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.

1-800-2ChaCha Officially Launched at CTIA

We are having a great show at CTIA so far. Please take a look at the following release from ChaCha regarding our 1-800-2ChaCha service (800-224-2242). Let me know what you think once you try it!

Regards,

--Brad

-------------Press Release-----------------------

ChaCha’s Industry Breakthrough Makes Searching Easy

from Mobile Phones

Call 1-800-2-ChaCha. Ask in your own voice. Receive free answers by text.

LAS VEGAS, April 1, 2008 — From the scoop on the hottest martini bar on the Vegas strip to advice on where to buy the cheapest gas in Manhattan, ChaCha’s ingenious new

1-800-2-ChaCha (800-224-2242) mobile answers service allows mobile phone users to ask an extensive range of questions in conversational English while on the go — and the free answers are texted back within minutes.

The online and mobile search company is announcing its free new voice service today at the CTIA Wireless 2008 global convention in Las Vegas.

You can ask ChaCha almost anything:

· How much sodium is in a McDonald's Big Mac?

·What hotel in downtown Austin has a business center?

·Who won the last Boston Marathon?

·Where can I get the cheapest gas in Orlando, Florida?

·Who stars in the new movie “21”?

ChaCha’s valuable new service instantly routes each question to a human guide — dramatically expanding the questions you can ask well beyond simple phone numbers or addresses. The guides utilize powerful tools to search the Web and quickly return a succinct, relevant answer in a text message with a Web reference link.

“On mobile devices, traditional 411 has been the only easy to use option and it is limited to the basics of only finding a phone number or address,” explains ChaCha CEO Scott A. Jones. “More recently, desktop search engines have attempted to enter the mobile market by forcing users to enter a restricted query with their thumbs on a tiny keypad in a specific way, which causes most people to find other ways of meeting their information needs, such as calling a friend or waiting until they get to a computer, or, worse yet, making less-informed decisions. Using ChaCha is like having thousands of informed friends available by phone to help answer your questions 24 hours a day.”

Moreover, ChaCha works on any mobile phone — from simple flip phones to sophisticated smart phones — with no voice recognition prompts or menus to muddle through.

“With our innovative combination of human intelligence and sophisticated technology, ChaCha’s mobile answers service does the work for you,” explains ChaCha President Brad Bostic. “Another groundbreaking feature is that you can easily reply with follow-up questions, as you might do in a conversation, further demonstrating how superior our new service is compared to 411 or algorithmic search engines.”

ChaCha’s new voice capability further expands upon its award-winning text service launched in January of this year. After only two months of deployment, ChaCha demonstrated at the “My Search is Better than Your Search” competition at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Manhattan that it dominates the mobile search arena by taking top prize for its service’s technical efficiency, relevance and practical functionality.

Additionally, ChaCha was ranked as the “No. 1 Alternative Search Engine” in February — beating out hundreds of companies — by Charles Knight of the blogging network, ReadWriteWeb. Last month, out of 70 promising start-ups presenting at Dow Jones’ “Web Ventures”, ChaCha was selected as a “Top Ten” company by VentureWire’s judges.

"ChaCha's new voice capability pushes the boundaries of mobile 411 beyond its historical name and address limitations," says Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence and the Program Director for Local Mobile Search. "It represents a next step in the evolution of the industry from directory assistance to voice search."

About ChaCha: ChaCha, a mobile answers service, allows users to call 1-800-2-CHA-CHA (800-224-2242) or text questions to CHACHA (242-242) on mobile phones and receive answers within minutes. ChaCha guides — trained and skilled individuals — use ChaCha's powerful internal search tools to respond to any query. Created by serial entrepreneur Scott A. Jones and Brad Bostic, ChaCha is funded by Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Jeff Bezos; Morton Meyerson, former President and Vice Chairman of EDS and former Chairman and CEO of Perot Systems; Rod Canion, founding CEO of Compaq Computer; and Jack Gill, well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist. For more information about ChaCha’s newest features, go to http://www.chacha.com/.

