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Posts Tagged ‘guides’

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.

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.

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It’s about time that TiVo outs some new hardware and it looks like it might be sooner than later. The TiVo HD and HD XL have been sitting atop the companies mast unchanged for sometime now, while other DVRs like the Moxi keeps the updates rolling.

Read more from the original source: 
TiVo Premiere leaked by manual mix-up?

It seems that every day there’s a new travel site looking to streamline the process of planning out your itinerary. And for good reason: trips, even the fun ones, are usually a total pain to plan. Those problems are only magnified when you’re trying to plan a trip with more than one person. Duffel is a startup that launched from TechCrunch50’s demo pit that’s looking to help. It’s giving users a straightforward, visual way to plan out their trips using a tool that’s long since proved its utility: a bulletin board.

Of course, as an online service Duffel’s bulletin board is virtual, but many of the concepts stay the same. To get started, first you tell Duffel what city you’re going to be traveling to. The site presents you with a virtual bulletin board populated with a handful of suggested activities and places to stay, each represented by a small note card. From there, you can add your own ideas manually (you enter a title, notes, and URL) or you can use the site’s bookmarklet to quickly save things from across the web to your Duffel.

The bulletin board is meant to serve as a central pool of all of the activities, restaurants, and modes of transportation that you’re considering. You can invite friends to brainstorm their own ideas and add them to the board. Then, when it’s time to actually plan out your trip, you can drag and drop each activity onto the timeline at the left side of the screen. To help plan out your activities, Duffel will automatically plot their location on a Google Map so you can see which items are closest. And when you’re ready to embark on your journey, you can print out an itinerary, which is automatically populated with information about the places you’re visiting. If you think your trip is particularly good, you can share it with the public. Likewise, if you can’t seem to find anything you want to do, you can browse the directory of trips shared by other users.

The site is well done, with a clean design and refreshing simplicity. But there are some features it lacks that competitors do have, like the ability to generate an itinerary with an hourly schedule (on Duffel everything is just listed by day, though some people may prefer it that way). More importantly it’s in a very crowded space — there are many travel sites out there, and even sites that help generate an itinerary for you aren’t very novel. Competitors include Nile Guide, GoPlanIt, Offbeat Guides, TripWolf and a host of others. Granted, there’s room for more than one player here to succeed, but Duffel is going to need to find a way to rise above the crowd.

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A relatively large announcement went live earlier today from RED, which as you’ll remember, made big promises for digital cinema a while ago — with equally big (and vague) timeframes.

See the original post: 
RED updates its lineup, throws a bone to current RED owners

Appsfire, the service for sharing iPhone Apps with anyone, has announced that they are doing a contest called App Star Awards, in partnership with SFR/AppliStore and LeWeb.

The idea is very simple. Anyone that has a legit iPhone application that doesn’t require jailbreaking, can submit a 30 second video to the contest, even if the app is not totally finished. 30 clips will be preselected, 10 in each category — games, entertainment, utility and other. Those clips will be reviewed and rated by a jury (full list below). Three winners, one in each category, will get a check of $1,500 and a free ad campaign with participating partners.

The results will be announced on stage at LeWeb in Paris on December 9th. TechCrunch Europe is organizing the startup competition in partnership with LeWeb.

AppsFire is currently taking pre-registrations on the site, but submissions will open on November 23.

The full list of jury members:

Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)
Loic Le Meur (Seesmic.com)
Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb.com)
Robert Scoble
Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC)
Jean Francois Caillard (SFR)
Eyal Magen (Gigya)
Rani Cohen (TuneWiki)
David Sifry (Offbeat Guides, Technorati)
David Marcus (Zong)
Zee M Kane (TheNextWeb, WeDoCreative)
Patrick Jordan, Just Another iPhone Blog
Yaron Samid (TechAviv.com)
Louis Gray
Daniel Brusilovsky

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Asus, Acer, HTC or BenQ: Taiwan is well-known as a significant player in the global electronics industry, but it’s safe to say the Taiwanese web landscape is still a black box for many of us. Taiwan ranks 10th in Asia in terms of Internet population, with around 15 million people currently online. Add to this an online ad market that grew by 14.9% to $208 million in 2009, and you have a fairly attractive Internet market overall.

As in many parts of Asia, the 800-pound gorilla in the web arena is Yahoo: The company established Yahoo Taiwan as early as 2000 after a buy-out and acquired Wretch, a wildly popular platform for blogging and sharing media, in 2007. Today, these two sites are the biggest in the country, with Facebook following as the No. 3 (Facebook now has 3.9 million users in Taiwan).

But the country does have promising tech start-ups with a global focus, too, some of which I talked with earlier this week during a (private) trip to Taipei. The TechCrunch/Crunchgear meetup on Monday, organized together with partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting (a local innovation strategy firm), was a blast. Over 120 people attended the meetup despite of a typhoon that traveled through Taiwan that day (we actually had to stop registration after a few hours due to space restrictions). Taipei- and San Jose-based hardware maker IPEVO sponsored the event.

