April 25th, 2013

Quora Snags John Hegeman From Facebook To Lead Its Engineering Efforts

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We’ve just gotten word that Facebook’s Director of Engineering for Ads, John Hegeman, will be moving to Quora to lead the Quora engineering team. While I haven’t received direct confirmation from either Quora or Hegeman on the hire, Hegeman has apparently confirmed the move on his (private) Facebook Timeline according to a tipster, writing: → Read More

March 16th, 2013

HealthTap’s Q&A Service Sees 7.5M Uniques Per Month, With MDs Spending An Hour Per Session Providing 581M Answers

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When you have a health question, what do you do? Likelihood is that you either search Google for the answer, WebMD, try to call your doctor, or set up an appointment. For most people, the latter two options would be preferable, because, after all, you’re more likely to trust a human being than Dr. Robot or some crowdsourced health resource. → Read More

January 28th, 2013

With 2B Questions Answered, Q&A Vet ChaCha Gets Another $14M To Be The Quora For The Common Man [Video]

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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

January 23rd, 2013

Quora Launches Blogging Platform With Mobile Text Editor To Give Every Author A Built-In Audience

QUora Blogs

The Internet is full of experts with no one reading their insights. It takes a lot of work to build a following. So today Quora launches a blogging platform that automatically distributes posts to its Q&A site users who follow related topics. Thanks to its upvote system, home page feed, and a new mobile text editor, anyone with something brilliant to blog, even first-timers, can find a… → Read More

December 21st, 2012

Quora Plans To Expand Beyond Q&A, Hints Blogging Platform Could Give Anyone An Audience

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“Today Quora is largely questions and answers, but that is not the ideal format for all knowledge. Other formats will gradually be added as we scale up”, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo wrote yesterday on the company blog. The clarification of Quora’s mission statement also expressed the site’s intention to give an audience to people who have insight but aren’t famous. → Read More

October 19th, 2012

Responsa Is Disqus For Company FAQs

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Responsa is a tool for adding interactive FAQs (frequently asked questions) to your company website through an embedded widget.

That sounded more like a feature than a business to me — after all, help desk applications like Zendesk and GetSatisfaction already have knowledge management systems for handling FAQs. But founder and CEO Gabriele Antoniazzi says that not everyone needs such a complex… → Read More

September 23rd, 2012

AMAs, A2As, And The Growth Of Tech-Enabled Political Discourse

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Editor’s note: Jon Bischke is a founder of Entelo and is an advisor to several startups. In the interest of full disclosure, the author is a National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O). You can follow Jon on Twitter here

It’s election season again and 2012 is likely to be remembered for many things, one of which is the amount of money spent on political advertising. Indeed… → Read More

September 5th, 2012

Quora Arrives on Android, Complete With Voice Search, Widgets And A Deep Search Integration

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After a long wait, Quora just arrived on Android today. The knowledge-sharing site from Facebook’s first chief technology officer Adam D’Angelo and early Facebooker Charlie Cheever sees about a quarter of its traffic coming through mobile devices. So like for so many consumer-facing startups, having a first-class mobile experience is becoming more important than ever.

“The thinking is that… → Read More

August 22nd, 2012

Bing Now Surfaces Quora Answers In Its Social Sidebar

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Microsoft and Quora just announced a new partnership that will bring content from the popular Q&A site to Bing’s social sidebar. Unlike some of Bing’s other integrations with social networks like Facebook, the Quora integration focuses less on content from your friends and more on bringing content from Quora’s topic experts to Bing. Just like the launch of Quora’s embeddable quotes earlier→ Read More

August 20th, 2012

Quora Is On A Quest For Users With Its New Embeddable Quotes

Quora Embeddable Quotes

It’s a shame Quora doesn’t get more traffic considering how fun and informative it is. So to raise awareness, today Quora launches an embeddable quote feature that lets any website host its content. The embeds make citation easier, and trackbacks show authors where their questions and answers are ending up. I’ve embedded Quora’s announcement of the feature in this post which will show you how it… → Read More

August 12th, 2012

Answer Underground Aims To Be A Mobile-Focused Quora For Education, Hits The iPad This Week

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There are some 3.7 billion web searches every month for education-related topics. However, ask a student how easy it is to find answers to their burning academic questions, and they’ll probably just roll their eyes. Sure, there’s Wikipedia, Google (and Google Scholar), Khan Academy and there are even Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers or Answers.com. While Khan is great for videos, it doesn’t… → Read More

August 9th, 2012

One Horrifying Account Of Working At Zynga

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Divorce, alcoholism, and near worthless stock are the rewards for 12 hour days prepping for a game launch at Zynga, according to one anonymous Quora user who worked there after their company was bought by the gaming giant.

The answer was called “butthurt” by one responder. “Sorry you’re not a millionaire after a year of work on a failed product” said another. Indeed it seems a bit overemotional… → Read More

June 19th, 2012

JustAnswer Becomes Pearl.com, Raises $25 Million Series A

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Eight-year old JustAnswer.com, which bills itself as a Quora competitor (but looked decidedly less hip), is announcing a rebranding and a new infusion of capital today. The site is becoming Pearl.com, which offers a new front-end to its Q&A service which is now focused on connecting site visitors with vetted professionals. Users will be able to ask questions aimed directly at those who work… → Read More

May 14th, 2012

Quora Raises $50M At $400M From Peter Thiel, D’Angelo Puts In $20M Of His Own Money

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Q&A site Quora has raised $50 million at a $400 million pre-money valuation according to a report by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed to me by the founders themselves. We had reported that Quora was raising in this range back in April and it looks like Facebook board member Peter Thiel has beat out many other investors including a much-rumored KPCB to lead the round. Also investing is… → Read More

May 8th, 2012

Quora Employee Answers “Why I Declined An Offer To Work At Instagram” On Quora

Why I Declined Instagram and Joined Quora

Here’s a heart-warming tale of why you can’t second-guess yourself. Robert Cezar Matei had the chance to work for Instagram long-before it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, but followed his passion for knowledge and became the growth hacker for question & answer site Quora instead.

