The latest from TechCrunch
- ChaCha Makes Its Crazy Business Model…Profitable
- Hidden Mac Gem: DigitalColor Meter
- Siebel's Stealth Carbon Startup C3 Lands $26 Million And Condoleezza Rice On Its Board
| ChaCha Makes Its Crazy Business Model…Profitable | Top |
| 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. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Hidden Mac Gem: DigitalColor Meter | Top |
| I’ve been using a Macintosh computer for a few years now, but just a few a weeks ago, I decided to look in my Utilities folder—one of those spur of the moment kind of things. I found the regular utilities like Activity Monitor, Airport Utility, Console, and Migration Assistant, but what I just stumbled on was something that has saved me so many times from that point on. DigitalColor Meter . Apple likes to secretly tuck away their best utilities in folders that people will most likely never end up using. So what makes DigitalColor Meter so special? The app does a lot of things, but what I found most useful was the ability for me to hover over any pixel on my screen, and to find out the exact RGB value (read up on RGB here ). This is a great tool that I’ve used in many scenarios with great success. For example, my Twitter background was all done through DigitalColor Meter, since I knew the colors I liked, but I just needed their RGB values. So, I whipped open DigitalColor Meter, it told me the RGB values, and bam — I have a new custom-colored Twitter background. If you want check out DigitalColor Meter in action, check out the video I did below detecting TechCrunch’s RGB colors all over the site. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Siebel's Stealth Carbon Startup C3 Lands $26 Million And Condoleezza Rice On Its Board | Top |
| What do Thomas Siebel, Condoleezza Rice and $26 million have in common? They are all connected to stealth energy startup C3 , which may be entering the business of managing carbon cap-and-trade systems for corporations. In the past two weeks, C3 has filed three Form Ds with the SEC disclosing financings totaling almost $26M. Very little is known about the company publicly, and the company declines to comment on its future plans (or anything else). But from other publicly-available sources, an interesting story can be pieced together. C3 is the brainchild of Thomas Siebel, former CEO of Siebel Systems which was bought by Siebel’s previous employer Oracle for $5.7 billion in 2005. Siebel has brought in a lot of familiar talent , including former Siebel Systems and Oracle executives Patricia House and Edward Abbo. House is a star, serving on a number of boards and in the past being named one of Fortune’s 50 most powerful women. Abbo is the former CTO of Siebel Systems, among other positions. The holdover team from Siebel, including its CTO, points towards enterprise software. Also among the C3 board of directors are former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Senator and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. Both are powerful Republicans, which comes as no surprise as Siebel played a role in introducing Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin to California. Far more interesting is the role each might play. C3 is focused on energy management and a former Secretary of Energy is a logical (and valuable) asset in that business. More interesting is the potential role of Rice. Rice’s most visible experience is as America’s lead representative to the world, suggesting that C3 is planning an international play. Another key Director is Jay Dweck, a Managing Director and Global Head of Strategies and Technology for the Institutional Securities Group at Morgan Stanley. Mr. Dweck’s insider knowledge of institutional securities and the underlying technology at least raises the possibility that C3 will seek to securitize and/or create a market for some kind of carbon security. So what does an enterprise-software, energy-management company with international ambitions, $26 million in capital, and sophisticated financial securities software do? Besides make a lot of money of course. One logical answer is that the company is planning to create software/platforms for the management of carbon emissions. What makes the space potentially so valuable is cap and trade . These systems substitute a market for regulation; an enterprise’s carbon emissions are measured against a specific amount, the cap. Companies with emissions below the cap can sell their extra “space,” while companies whose emissions exceed their cap need to purchase permits for their overage. Cap and trade is not currently in use in the United States, although it has been proposed and is being pushed by the Obama Administration , but it is being used to reduce carbon emissions on a cost-efficient basis elsewhere, notably in the EU. Two large and related problems plague cap and trade systems. One is measuring emissions (in an officially sanctioned manner) and the other is pricing them, and those two problems could very well be C3’s targets. The goal in this scenario would be to get licensed or approved to create and run cap-and-trade markets. If cap and trade is ultimately adopted as the way to control carbon emissions in the name of reducing global warming, it will be a multi-billion dollar market. C3 bills itself as an “Energy and Emissions Management” company. Limited information about it is currently available at c3welcome.com , itself an unlikely website. The company also appears to own c3-carbon.com , and may be shopping for a more euphonious domain as it has chosen to remain at the welcome site as opposed to the longer term c3-carbon.com, which redirects. There are other companies tackling this problem such as Greenstone Carbon Management , Carbon Hub , and Carbon Trust , but the glowing board/leadership pedigree on top of nearly limitless access to capital make C3 a diamond in the rough, so to speak. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
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