The Wolfram Alpha integration provides ChaCha users with instantly computed facts and answers to questions from over topic areas, such as demographics, definitions, mathematics, geography, and celebrity facts. In , ChaCha started to experiment to launch its service worldwide. It started from the UK in September ChaCha had to shut down its operations in the UK. As recounted by at the time VP of operations Doug Gilmore:.
This is how Doug Gilmore of ChaCha announced the shut down of its operations on the forum moneysavingexpert. It is with a heavy heart that I announce ChaCha will no longer be offering our service in the UK and plan to stop incoming and outgoing texts on Friday, April 20th, This pains us because of all the hard work and dedication you have all contributed to the ChaCha service in the UK.
Any and all success we have had in the UK can be attributed to you, our Guides, who provided quality answers and helped us spread the word about the service. We would like to thank you for your service and support during the last 9 months. Please note that we will process any and all remaining Guide funds from your ChaCha accounts and transfer those on Friday, April 20th. How could ChaCha get back on track with its mission to scale up the business?
After a decade of operations, in ChaCha announced the shut down of its operations. Before that, in Scott Jones was looking for ways to land an offer from an investor and sell the company. In fact, at times the difference between the two can be measured in terms of outcome. For instance, today people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are the epitome of the modern tech visionary. However, had they not been so wildly successful one could wonder whether we would have called them visionaries.
Or rather madmen! Remember that one of the first investors of ChaCha was Jeff Bezos? Today, we get inspiration from the boldness of Jeff Bezos and the fact that he risked his own family money to start Amazon, yet what if Amazon failed?
Since the start, ChaCha has been identified as innovative. However, is that enough to build a successful startup? Even though ChaCha had a great idea of introducing the human variable into the search equation. That variable was not scalable and sustainable over time. In fact, ChaCha realized that when it introduced Wolfram Alpha.
Mike Burroughs, former director of mobile development, reported :. It was a scaling problem. Another issue was culture, at least in the latter years. The multiple pivots induced fatigue, some said, and employees spent long hours trying to get something right. 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. This is a story of such nasty things emanating from ChaCha and falling upon myself and my fellow guides.
Thank you. If you have no knowledge of ChaCha, search for ChaCha in www. Alright, with those details cleared, I will begin. I have been a ChaCha guide for 3 months now, and have attained a ranking of Master.
I did my work diligently and served their cause well, earning a nearly dollars during my time there. All was for the most part well, until this past Friday. In an e-mail from the VP of ChaCha that came in my Gmail box, I was informed with a blunt and unhelpful reasoning that I had been permanently deactivated from being a guide at ChaCha.
Finding great alarm at this, I replied to the e-mail and set up a date this past Monday to talk to the VP over the phone and to find what had happened. When asked for any reason at all as to why I was being banned, I was informed this was all due to the occurrence of a single event that past Friday morning. Apparently I had accepted some number of searches, as per my job, which isn't strange until they found upon review that the searches all appeared to be coming from the same person.
ChaCha took this as a scheme on my end to somehow wrangle the randomly assigned search system so I was guaranteed searches without having to wait for them to come to me.
Based on that assumption, I was branded part of a monkey-making scheme in those early hours and swiftly deactivated from ChaCha. Now this is all very strange. I typically get on ChaCha around 4 AM to 6 AM to get the rush of UK searches that occur when my fellow guides are all offline and most likely sleeping. The same goes for anyone else I talk to. I work with no interruptions and I get a fine number of searches from the random assignment system anyways.
So where was the scheme I had been involved in? ChaCha had no proof I was involved in anything past correlative evidence, and the correlation was based on assumption. I myself know of no way to cheat the system, I have no clue how a single person could manage to find a single guide amongst the thousands of other guides. But despite all of this, ChaCha played it out that I was involved with someone else and had them give me searches so I could quickly gain money off the system.
Sighing, I asked how one event could be enough to cancel my entire three-month long membership under ChaCha. I was then told glibly that upon review of my search history, they had found a number of events that incriminated me further. I asked for an explanation. If I'm to be charged guilty, show me all of the evidence so I can defend myself, right?
No, they bluntly said they would not go into detail. Ah, at this point I began to suspect there was really no other evidence against me. ChaCha was up to something. Were they padding their story to get rid of me easier, so they could reclaim all the money I had earned while working based on a few hours of strange activity? Reabsorbing my funds so they could easily distribute money around their ever growing and easily replaceable work force?
Really ChaCha, you aren't that low? But despite my personal reassurance that I was not part of a scheme, my reasoning that one event was not enough to cancel me fairly, and that if they reactivated me they would see nothing else would occur as I would keep a watchful eye of strange activity, then surely we could all be happy. I keep my job, and they could be happy treating their guides with fairness and gaining trust amongst their workforce for it by sentencing their guides fairly, correct?
No, it was not to be as they said based on the actions of other, unidentified and never backed-up cases where they had supposedly reactivated accounts only to see the same strange activity happen again, then I would not be trusted or allowed back on.
In fact, the VP had the gall to say I was given the benefit of a doubt and that was the only reason I had received a phone call and any explanation at all.. It was directly stated I was being given grace by ChaCha doing what is typically and certainly a given requirement termination at other business. Well, thank you ChaCha for lumping me in with others and honoring me with such respect. Alright, I tried to swallow my indignation and looked to what really mattered: the large sum of money ChaCha had in their system that I had earned and was in the process of transferring to my First Internet Bank account.
Instead they were now going to "research" my search sessions and see if I had actually earned any money at all, and in days I could expect a check of any amount of money based on what they felt I had earned. They have never done this before, and it's not normal procedure. I was being treated like a convicted criminal nonetheless.
All of this based on one event and the sudden appearance of a history of incriminating evidence that had not been there to alert them earlier. Taking all of what transpired over that phone call and e-mail in, I truly doubt they'll ever review my history. Most likely they're waiting two months to pass in the hopes I will forget I am owed money and they could forget to send it to me. They never went past sending me the short e-mail saying I was deactivated, never voluntarily told me why I was being kicked off or even not being paid in the first place until I dragged the answers out of them.
If I had not replied to the e-mail, I would have been left with that simple message "Consider yourself permanently deactivated, thank you! Is that not twisted? Yet the answers I got were even more fishy and seemingly pasted together. Why is ChaCha so ready to drop its guides? Its very unique element? Why do they only look to the bad to be seemingly proactive yet when you contact them for help or suggestions you never hear back from them?
All of this raises some strange questions, and I have to admit over my time at ChaCha I've seen some pretty awful things. I will post the rest of what I've seen of ChaCha here when I'm able to copy and paste, but if you cannot wait to see it, please look to my blog for the rest of the story: blog. Please look at your contract. You can sue for your money, because you actually worked for it. 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. Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership.
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