The online question-and-answer market has had a lot of different iterations over the years, starting out first with sites focused on everyday, practical knowledge and trivia and later expanding — by way of sites like Quora and Branch — into longer discourses on bigger issues. Today, ChaCha, one of the earliest movers in Q&A, is announcing that it is raising another $14 million to continue… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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. → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
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… → 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… → Read More
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… → Read More
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”… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
Two startups, ChaCha and Mechanical Zoo, are taking different approaches to tap human intelligence, and human labor, and get you quick answers to your questions.
Despite attempts to evolve search into something more human friendly, there’s still a big hole there. As useful as Google is, it doesn’t answer questions very well, and it isn’t good at making highly subjective recommendations (where… → Read More
I’ve aimed a lot of criticism at human powered search engine ChaCha over the last couple of years. The service lets users ask questions, just like a normal search engine. But instead of a computer spitting out answers (see Google, etc.), real human beings answer instead.
The ChaCha service was absurd in its original web version, which has since been discontinued. The mobile version is actually… → Read More
ChaCha used to be a ridiculous human powered web based search engine that’s best use appeared to be for killing time when bored.
They raised a boatload of money from Jeff Bezos and others and eventually switched to an all-mobile interface. They also began offering their platform to third party marketers.
But now there are indications that the company is having cash flow issues, even after a … → Read More
We’ve never been big fans of ChaCha, the human powered search engine that pairs you up with a “guide” who attempts to answer your questions in real time. The search model was obviously unscalable from the outset, but ChaCha’s botched implementation hasn’t helped much. When it first launched, ChaCha allowed users to initiate full on chat sessions with their guides… → Read More
Stumpedia, a “human powered search engine” we’ve not covered before has added live search results ChaCha style. This is how they spin it: Stumpedia.com, the social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web is launching another human-powered search feature similar to the guided search model that was recently ditched by… → Read More
Well it only took ChaCha fourteen months to figure out what everyone except ChaCha (and these guys) knew when it launched – search with a human guide as a business idea is ridiculously stupid. The idea is that you do a search on ChaCha and a real person works with you via a chat interface to give you results. In theory those results would be better than Google. In reality, they weren’t… → Read More
Twelve days ago ChaCha, a controversial search engine that uses humans to answer search queries, rolled out a mobile version of the service. Ask it anything via text message, and they’ll send you an answer in a few minutes. I tried the service once to test it, and haven’t used it since. But today I received a text message from them saying “Ever wish you could actually know… → Read More
I was surprised this evening to receive an email from the ChaCha communications team about a new feature they’ve just launched. I say surprised because we have not been kind to the service in our three posts on them so far. In the most recent post, I called them “a bad idea, poorly executed.” The new feature is a mobile interface to the search engine – try it virtually… → Read More
It is rare to find a company offering such a game-changing disruptive equation, even in the context of giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. These are the words of Morton Meyerson, the man who just led ChaCha’s $10 million Series B round of financing. What is ChaCha? It’s a new search engine that lets users ask questions to a real person, called a search guide, via a chat interface. → Read More
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