ChaCha Selected as Best New Mobile Service by AT&T at CTIA

Yesterday was a big day for ChaCha at CTIA. Thanks to some outstanding work by the ChaCha team, we were selected by AT&T as the best new consumer mobile product in their fast-pitch competition. What does this mean?

We received $25,000 in prize money (giant "Happy Gilmore" style check being held by Kevin Mazzatta, VP of Biz Dev at ChaCha) and, much more importantly, we will be working with AT&T to introduce ChaCha to their customer base (about 70M folks). What a great way to kick-off the second quarter!

To win, ChaCha competed with hundreds of companies from around the world that applied. Only 66 were selected to present to the judges at CTIA and ChaCha was selected as the winner.

The Fast-Pitch program is considered the wireless industry’s equivalent of American Idol, with emerging mobile technology companies presenting their wireless applications directly to AT&T’s decision makers. Hundreds of companies applied from around the world and were judged based on the following criteria:

1. Originality / Innovation

2. Market appeal

3. Interface design

4. Number of platforms and handsets supported

This news will hit the wire tomorrow but I wanted to get the word out here. Let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer them! We are still working with AT&T to define the rollout plan but I will keep updating here as things progress.

Headed to CTIA Las Vegas

I made onto my Southwest airlines 737 this morning and will be departing to Las Vegas for CTIA shortly. This is my first trip out to this conference and I suspect it will be massive and loud -- full of new product announcements that both excite and under-whelm the attendees.

I am accompanied at CTIA by our (ChaCha's) head of business development Jay Highley and Kevin Mazzatta and Darin Leach who are also on the biz dev team.

We have a major announcement regarding ChaCha's mobile answers service coming tomorrow so please check back here to learn more!

Doors are closing - time to sign off.

What's Happening with Micro-Yahoo!?

As you all know, Microsoft made an offer to purchase Yahoo! on February 1 and that offer was rejected. It seems that the most commonly held view on the offer and subsequent rejection is that Yahoo! realizes just how badly Microsoft needs them and that Microsoft is willing (and obviously capable) of paying much more for the company.

What's at stake is a stake in the rapidly growing online advertising industry that some project will reach $80 billion by 2010. It's apparent that Yahoo! and Microsoft both need some kind of a spark if they expect to have any chance at competing with Google over the next several years in the online advertising and search markets.

So let's assume that Microsoft will ultimately prevail in taking out the once dominant Yahoo! What is going to happen to the employees? What about the products? Locations? Culture? Etc...? Following are some thoughts on these items based on what is being said among the senior ranks at Microsoft:
* Microsoft expects that, if and win Yahoo! agrees to the transaction, it will close in the second halof of 2008.
* The number one reason for the take-out bid is stated as, "the industry needs a more compelling alternative in search and online advertising."
* Microsoft believes the R&D talent that would pick up could help them better innovate to compete with Google.
* For agencies and advertisers this would result in a more efficient management process for campaigns with a higher yield. Also, they would be pushing hard to extend the ad platform a la Google's multi-channel strategy which is something agencies and advertisers are asking Microsoft to do.
* Of course, they think this will reduce redundant expenses and increase revenue resulting in "greater shareholder value."
* On the topic of cutting duplicate positions in the merger, Microsoft mostly dodges the question pointing to the fact that MS has hired over 20,000 employees since 2005 and that there are many challenges that need to be tackled across the company. I read this to mean some people will surely get canned and that's just part of reality in any merger - especially of this magnitude.
* Microsoft would definitely retain the Yahoo! brand due to its strength in the consumer market. They will not comment on which Yahoo! and Microsoft brands would survive once the companies are combined.
* Microsoft will have a bit of a quandary with their technology integration given that Yahoo! is anti-Microsoft. I am glad to not be leading that integration process... However, Microsoft does claim that in certain cases they are good with leaving open source technologies in place and making the interoperability happen with all of their other Microsoft-based stuff. This has got to be a big concern for all of the engineering talent at Yahoo! If they migrated to MS platforms it would have a massive impact on Yahoo!'s talent pool and would likely result in a massive elimination of jobs. Even though MS s head of their own religion, I actually think it is unlikely that MS would attempt to crater all of the great technology Yahoo! has created.