A total of six Taiwan-based startups were given the chance to pitch their services (all are available in English) to the audience. Here’s a rundown on all of these companies.

Startup 1:
Swagly
Swagly, which calls itself a word-of-mouth affiliate network, is targeting a multi-billion dollar market: the monetization of social networks and video sharing platforms. The key idea is to let people buy what they see in pictures and videos via a product-tagging widget. This widget is placed right below the pictures or videos, with the social network users tagging products themselves (demo).

If a friend sees a user-tagged Gucci bag in an album photo, for example, the Swagly widget will show details of the bag and where the friend can buy it (Swagly works with a slew of American retailers by integrating with Commission Junction and LinkShare). In the case of a click or sell-through, Swagly shares the revenue with the publisher and the user who tagged the product.

Startup 2:
DragNTalk by Taroko Technology
DragNTalk is what appears to be a quite powerful application that makes it possible to project presentations (and other documents) onto nearby computers just by using drag and drop. The software automatically displays presentation materials as web pages in your browser. And all you need to do to share a presentation is to share a local web address with your listeners in a local network (details).

You can then drag and drop any kind of file into the DragNTalk pane and go through your slides just like you do in Powerpoint, for example. The application lets you take snapshots of materials that are available in unsupported formats to be able to share these, too. Listeners can view the presentation you give in their browser windows.

DragNTalk is currently available as a trial edition, with a USB-powered wallet-size wireless router supporting the application in the works (people connecting through the Wi-Fi network spawned by the router will then be able to see the presentations automatically).

Startup 3:
Ragic
5-man startup Ragic wants to take on big enterprise solution companies like Salesforce with a dead simple database creation tool that’s based on a spreadsheet UI. Ragic claims their users can build a full-scale enterprise application like Salesforce’s account management system by themselves in about an hour – without any coding. Alternatively, users can customize and deploy applications offered by Ragic, i.e. their issue tracking or employee management solutions (Ragic’s own account management system is here).

The six applications Ragic currently offers are free to use for a limited time and are as easy to use as Excel. The company earns money by charging customers on a monthly basis (just like Salesforce in the form of a Platform as a Service model) and selling OEM licenses to web design companies.

Startup 4:
Starmugs
Starmugs was surely the most unusual of the demo companies presenting at the TechCrunch Taipei event. The site sees itself as the primary online destination for all lovers of Starbucks City Mugs, apparently quite popular collectible coffee mugs Starbucks started selling in 1994. If you’re one of these people, Starmugs lets you list up, display, trade and share stories about your mugs. The site even has its own virtual currency (Mug Cash).

Startup 5:
Citiport
Launched at DEMO last year, Citiport can roughly be described as a mix between Yelp and TripAdvisor. The site offers travelers “insider information” on the best places to visit in cities around the world. The idea is to collect recommendations on so-called “hotspots” (restaurants, bars, nightlife, shopping, sightseeing, hotels etc.) from people who live in these cities. These locals can be contacted directly on the site and may be ready to help travelers get around in real life as local tour guides.

Startup 6:
YusReader by Cloudonline Technology
YusReader is a nifty full-content RSS reader and sharing platform. The site encourages you to log in with your Facebook account, as YusReader makes it possible to find blogs read by your Facebook friends and share your own favorite blogs with them. The site is also pre-populated with blogs grouped in several categories (sports, lifestyle etc.), but allows you to add your own RSS feeds, too.

Each blog is displayed as an icon in a customizable grid-view. Click on the icon to view the blog in a full browser window where you’ll find a YusReader bar at the top. You can choose the blog you want to read via a drop-down menu and quickly browse through the articles from that blog by scrolling up and down with your mouse.

Event sponsor:
IPEVO
Founded in Taipei, Taiwan & San Jose, California in July 2007, IPEVO creates devices that expand and enhance the overall Experience over the Internet. Renowned for its iconic line of VoIP and Skype hardware, IPEVO has established a reputation for innovating award-winning designs and affordable products to help make the Internet a better place for what matters most–connecting, communicating, and sharing with the world around us.

IPEVO’s current product line includes the best-selling So20 Wifi phone for Skype and the Kaleido R7, a digital frame that features a unique pivoting display design and comes bundled with EyeStage software to wirelessly stream Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and other Internet contents from a PC or Mac to the frame. Available in late October, the Point 2 View USB Camera (pictured below) is a 2.0 Megapixel, PC & Mac compatible webcam that sits on a versatile swing-arm stand.

