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.

The company alerted its Guides — the people who get paid to answer questions from users — of the change on April 19, and noted that it would be shutting up the service on the next day. Sure enough, the URL for the UK site is not longer active.

ChaCha, which has been around since 2005, is primarily based around users sending questions in the form of text messages to a shortcode and receiving a text message in reply. It is one of the bigger — perhaps the biggest — Q&A sites of its kind, in March reporting 2 billion questions asked and answered, with 40 million unique users of the service.

It also has an impressive funding track record. To date, it has received $75 million in backing from investors including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Qualcomm and Rho Capital Partners, among others.

But this could be one case of when it’s not always best to be an early mover — or at least a lesson to early movers that they need to make sure they can change with the times, and in this case the rise of very capable smartphones.

Q&A has moved on a lot, with apps like Apple’s Siri, Evi, Iris, Vlingo and others offering a similar ability to answer questions but with many more features like voice response, integration with maps and more.

Ironically, one other chapter in ChaCha’s history involved the company launching a legal attack against HTC when the handset tried to launch an Android smartphone, branded ChaCha, in the U.S. (Its name eventually got changed to Status.)

ChaCha, of course, has the added benefit of working on any device — not just a smartphone — but it looks like its basic business model was focused on scale that it just wasn’t getting on that product: the idea in the UK was to disrupt the Q&A space by offering users the service at the same price as a regular text message. Other services make money by using the premium SMS channel (those texts can cost up to £1.50 here). So: accepting a much thinner margin on those texts, in exchange for a higher volume of usage and potentially the promise of selling sponsorship or advertising against that.

“Our mission was simply to provide quality answers at 1/15 the cost of the current competition. After months of direct advertising, branding events, marketing advice from UK leaders, and initiatives designed to help spread the word socially, we’ve found that adoption rates for new price-competitive services are quite low in the UK,” VP of operations Doug Gilmore writes in the letter.

Although the letter promises that ChaCha would pay Guides any outstanding balances owed by April 20, there seem to be users that are still complaining on the MoneySavingExpert forum, on a thread about the closure, that they that they have yet to be paid.

We’ve reached out to ChaCha to try to get some more details, and will update the story with whatever interesting facts that we learn. In the meantime, the letter below.

Update: ChaCha’s spokesperson has responded to say that “The final payment to the Guides is completed, and we apologize to them for the delay in payment.” She also notes that ChaCha “found it difficult to reset expectations” in a market that had already grown “wary of gouging price structures” and Q&A services. She also notes that currently the company’s iPhone and Android apps are growing faster than currently have much better engagement than the SMS-based service currently has.

Dear UK Guides,

It is with a heavy heart that I announce ChaCha will no longer be offering our service in the UK and plan to stop incoming and outgoing texts on Friday, April 20th, 2012. This pains us because of all the hard work and dedication you have all contributed to the ChaCha service in the UK.

ChaCha began its UK service 9 months ago as an alternative to similar text-based services which charge premium rates for Q&A. Our mission was simply to provide quality answers at 1/15 the cost of the current competition. After months of direct advertising, branding events, marketing advice from UK leaders, and initiatives designed to help spread the word socially, we’ve found that adoption rates for new price-competitive services are quite low in the UK.

Any and all success we have had in the UK can be attributed to you, our Guides, who provided quality answers and helped us spread the word about the service. We would like to thank you for your service and support during the last 9 months.

Please note that we will process any and all remaining Guide funds from your ChaCha accounts and transfer those on Friday, April 20th.

With Warmest Regards-

Doug Gilmore – VP of Operations ChaCha Search Inc.

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).

ChaCha has a good case, as HTC’s branding of its new phone is sure to confuse people. After all, ChaCha has historically put a lot of focus on providing a service on mobile phones, with a mobile website and dedicated apps for iOS devices, BlackBerry and, well, Android handsets.

The lawsuit was filed last Tuesday in Indiana Southern District Court. Ironically, it was filed around the same time online payment company Xoom Corporation filed a trademark infringement suit against its rival Motorola after the latter named its new Android-based tablet computer, slated to launch in the U.S. today, the XOOM.

You have to wonder whether these hardware manufacturers don’t do enough trademark and branding research before they launch massive campaigns for products, or if they simply don’t care and deem the risk for infringement lawsuits an acceptable, calculated one.

We’ll keep an eye on how this one plays out. From where I’m searching, ChaCha.com still shows up in the first search results when I search for ‘ChaCha’, but the phone was only unveiled last week and the HTC website is already on the first page of search results, too.

The HTC ChaCha smartphone will be available to customers across major European and Asian markets during Q2 2011. In the United States, HTC said it plans to bring it to market ‘later this year’ exclusively with AT&T, probably before the end of the second quarter.