The Microsoft staff has been told to continue with "business as usual" and to compete aggressively with Yahoo! on deals. They are also not to start any integration discussions until they hear otherwise.

The tone of what I am hearing out of Redmond tells me they are really serious about making this deal happen.

My bet is that Micro-Yahoo! will be a reality by the second half of 2008 and that the focus on integrating the two companies will only serve to distract them and allow Google to distance itself.

I also think emerging players should view this is a great opportunity to continue driving rapid adoption while the big three sort all of this out. For ChaCha, we believe our mobile answers capabilities are truly different than anything the search Goliaths are focusing on. I was recently asked what I thought of my partner stating that ChaCha could "blast right past" Google in mobile. My view is that the race we are running today is demonstrating that we are tapping into a massive base of demand that is not served at all by the big three. Namely, the need to simply ask a question (about anything) and get the answer on any type of phone. With ChaCha, every phone is a smart phone.

If you have yet to try it out, go ahead and text ANY QUESTION to 242242 (spells ChaCha). You will see the difference.

As for Micro-Yahoo!'s mobile plans, it looks like those are about fourth or fifth on a list that looks something like: advertising, search, video, mobile, commerce, and social media.

What do you think of this proposed merger? Will Micro-Yahoo! compete favorably against Google? Or will this all result in more distractions and less competition?

Please post a comment to let me know what you think!

ChaCha Mobile Answers Save Lives :-)

I have been blogging about the great experiences ChaCha mobile answers users have been getting with texting their questions to 242242. A particularly good example of this was recently posted by Jesse Stay on his blog.

Then I remembered Cha Cha had a “Human Powered” search engine. I sent a question to “242242″ (CHACHA on your cell phone) via text message on my iPhone asking why my brother was at a standstill. Within just a couple minutes I received a response saying they were cleaning up after near white-out conditions, and to wait out until they cleared up the roads. A link was attached, which also told me there were several accidents ahead and the road was closed (I love my iPhone’s browser!). I quickly called my brother and told him the details so he could decide to find the nearest hotel and wait it out.

ChaCha definitely delivered in this case as it is in thousands of cases every day! If you want to see the full post click here.

242242 ChaCha Text Answers Soar while Sybase Stumbles

ChaCha's text answers trend continued today with another record-breaking day of volume. We continue to optimize systems and processes daily to provide an continuously improving mobile answers product.

Last night, Sybase, the company that aggregates our messages and routes them through the carriers, made what was believed to be a "simple" migration of routing for Sprint, Nextel, and Boost mobile. This occurred late-night and has caused a disconnect somewhere in the communication chain within Sybase's routing process. The net result is that anyone on these carriers are unable to receive answers. It's really incredulous given that Sybase is the largest provider of this type of routing services. We are working with their team diligently to get this issue resolved.

I will post an update as soon as the status of this routing issue changes so all users are able to again access ChaCha's text answers service.

ChaCha Debuts Mobile Text (242242) Answers

You might notice that the name of my blog has changed! It is subtle, but what was "Brad Bostic's Human Powered Search Blog" is now "Brad Bostic's Mobile Search and Technology Blog". The reason for the change? We finally launched our first mobile product at ChaCha!

After a year of tirelessly building and optimizing our online community of roughly 30,000 ChaCha Guides (real people with expertise in providing online answers to your specific question) and making real-time answers available online, we announced our new text service on January 3rd. The response has been tremendous!

When you get a chance please text your question to ChaCha at 242242. It's easy - Just create a new text message, enter 242242 as the number you are sending the text to, type your question, and send it off! ChaCha will respond with the answer (usually in a couple minutes but difficulty of question will impact the speed of your response).

I want to know what you are asking and how you like the service! Please give it a try and please POST A COMMENT WITH WHAT YOU ASKED AND HOW IT WENT.

Having ChaCha answers available via text has been absolutely amazing for me. I look forward to hearing how you like it.