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Google's "knol" Experiment Highlights Need for Credibility

Today Google's VP of Engineering, Udi Manber, blogged about a new project called "knol" Google is working on. This project is intended to "to find a way to help people share their knowledge".

This announcement is exciting to the ChaCha team because it validates for the masses something that we have believed deeply from the beginning - that leaving it up to the crowd to give you an answer is not a good idea when accuracy and authority count.

My sense is that Google has Wikipedia in its crosshairs with this initiative as Google sends millions of visitors to the not-for-profit everyday. By capturing this traffic rather than shuttling it off to Wikipedia, Google stands to grow revenue and extend its brand to include the provision of knowledge by actual authorities.

ChaCha for Outdoorsmen

I am out in Mitchell, South Dakota on a hunting trip this weekend. It's an annual tradition that has been ongoing since I was old enough to walk. I haven't been on the trip in a couple years (and I am really not a bigger hunter - I mainly go to see old friends and spend some time with my Dad) so when I went to prepare for the trip I was unsure of the gear I needed to pack. I turned to my cousin Andrew for advice.

The ultimate sportsman, he can tell you exactly what type of gear to buy to prepare for your pheasant hunting trip on the opening weekend in South Dakota this year. Since Andrew is from Minnesota and he hunts in his home state or South Dakota almost every weekend, he knew that this year it is going to be unseasonably warm and (since it has rained heavily) extremely muddy. Thanks to Andrew I arrived prepared with waterproof rubber boots and lightweight hunting clothes.

Andrew is also a ChaCha Guide so it occurred to me that hunters using ChaCha would be much better prepared than those who might use an algorithmic-only search engine. You would need to tap into a dynamic source with deep, current knowledge of the hunting conditions to prepare properly for this trip. I think this is a great example of human powered search delivering answers that standard search engines such as Google cannot. If you Google "what should I wear for opening weekend of pheasant hunting in South Dakota this year" you currently get results about pheasant hunting in South Dakota but nothing about what you need to be wearing this season.

So whether you are planning to go hunting or heading to Desolation Canyon for a white water river rafting trip, give human powered search a try. You will be glad you did!

So what is human powered search anyway? PART 1

Overview
There is a lot of talk about "human powered search" these days. Since co-founding ChaCha, which is lumped into this formative category, I have come to find that human powered search means many things to many people.

These meanings include human edited web pages, message board-style services like Yahoo! Answers where anyone can answer any question (and often-times the person
answering is doing so more for the entertainment value of their "answer" than anything), and true expert services where questions are asked on specific topics and people who are knowledgeable on those specific topics respond with answers.

Ask.com is not human powered search
One thing that really needs to be cleared up is the notion that Ask.com (formerly AskJeeves.com) somehow utilizes people who provide answers. It is tough to tell exactly what Ask Jeeves had in mind when it first launched since IAC offers only a brief company overview. Ask.com definitely does not fit in the human powered search category today.

Hand-written and human edited content
Many services exist today that utilize people to write web pages on specific topics. These are considered part of the human powered search category. About.com is the best known service utilizing this approach. I would include Wikipedia in this group as well. Mahalo is another recently launched service that follows this basic approach to creating web content framed in a search context. Valuable content can be created by people writing and editing web pages and this content is attractive to Google. The SEO power afforded to such human-edited sites is the primary value equation that allows them to create a niche on the web. It will never be the case that human written topical web pages positioned as search sites will change the way people access information. They definitely do not make a big impact where access to information and answers is soon to matter most - on mobile devices. Also, quality and validity of the information on Wikipedia is being called into question so frequently that it is banned by many universities as a valid information source.

Message boards
Message boards have been around since the dawn of the web. Today some message boards are oriented toward people asking questions for others to answer. These are included in the human powered search category. Examples include Yahoo! Answers and the now defunct Google Answers. Yahoo! Answers has tapped into the massive traffic of Yahoo! to gain a large base of users (90M or so). Anyone can answer questions on Yahoo! Answers once they great a login.

Paid expert services
There are also services that require users to pay for access to specific experts. These services are proving that users are willing to pay a premium for efficient access to experts online that can answer complex questions accurately.

More to come on this topic...