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.

The company has nearly 32 million unique inquisitive users monthly and answers over 3 million questions daily. In December, ChaCha hit a record of nearly one million unique visitors to ChaCha.com in a single day and hit another record of two million mobile SMS text questions in one day.

ChaCha’s success have proven that flexibility in a company’s business model can end up paying off on the long run. Launched in 2007, ChaCha started as a human powered search engine but encountered the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people. The company then evolved into a basic Q&A site, focusing on both mobile and web platforms.

And the company has steadily been adding new features to its platform, including a Facebook integration, business listings and ChaCha.me.

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.

You can ask a question on ChaCha via text and via voice, with 98% of users texting. With 15 million uniques a month, ChaCha was most recently in the news for standing up to the T-Mobile tax on text messages as the company sends over 2 million text messages a day.

With companies like Formspring and Quora reviving the burgeoning Q & A space, it’ll be interesting to watch what ChaCha does with the money in order to expand its current reach.

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.

The concept of Net Neutrality is pretty simple. Consumers look to the FCC to prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management, which should be entirely transparent. Today, the providers may not like bandwidth hogs like BitTorrent; tomorrow they could decide they don’t like YouTube or music sites because they also use lots of bandwidth. If unchecked, the providers could limit (by slowing their page loads) or totally preventing consumer access to whatever they don’t like such as political or religious sites with views they corporately don’t agree with. The providers would decide what is appropriate for consumers to see or access. Suddenly, the world’s largest library of information has “Do Not Enter” or “Not Allowed” signs posted here and there. Consumer and advocacy groups say Net Neutrality legislation will prevent this kind of “corporate censorship.”

Net Neutrality supporters say it is critical that the concept also apply to wireless services and their operators because, in the not-so-distant future, most people will access the Internet via wireless devices.

“If consumers had a wide choice of broadband service providers, preserving an open Internet might not be such a critical issue,” Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, wrote in a blog post recently. “Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans have few (if any) choices in selecting a provider. As a result, these providers are in a position to influence whether and how consumers and producers can use the on-ramps to the Internet–and we’ve already seen several examples of discriminatory actions or threats that impair openness.”

For example, Skype, which allows users to make free and low-cost phone calls over an Internet connection, and Google Voice, which allows use of a single phone that follows them, regardless of which voice network they use, have been blocked by certain carriers.

T-Mobile has been sued by a text-message marketing company for allegedly blocking access to the T-Mobile network because of a client that provided information on medical marijuana. Ez Texting, a company that helps businesses send marketing text messages to large numbers of people, filed the suit Friday. The company provides the behind-the- scenes infrastructure for the type of ad that asks consumers to text a specific word to a specific number to get more information on a product. “This case is yet another example of a totally arbitrary decision by a carrier to block text message calls between consumers and organizations they want to communicate with,” Gigi Sohn, president of public interest group Public Knowledge, said. “The FCC should put a fast end to this blocking by issuing the ruling we asked them for three years ago.”

Similarly, T-Mobile plans to suddenly institute a charge for every text message that ChaCha’s messaging aggregator sends on ChaCha’s behalf to T-Mobile customers. Never mind that T-Mobile is already making a small fortune charging their customers for text plans or on a per-text basis, and never mind that T-Mobile already charged profitable and fair rates to aggregators and content providers including ChaCha. Noted global expert on mobile telecom, Tomi Ahonen has written that, for carriers, texting is “the most profitable mass market service in the economic history of mankind…with a profit margin [that] is north of 98%.” Oh, and by the way, in the second quarter of 2010, T- Mobile USA reported service revenues of $4.70 billion up from $4.63 billion in the first quarter of 2010.

T-Mobile would have you believe that the charge will help reduce “unsolicited” commercial texts, but ChaCha is contacted proactively by mobile users asking questions (over 60 million a year JUST from T-Mobile customers). We are a free service that provides timely, accurate answers. We answer over 2 million questions a day, primarily from folks who text us and we text them back answers, although the service is available via www.chacha.com, the mobile Web, mobile apps, via Twitter, etc…. We are commercial only in the sense that we also serve our users one or two text ads in conjunction with each answer (and never unsolicited). This helps pay for the more than 50,000 people answering all those real-time questions.

Interestingly, T-Mobile is exempting Twitter and Facebook (which send collectively about 15 times as many messages to T-Mobile users than ChaCha does) from the new charges because they won’t be subject to the tax like the rest of us. Even more interesting is that, to the extent T-Mobile has any congestion from all the increased texting, Twitter and Facebook are driving the lion’s share of the explosion of texts coming from content providers, so why are all the other publishers footing the bill on behalf of Twitter and Facebook? Because this charge will be passed along to ChaCha, amounting to a 600% price increase on October 1st, we have no choice but to drop T- Mobile customers from our SMS service, unless something changes.

