 million businesses across the country.
ChaCha.com visitors can access the local business listings in a search bar and through a direct listings page. In both cases, they will be served a full content page that includes Google maps, directions, phone, and other contact information. And of course, any questions and answers related to the business can be found on the content pages. Business listings can also be viewed by category and or state and city. Eventually, ChaCha’s listings will be integrated with its chachacoupons.com site. → Read More
Mobile question and answer startup ChaCha has been able to turnaround its model, possibly achieve profitability, and raise boatloads of money, much to our surprise. Today, ChaCha is rolling out a Facebook application allows users open access to questions and answers from both ChaCha and all of their friends.
With ChaCha’s Facebook App, when individuals pose a question to any friends within their social network, the question is also automatically submitted to ChaCha. ChaCha returns an answer from its database of hundreds of millions of answers. Users can also select “add to profile” to get a permanent “Ask ChaCha” prompt on their profile pages. → Read More
We’ve always had a lot of fun with Indianapolis-based startup ChaCha. They launched in 2007 as a human powered search engine – meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query. Pranksters, obviously, loved it. And we noted the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people.
The human powered web search never really worked out. But ChaCha evolved. In 2008 they launched a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. Putting a human into the mix makes sense with mobile, with poor (or no) data connectivity and hard to use keyboards. But all phones have SMS, and ChaCha had a hit on their hands (they also had the infamous Eiffel Tower incident).
And ChaCha also made another smart move. They started archiving questions and answers on their website in January 2009. 300 million of them are now published on their website – you can view and search them from the ChaCha home page. Those pages have lots of ads generating revenue, and the search engines tend to rank pages like these highly. The company serves just under a million page views to answer pages per day, they say.
CEO Scott Jones says the company has had “explosive growth” in usage of their mobile product. In fact, the company has had to take steps in the past to control that growth, by limiting the number of questions people can ask each month. Even so, people now ask ChaCha a million questions a day via SMS. They recently passed Google and ChaCha is the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile. → Read More
Human-powered mobile answers service ChaCha has raised $7 million funding, according to an SEC filing. The company has confirmed the funding but declines to name investors. This brings ChaCha’s total funding to nearly $70 million.
ChaCha has been the subject of a little bit of ridicule at TechCrunch since its launch, thanks to its entertaining snafus and some issues with its business model. Despite its various problems over the years, the company has been able to raise a boatload of money adding $4 million to the pot earlier this year.
While ChaCha’s service currently attracts about 9 million unique users per month through mobile devices and its website, the model has had some problems ChaCha has cut guides’ payments quite a few times since its inception and was forced to lay off a significant part of its staff earlier this year. The startup recently branched out from the answers engine by launching a digital coupon service. → Read More
Mobile answers service ChaCha continues to find itself on TechCrunch’s radar. A tipster points us to this article published on a local Indiana business news site, which reveals the heavily VC-funded company is expanding if not slowly changing its business strategy with the addition of a digital coupon service dubbed ChaChaCoupons.
ChaCha CEO Scott Jones tells the local business newspaper that ChaChaCoupons is a ‘logical extension’ of its core service, which allows users to call or text questions on mobile phones and receive answers from human guides quickly and free of charge. He adds that the service currently attracts about 9 million unique users per month through mobiles and its website, but forgets to mention that the model doesn’t appear to work out all that well for the startup. ChaCha has cut guides’ payments quite a few times since its inception and was forced to lay off a significant part of its staff earlier this year.
Anyway: ChaChaCoupons aims to make it easy for people to search for local companies and offers by business type, area of the city, alphabetical listing, newest deals, and more. Like most online coupon services, visitors can print coupons at their desktop or send them to their mobile phones to be redeemed at their favorite businesses. They can also send a coupon via text messaging to a ChaCha in-store coupon printer. → Read More
Human powered search startup ChaCha has been the subject of a little bit of ridicule at TechCrunch since its launch, thanks to its entertaining snafus and some issues with its business model. Despite its various problems over the years, the company has been able to raise a boatload of money, as much as $62 million, adding another $4 million to the pot most recently.
Unfortunately, some of the human “guides” who find the search results for visitors to ChaCha are taking a pay cut once again. Last summer, ChaCha implemented a “Pay-For-Performance” system, that forced guides to work five or more hours per week if they want the higher payrate (20 cents per question), which we said would alienate the site’s more casual (but accurate) users. Regular guides would make 10 cents per question. Now, ChaCha has decided to cut the rates of “Voice Transcriber” guides from 4 cents (people who transcribe voicemail questions and answers) to 3 cents per transaction, with the pay cut taking effect last week. → Read More
This one slipped through the cracks, but apparently Brad Bostic, who co-founded mobile Q&A answer service ChaCha together with current CEO Scott Jones back in 2006, has stepped down as President of the company and will not be replaced.
In an interview with the Indianapolis Business Journal, Bostic stresses that he will stay involved with the company as an advisor and strategist, saying ChaCha has matured enough for him no longer to be needed for day-to-day operations.
“I’m doing some evangelism for the company at trade shows, at conferences. [To say I] ‘left’ is not the appropriate characterization,” Bostic said.