Many thanks to all attendees, demo companies, co-organizer Chili Consulting and sponsor IPEVO. xie xie! You can find many more pictures of the event here (courtesy of Chili Consulting).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Travel site Localyte has a new twist on travel advice—the site tries to connect travelers with locals in their destination to serve as guides or just to get advice. Locals in communities around the world vary from professional tour guides who charge for the custom tours to everyday people who simply want to help folks enjoy their hometown as much as possible. Since late 2007, Localyte has accumulated 40,000 local guides in about 10,000 destinations across 160 countries. The site also offers reviews and listings of local activities.

Now, Localyte is furthering its mobile strategy by launching PocketSherpa, a free iPhone app that integrates its online platform onto a mobile device, letting travelers access local guides and information (from WikiTravel) on the go. The app lists tours and contact info in cities and also lists local travel guides in those cities who are available to answer any questions. For example, if you were traveling in Egypt, you could ask “Are there any hot air balloon rides available over the Pyramids?” Localyte’s CEO Guillermo Baensch says that locals answer the questions fairly quickly, within a few hours at most. You can also access threads of previous questions that were submitted in your destination. Localyte’s app has a built-in mailbox that lets you send and receive messages, and also lets you see local newspapers in the region where you are traveling.

So how does Localyte get locals to participate? Baensch says that Localyte engages people around the world through social networks, such as Facebook. From glancing at Localyte’s Facebook page, you can see that locals seem enthusiastic to help show travelers around in their native countries.

Of course, there is not shortage of mobile applications that provides useful services to travelers, making it a very competitive space. But Baensch says that in the week that the app hit the app store, it quickly rose to be listed as one of the top 15 travel apps in the App Store.

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This post was written by Frank Gruber, who cofounded TECH cocktail, a startup that looks to help people involved with technology connect at events, which it throws around the country. Tonight’s event is being held in Washington DC, where nine startups are presenting to tech enthusiasts from throughout the region.

Though situated in the heart of Government 2.0, the private sector in Washington, D.C. has been a wellspring of new startups each quarter. TECH cocktail, a community building organization, looks to help entrepreneurs by giving them a place to share their latest creations with the local technology community. The first couple of TECH cocktail events in Chicago were covered here in July and October 2006. Since then, TECH cocktails have been guzzled down like dirty martinis quarterly in D.C. and Chicago and annually in Boulder, Boston and other smaller technology communities.

TECH cocktail D.C. 6 is being held tonight and is supported by local companies like AOL, which will be showing off the new AIM product with its real-time lifestream. AOL is joined by Boalt, TransFS, Jess3, iStrategyLabs and a handful of other local supporters who help make it possible for TECH cocktail to promote the startup scene.

The start-ups demoing will include the following:

AddyMate a free web service that helps you manage & communicate with all your contacts across various web services, social networks & computers from one central connected address book that self-updates when you or your contacts change your personal information. It also offers various privacy settings to help group together family, friends, co-workers & others.

CostToDrive or C2G is an application that uses a “galculator” to help people quickly and easily discover how much it costs to drive anywhere in the United States. You might want to check with CostToDrive before you gas up the family truckster for a Sunday drive. There is also a CostToDrive iPhone application coming soon.

Human powered search startup ChaCha has been the subject to 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. It appears that at some point over the past year, ChaCha lowered the Transcriber rate to 4 cents per question. Now, ChaCha has decided to cut the rates of “Voice Transcriber” guides (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.

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Center’d, the service that looks to help you figure out what to do with your day, has released a new iPhone application that lets you tap into the site’s restaurant, event, and activity recommendation engine on the go. The application is free and you can grab it here.

Center’d competes with sites like Yelp and CitySearch, but instead of simply offering text reviews, the service scours the web for reviews and descriptions and performs semantic analysis on them, allowing you to perform more detailed searches than you could on other sites.

In my testing I found the app’s manual search mode, which lets you search by keywords, to be pretty hit-or-miss. During one search for “large portions” Center’d pulled up a list of matching restaurants, but the app didn’t do a good job explaining why it thought they had large portions (you’d expect it to display any relevant text in its database, but it didn’t). In fact, when I looked through the details of the top hit for “large portions”, that restaurant’s top keyword was “small plates”. Go figure.

Search leaves something to be desired, but that doesn’t mean the app isn’t worth checking out. Its City Guides functionality, which lets you search using a number of pre-set filters, is actually quite helpful. To use it, you first choose a description of what you’re looking for (options include things like ‘Kid-friendly’, ‘Romantic’, and ‘Outdoors’). Then you choose the type of venue you’re looking for, be it a restaurant, event, shopping or attraction. The app pulls up a list of matches, and for the most part I found these to be pretty accurate — a search for kid-friendly restaurants in Palo Alto pulled up local favorite ‘The Creamery’ as the top result, and the app also made it easy to pull up a list of local bars with outdoor patios.

Aside from the iPhone app, Center’d is seeing strong growth, though its traffic is still pretty modest. Since April the service has doubled its traffic.

Also worth checking out is Yelp’s new iPhone application, which includes deals from local merchants.

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