As for T-Mobile stifling innovation, if Twitter had to endure this tax across all carriers, it would cost them about $50 million annually, based on their Q2 2010 Nielsen-reported text traffic. If the “text tax” had been in place over the past few years, it would have made it impossible for Twitter to have grown or prospered.

What this means is that T-Mobile has decided on behalf of their customers that having access to the world’s largest repository of questions and answers is “not appropriate.” While you may not be a ChaCha user, think what will happen if T-Mobile’s text tax does impact one of the services you DO use and like, such as Zynga, ESPN, NFL, NBA, Fox, Foursquare, USA Today, the Weather Channel, Yahoo, AOL, or Google.

For ChaCha, this is a business issue. We have a work around to reduce the burden of this “tax.” But, T-Mobile is giving their subscribers reasons to consider other carriers and/or prevent defectors from AT&T/Sprint/Verizon from considering T-Mobile. Also, their “text tax” move will completely stifle innovation in the space, further harming T-Mobile customers. This is also clearly a Net Neutrality issue as it applies to wireless services and their operators. Without consulting its customers, T-Mobile is implementing a pricing structure that removes rights from their customers to utilize what we think are pretty valuable free services.

Your favorite site or service could be next.

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.

They’re starting things off with 2010 Grammy winner David Guetta – his page will launch later on Monday but users are already lining up the questions. If you’re willing to step things down a few notches you can see my ChaCha page here, and I’ve already answered a few of the questions.

Lots more features are coming in the next couple of weeks, says ChaCha. Among the changes – 15 million or so listed U.S. businesses in ChaCha will have the Q&A feature added to their profiles and will be able to answer questions from users.

ChaCha thinks celebrities and businesses will feel safe using ChaCha.me because they only have to answer the questions they like and they can stay in control of the discussion.

And ChaCha users will be able to integrate the Q&A feature directly into their Facebook pages as well. ChaCha already lets users ask their friends questions on Facebook. The new feature turns that around and lets friends ask you questions, too.

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.

The local business listings feature makes sense, as ChaCha realizes the importance of local content for both its mobile application and website. Localeze also helps power local business listings for Microsoft Bing’s Bing Local and Bing 411. ChaCha also recently rolled out its API, allowing developers to tap into the startup’s database with of questions and answers. ChaCha’s recently launched Facebook App allows individuals pose a question to any friends within their social network and ChaCha.com. 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.

Launched in 2007, ChaCha started as a human powered search engine – meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query. ChaCha encountered the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people but then evolved into a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. The site also archives questions and answers on their website, with 500 million of them currently listed on the ChaCha site. ChaCha is answering one million questions a day via SMS, passing Google as the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile.

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.

Additionally, users can select “share” when they submit a question, and the question and answers will post to their friends’ Facebook walls that they select. Individuals receive points for questions they answer for pure recognition and fun, and based on points attainment, users receive different titles which are displayed on a leader board. ChaCha has also recently launched an iPhone App and Twitter integration via @chacha, so people can ask questions on the microblogging platform.

ChaCha has rolled out its API, allowing developers to tap into the startup’s database with of questions and answers. ChaCha offers developers three variations of its API’s: Quick ChaCha Answer (query the API with a specific question, get an answer instantly); Top ChaCha Answers (query the API with a general topic or keyword(s) and get a list of the most popular answers); and ChaCha Trends (query the API to find out what the world is asking about).

Launched in 2007, ChaCha started as a human powered search engine – meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query. ChaCha encountered the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people but then evolved into a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. The site also archives questions and answers on their website, with 500 million of them currently listed on the ChaCha site. ChaCha is answering one million questions a day via SMS, passing Google as the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile.

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.

Those mobile questions bring in revenue, too. I asked ChaCha tonight “When and where is Avatar IMAX playing in San Francisco?” The first response, less than a minute later, was an advertisement. The second message came a minute later with the correct information: “AMC Loews Metreon 16 101 4th St. San Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 369-6201. Showtimes for 12/31/09. Avatar IMAX 9:45 am, 1:15, 4:45, 8:15, 11:45. ChaCha!” Even on a smartphone, and even dealing with the ad, it was far easier to use ChaCha than doing a mobile search via Google.

And while there are a number of easy-to-use movie apps for the iPhone and Android, ChaCha is a multi-purpose app. I can just as easily ask it for flight schedules. Or the first king of England (answer: “No one is universally recognized as the first King of England. Some historians start with Egbert, the king of Wessex”).

