News Corp is a global, diversified media and information services company focused on creating and distributing authoritative and engaging content and other products and services. Dow Jones. By Walter S. To Read the Full Story. Subscribe Sign In. ChaCha is the text message search service. The service used real people to answer the questions people just like a guide. And people also found it fun and knowledgeable. ChaCha was used by almost all the people around the world.
ChaCha was a masterpiece of that time because of the crazy and innovative idea and a company claimed that ChaCha has 18 patents which have been filed in the very first year. There were many investors who wanted to invest their money in ChaCha. ChaCha search engine always tries to make things work for their customers. They always wanted that what their customers ask, they will be able to answer that query or question.
ChaCha was free, and give its customers real-time answers to any question. Four minutes later I had my answer, "Salamat" in casual use and "Salamat po" for more formal usage.
My text shorthand, such as "add" for "address" and "ds" for "does" was recognized. I wanted to test it with a trivia question but got tired of texting. The responses have a URL at the end where you can go to see the question and answer on the Web. There is also information on that page about who answered the question first name and last initial , when they started answering questions at ChaCha and how many searches they have conducted.
Many believe this is the traditional way to look at modern tech startups. However, I believe profitability is still a critical metric to assess the long-term success of any business. For instance, Twitter, founded in , reported its first profitable quarter ever just in Q4 of however, annualized, the company still loses money. Thus, the new business model for tech startup seems to have become: start with an idea, burn millions of dollars from venture capital firms, pay them back with an ICO, and monetize by selling stocks to a bunch of clueless fellows!
Many might claim that also companies like Google had to go through a few years of trial and errors before figuring out how to monetize. However, when Google went public in , it was already a cash machine! Actually, Google was already profitable in In , would have anyone envisioned the wild success of the iPhone just a year later?
In fact, as the technology landscape started to evolve at a faster pace, an idea that seemed bright eventually became obsolete. In Google started to work on ways to understand human language.
In short, Google wanted to be able to provide accurate answers to complex queries from its users. This quest led to innovations, such as the knowledge graph in And Hummingbird and RankBrain in and respectively.
Those search algorithms changes made Google way more powerful. Those also allowed it to consolidate its growth. When Google SERP started to penalize the human-powered search engine, things turned awry, which leads us to the next point. ChaCha had initially managed to scale up its operations when it started to create a knowledge base, with millions of queries that at the time was quite sophisticated for Google to answer.
As of today, Google relies on Quora to get some of the answers from its users. Thus, back then it made even more sense. Even though, platforms like Quora do have the same risk. Thus, had ChaCha introduced a mechanism based more on the social media rationale, rather than pure monetization, would have this been more sustainable?
Well, in part they had contributors also. I wish there were a happy ending to this story. We are left with a few lessons that probably are worth more than any startup success story. This is the story of a tech visionary, that started out with a bold idea to take over the search industry dominated by Google.
It started with investments from other tech visionaries, like Jeff Bezos and companies with significant technological understanding like Qualcomm. It managed to raise dozens of millions over the years. Then, the international launch in the UK.
Yet after a decade of operations, ChaCha shut down. All that is left is a colossal failure and a few precious lessons. I could have told you the story of how Richard Branson conquered adversity. How Elon Musk became a billionaire. Or how Jeff Bezos disrupted several industries. Yet the only story I was able to tell you is about an original idea, which turned awry. And tech visionary Scott Jones selling all his stuff in his home in Indianapolis. While failure is never a pleasant experience, there are many good things that can spring from it, as is constantly demonstrated in places such as Silicon Valley, where failure is sometimes even considered a badge of honor.
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