This is his answer on Quora (fittingly) for why he declined Instagram, and why he’s still smiling. → Read More

April 21st, 2012

Quora Is Raising At A $400M Valuation, With D’Angelo Putting In His Own Money

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It’s really beautiful outside. Like so beautiful that if San Francisco is like this more often it will become really expensive to live here. Also, Quora is raising money according to the multiple people in the past week who have told me that Quora is raising money.

From what I’ve heard, the startup wants to raise between $30 to $50 million in its Series B, at a $400 million valuation —  while… → Read More

March 5th, 2012

Semantic Web/Q&A Startup Beepl Loses Ex-TechCrunch CEO, Gears Up For Mobile App

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The drive for more information has long been fueling the growth of the Internet, but that rising tide is not automatically lifting all boats, as one company trying to ride the wave has seen.

Beepl, a Q&A startup co-founded last year and led by ex-TechCrunch writer Steve O’Hear, has now lost him as CEO over what TechCrunch understands to be a dispute around future strategy. O’Hear confirmed… → Read More

February 21st, 2012

Now You Need Quora Credits To Ask Questions, But Can Also Use Them To Promote Content

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Quora has fiddled around with its Credits system and unveiled some new features today, making two very notable changes. The first one is the elimination of the original “Pay to show to Topics” feature of Credits, where users would have to pay credits to have their questions show up to people following specific topics. Instead, users will have to pay 50 Credits to ask a question, any question and… → Read More

January 27th, 2012

Q. When Will Wisdio Add Authority Scores? A. Right Now.

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Wisdio, a social QA site like Quora, has decided to up the social QA ante by adding something they’re calling WAR – Wisdio Authority Ratings. These ratings allow folks to recieve answers from authorities on their subject of choice, thereby reducing the number of incorrect answers and, one would hope, increasing the utility of the site.

Founded by Sebastian Zontek, Wisdio aims to help “find the… → Read More

January 17th, 2012

Quora Launches An Off-Site “Follow” Button For Topics And People

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Quora has joined the “Button” wars today with the launch of the Quora “Follow” button, created by Quora engineers Shu-Uesugi and Edmond-Lau. In the same vein as the Twitter “Follow” button, the Quora Follow button can be embedded in any website by cutting and pasting a customized snippet of code from the Quora Resources page. Users can choose between a light button and a dark button to… → Read More

January 16th, 2012

Ex-TechCruncher launches semantic Q&A service Beepl

Beepl is a questions and answers service, which launches today. Co-founder/CEO and ex-TechCrunch blogger Steve O’Hear actually left TC to do this startup is convinced that Beepl can take on the the so-called Q&A field better than Quora. But how? → Read More

January 16th, 2012

Ex-TechCruncher launches semantic Q&A service Beepl

Beepl is a questions and answers service, which launches today. Co-founder/CEO and ex-TechCrunch blogger Steve O’Hear actually left TC to do this startup is convinced that Beepl can take on the the so-called Q&A field better than Quora. But how? → Read More

January 5th, 2012

Announcing The 2011 Crunchies Finalists And Tickets On Sale Now

Crunchie Award photo by Susan Hobbs

The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.

For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks… → Read More

December 19th, 2011

Quora Expands Beyond Q&A, Launches ‘Boards’ — A Way To Personally Curate Information

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Quora is taking a step beyond Q&A this morning with its latest product launch, boards. Users can now set up their own personal-themed bookmarking boards, sort of like a Pinterest for text-based information.

Writes Quora CEO  Adam D’Angelo in a blog post, “As Quora has grown, we’ve learned that people want to read the most interesting content regardless of whether it happens to be in… → Read More

December 17th, 2011

The Top 20 iPhone And iPad Apps of 2011

iPhone Apps

It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it.

From social magazines to music discovery apps to console-quality games that players can hold in the palms of their hands, there are hundreds of new… → Read More

December 12th, 2011

Quora Now “Charges” You To Show Questions To Topic Followers

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You know what I’m into? Quora‘s efforts at gamification. Because listen, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever could have chosen to devote their youth to anything on earth and they have chosen to build a database of all content that people want to know. Valid. → Read More

December 3rd, 2011

A List Of Startups Goldman Sachs Thinks Will Most Likely IPO

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Very very quietly (there is almost no Google footprint), investment bank and securities firm Goldman Sachs held its “Private Internet Company Conference” this week in Las Vegas. During the two-day conference, which lasted from November 29-30th, a gaggle of companies presented their business models to an elite audience composed of bankers, investors and peers. → Read More

November 23rd, 2011

Quora Gains A Twitter/Facebook Growth Expert, Loses Top Engineer to Pinterest

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Good news people who are really curious about Quora growth! You might one day be reading an article like this about Quora …

Because Quora has hired a former Twitter and Facebook guy, Andy Johns, to focus on user growth and engagement. Johns, who tweets under the apropos username @ibringtraffic, spent a year and four months at Twitter, two years at Facebook and is now taking his speciality to… → Read More

November 14th, 2011

Quora Gamifies: Credits And “Ask To Answer” Suggestions Live For Everyone

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After five months of beta testing, Quora has made its Quora Credits and “Ask to Answer” User Suggestions live for everyone today.

All users can now earn credits for a variety of positive and user engagement-magnifying Quora behaviors like answering questions they’ve been asked to answer, getting votes on answers to questions they’ve solicited through “Ask to Answer” and getting votes on their… → Read More