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.

Sprint / Sybase Issues with New ChaCha Text Answers Service

Since Friday evening sometime (probably about 5PM ET) Sybase and Sprint have managed to somehow "break" the flow of questions sent to ChaCha (242242) and answers returned to Sprint handsets. Our network ops team at ChaCha have been working through the weekend with Sybase in an attempt to resolve these issues. One of the more perplexing facts is that the service does occasionally work on Sprint but more often than not it fails.

We have a longer term strategy that will put us in more direct control of these situations but right now we are left to the devices of Sybase who is proving to provide lackluster service at best.

Incredible that Sybase, who is the biggest aggregator of text traffic, is this inept with respect to customer support and basic implementations of what is supposed to be their core competency. I don't generally speak out about partners in this manner but at this point the truth needs to be told.

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.