We’ve said all along, though, that the ChaCha mobile service was useful. But we questioned its scalability since it involves humans.

Jones says they’re scaling just fine, thanks to tens of thousands of part time guides who work from their homes for an average wage of $2.50/hour. It’s not much, but they do it voluntarily, so they must think it’s a reasonable deal. The cost of answering a question has dropped from $0.50 two years ago to just a few cents today, and Jones says they’ll get it to under a cent soon. They’re able to recycle a lot of answers, he says, and they’ve built tools to make it easier for guides to quickly answer most queries.

The company is now profitable per query, says Jones, meaning they are making more money from those SMS ads than they pay the guides. And when you add revenue from the archived website questions, the company is on path to profitability. Their current revenue run rate is $9 million or so. My guess is they need to roughly double that to become profitable as a business and support their 60 or so full time employees.

Jones says has raised $52 million, including a recent $7 million round from insiders. We’re tracking more than that on CrunchBase and have asked the company for clarification.

So ChaCha may just have a real business on its hands, despite the near constant criticism from us and others over the years. This is one time that I won’t mind at all being wrong.

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.

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.

At launch, hundreds of local offers are on the site with special coupons and discounts in some 13 categories ranging from beauty to restaurants. Conceivably, ChaCha will be expanding the service to more regions and cities across the United States in the future.

The new ChaCha service has also been integrated with the company’s text VIP lists where users sign up to get cellphone offers and news from their favorite businesses. Users can choose to instantly join an advertiser’s VIP List by either text or online at ChaChaCoupons.com, giving local businesses a way of retaining their loyal customer base.

In all fairness, I actually agree that this could be a worthy extension for the regular ChaCha service that the company could turn into dollars, which it is hard-pressed for. That said, ChaCha basically raised approximately $62 million for a mobile answer service, and I can’t shake off the feeling that this new addition is actually the company desperately trying to do new things because its primary focus turned out to be, well, worthless. Time will tell if all this branching out can help the company’s investors get something out of the startup in the long run.

On a sidenote, I had a good laugh when I looked up the most recent question from a mobile phone that was featured on the ChaCha website. It was: “where do squirrels poop?” and I’ll let you check out the guide’s answer and more in the comment section on your own, for shits and giggles (pun intended).

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.

ChaCha said that because the startup is answering nearly 600,000 questions a day, they need a workforce of more than 55,000 guides to answer the questions properly. The startup claims that their budget is too small to compensate transcription guides with higher payout. In an email sent to guides, ChaCha said that Transcribers have enjoyed the “relative” highest pay of all guide roles, with other types of guides (i.e. the guides that answer questions) and even ChaCha headquarters staff enduring pay cuts beforehand.

We contacted the company to inquire about these cuts, and were told that the “Pay-For-Performance” system was eliminated in February and replaced with a pay system based on the difficulty of the question answered. Many of these guides are only interested in making a quick buck, which is why there are frequently poor search results. But for other guides, ChaCha is an extension of the workday, offering some relatively easy money to help supplement their incomes. Under the new compensation system answering a math question would get a guide 20 cents but answering a more simple question would only get 10 cents. This seems like an improvement to the previous flawed system, which seemed to alienate many guides who actually answer questions correctly.

Regardless, the cut from 10 to 3 cents for transcriber guides over the past year is considerable and will likely see some backlash from that faction of guides. Last year, guides were apparently not being paid on time by ChaCha.

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.

More interestingly, Bostic openly discussed the fact that ChaCha is struggling to become a profitable company in the current economic climate, despite the fact it fired 1/3 of its workforce and brought on salary cuts for the rest of the employees earlier this year.

ChaCha lets people ask questions from their mobile phones to have humans (so-called Guides, often part-timers working from home) attempt to correctly answer them by text message. ChaCha makes money by embedding advertisements in those answers, and advertisers pay only when users respond by clicking through to the text ad. In the past, we’ve questioned the scalability of its business model, and we’ve also made fun of some of the answers that have been sent to users by Guides.

We pegged the company’s total funding at $58 million, but Bostic in the interview says only $43 million was poured into the company, among others by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. He also said the company is not yet cash-flow positive, but that there is a consistent growth in audience and revenue is starting to come in.

Let’s hope for ChaCha that Bostic’s evangelizing at conferences spurs more thereof.

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.