IMshopping has launched a human-powered shopping search site and Twitter shopping service designed to help consumers find niche products on the web. It’s sort of like a shopping 411 service, which human guides on call respond to product questions and provide personalized recommendations for users about what product best suits their needs. IMShopping tries to simulate the experience of going into a store, speaking with a sales person and being guided to the item that works best for you. IMShopping also closed a $4.7 million Series A round of funding from SK Telecom Ventures.
IMSHopping hopes to fill the gap pf personalized, detail-oriented service that e-commerce sites don’t have, since these sites are focused less on answering technical questions about a product and more on price and reviews. Twitter users can directly ask questions by messaging @imshopping. The shopping guides in the community and trained experts offer detailed responses within minutes. Shoppers can use these responses to instantly make purchases or save to their own folders before making a product decision. → Read More
Mobile Q&A answer service ChaCha is shedding one third of its employees. We’ve confirmed with the company that it laid off 25 people, leaving it with 56 employees. ChaCha cited the layoffs as necessary to ensure profitability in the future. The layoffs have been added to the TechCrunch layoff tracker. From one tipster who says she was let go today:
Wanted to drop you a quick line informing you of layoffs at ChaCha today. There were 25 people layed off, leaving the company with 56 employees. Some very high ranking people were let go today, including 2 Directors of Development, the Vice President of Engineering, 2 Product Managers, a Sr. Director of Product Management, Director of Marketing Communications, 2 Linux System admins, and a Senior Program Manager. These were some of the larger layoffs. The rest of the company will also be taking a 10% decrease in pay, along with Upper MGMT taking larger cuts.
Here’s a question for you. How many Q&A sites does the Web really need? Already, there is Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, Mahalo Answers, Linkedin Answers, ChaCha and dozens beyond. But Wikia (and Wikipedia) co-founder Jimmy Wales thinks there is room for one more.
We learned from a tip that he has quietly launched Wikianswers, a Question & Answer site that attempts to create one true, consensus answer for each question, wiki-style. If this sounds familiar it is because Wiki Answers, which is part of Answers.com, does the exact same thing and had 26.7 million unique visitors worldwide in December (comScore). (Yahoo Answers had 144.7 million worldwide uniques in December).
And then there is the little problem of the name. It is supposed to be Wikia Answers!, but in the current logo the last “a” of Wikia shares the first “a” of Answers, making it Wikianswers. The already established WikiAnswers might have a problem with that. (The URLs are different: http://answers.wikia.com and http://wiki.answers.com/, respectively)
Update: Wikia Gil Penchina responds in comments:
Wikianswers started at Wikia in November, 2004. The other site with the same name was called FAQFarm back then and changed their name without getting our permission.
ChaCha, the human-powered answers service we’ve written about quite a bit here on TechCrunch, is raising a Series C round of $30 million, of which close to $11 million has already been secured according to a regulatory filing, reports peHUB. The filing doesn’t list any new shareholders.
Update: we exchanged e-mails with a company representative, who informed us that this is actually “old news” and that the Series C round of $30 million has actually closed a couple of months ago.
The company raised $6 million in Series A financing exactly two years ago from Jeff Bezos and Bezos Expeditions, followed by a $10 million round by Morton Meyerson and 21st Century Technology Fund. If ChaCha closes the $30 million Series C round (see update above), the total capital invested in the company will amount up to a whopping $46 million. → Read More
Scott Jones, the CEO of human powered voice/sms search engine ChaCha (our recent coverage), has one of the awesomest computer setups I’ve seen.
It can be seen, along with everything else in his house, in this MTV Teen Cribs video (also embedded below) that focuses on his fifteen year old son. For the computer, jump to the 3:25 mark.
They don’t say anything about the processor, but the guy has an eight-screen (Dell) setup and stationary bike pedals to get exercise while working.
To get more details, I’ve sent a text message to ChaCha asking for the hardware specs (they love answering random questions). Their tagline is “answers to anything, on the go” so this should be no problem. Alas, it’s been ten minutes and there’s no response. I’ll update later if they do. → Read More
Scott Jones, the CEO of human powered voice/sms search engine ChaCha (our recent coverage), has one of the awesomest computer setups I’ve seen.
It can be seen, along with everything else in his house, in this MTV Teen Cribs video (also embedded below) that focuses on his fifteen year old son. For the computer, jump to the 3:25 mark.
They don’t say anything about the processor, but the guy has an eight-screen (Dell) setup and stationary bike pedals to get exercise while working.
To get more details, I’ve sent a text message to ChaCha asking for the hardware specs (they love answering random questions). Their tagline is “answers to anything, on the go” so this should be no problem. Alas, it’s been ten minutes and there’s no response. I’ll update later if they do. → Read More
ChaCha, a free search service that lets you call or text in a question and get an answer in minutes via a return text message, got a confidence boost yesterday. AT&T announced a “strategic relationship” with the company that, to start, gives callers a cobranded greeting from both AT&T and ChaCha.
To use the service, call or text a query to 1-800 2ChaCha (1-800-2-242242).
We’ve questioned the scalability of the business, which uses human guides to answer questions. And we’ve also made fun of some of the answers that have been sent to users.
ChaCha says that they are approaching profitability on a per-call basis, though. And the usefulness of the service is undeniable. → Read More
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