Shoppers who are asking questions on IMShopping’s site can search IMshopping’s database for product questions that have been already answered, or pose their own shopping questions (the site currently has an archive of 20,000 questions). As the shopping guides craft their response, they review a detailed analysis of the product, including specifications, reviews from third-party sites, blog buzz and price. This response is then delivered to the shopper and also archived anonymously for review by future shoppers. All public questions and responses are searchable via Twitter or can be viewed by following @imshopping. Consumers can also ask direct questions via Twitter that are not made public.

The guide will give you an answer of where to find your desired item and also provide you with links to sites where the item can be purchased. You can also rate the response you received from the guide-the guides are paid based on the quality and etail of their responses. The site is really designed to get answers on where to get hard to find or obscure items-like what electronic toy is best for a hyperactive two year old. If you already have a specific item in mind, the site may be useless to you.

As a business model, IMShopping collects revenue when consumer buy products that are recommended through the site. The problem is that when a consumer finally gets the right product for their needs, what is there to stop them from then searching for the produt on Google. The company is staying quiet on future business plans we are told that over time the company will roll out programs for general consumers to earn value from assisting on searches and getting rated for the quality of their answers.

Human search hasn’t done well in the past; take a look at ChaCha’s former business model. It’s hard to understand how human guides could do better than Google or Yahoo unless the guides are experts in electronics, clothes etc. IMShopping is hoping to add the human touch to the online shopping experience but increasingly retail sites employ staff to conduct live chats with potential customers.

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.

The news today about the $12 million is a ruse. Its just confirmation of a round we closed back in October.

These cuts come in the face of a drowning company. The ex VP of Mobile Ad Sales at Yahoo, Rob Wilk, has been in the NYC offices for 8 weeks now, and has not closed one single deal for any advertising on ChaCha’s platform. After I was let go, there was a company meeting in which Scott Jones layed out a pretty bleak estimate for the coming times. If the company can’t get to a crossover point and make money in 2 months, the whole thing is over.

Strangely, ChaCha hid the layoffs in a press release announcing a $12 million equity financing round, which may or may not be an extension of the $30 million round we reported on in January. (We are awaiting more details)

UPDATE: ChaCha informed us that they never officially announced their C funding round, but the amount was approximately $15 million and closed in October 2008. The company closed their $12 million Series D round last week, with funding from Morton Meyerson, Scott Jones and other investors.

We haven’t been big fans of ChaCha in the past and cited many reasons why the startup needs to reevaluate its business model. Still, the company was growing on us and their occasional snafu was always entertaining.

UPDATE: ChaCha issued this response to the tipster’s assertions about Rob Wilk: “Rob Wilk was a top performing advertising sales leader for Yahoo and he is leading an advertising sales effort for ChaCha that is resulting in significant revenue growth each month. Rob started 6 weeks ago and opened our New York office.”

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! (see second screenshot below), 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.

Wikianswers is built on the same wiki platform offered by Wikia, and it is already being promoted from Wikia Search. Building up a searchable Q&A repository is a natural add-on for a search engine or any online information database. (See our post on Mahalo Answers).

But, really, How is Wikianswers different than any other Answers site? Unless Wales can satisfy that question, people will ask look for answers to their own questions elsewhere.

Update: Wikia CEO Penchina’s explains below in comments:

Wikia’s Q+A service is in keeping with the wiki-way and that’s what makes it different
- The content is freely licensed under GFDL unlike other answers sites allowing it to be re-used and re-purposed by others for free
- Anyone can contribute (other answers sites require you to register)

We believe that a more open, freely licensed community will always do better than a corporate site that takes customers contributions and copyrights them in order to take rights away from the contributor.

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.

In case you’ve never heard of ChaCha, it’s essentially a search engine that lets users ask questions to a real person, called a “search guide”, via the web, text message or a mobile website (answers are only provided by mobile). We’ve called it a dumb idea in the past, and unscalable on numerous occasions, but it’s not the only startup that’s taking a crack at a human-powered Q&A service (Mahalo launched a similar service last month, Answerly is another one).

We’ve reached out to the company to confirm that they’re raising more venture capital, as well as the names of the investors. (see update above)

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.

Thanks for the tip Shawn.

Update: Ok, ChaCha’s awake now and talking to me. No answer yet but I’ll add screen shots of messages as they come in.

Update 2: We’ve got our answer! 3.4 GHz P4 CPU, 2 GB RAM, 8x Dell 19 in. monitors, Colorgraphic Xentera GT display with ATI, Schwinn 205p recumb bike, Ergotron frame.

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtv.com:332959

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.

What we’re digging to find out is how deep this relationship with AT&T goes. AT&T says “The two companies also will work together to further enhance ChaCha’s free mobile-answers service and explore opportunities in both text and voice ad-based services.” This may be a first step towards an acquisition. ChaCha has raised $16 million in capital.