It is interesting that Go2net invested $10 million in xpertsite, while Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures invested in Keen.com, a competitor.
dailynews.yahoo.com
Plethora of Web Sites Offer Advice And Experts
By Therese Poletti
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Last year, when software entrepreneur Karl Jacob was on vacation listening to his father's frustrations as he tried to fix his motorboat, Jacob had an epiphany.
``I said to him, 'Why don't you call someone (to help you)?' and he said, 'There are probably about 400 to 500 people in the U.S. who know how to do this,' Jacob recalled. But the problem is trying to find just one of those people the moment you need them. ``That was a flash of light,' he said.
That flash of light led Jacob, who at the time was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, to form Keen.com, a start-up company that offers answers to questions and advice over the telephone.
San Francisco-based Keen.com (http://www.keen.com) is one of many new Web sites offering advice, answers, or professional experts that have been springing up over the past year, such as ExpertCentral.com, XpertSite.com, KnowPost.com, Deja.com, Abuzz.com, Expertcity.com and others -- all with a slightly different twist.
Keen.com, for example, launched in November a ``live answer community,' with a system that lets people know on their Web site who is available to immediately answer their questions.
``It's not about experts, it's about people who know a little bit more than you do about a particular topic,' Jacob said. ``It's mimicking what we do in our everyday lives. If I want to know about something, I call a friend. If the advice I get is good, I call them again.' At Keen.com, users pay for the advice.
Keen.com has the biggest amount of venture backing in the advice/expert site arena, which has raised a total of $67 million in funding. Its investors include Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures, Integral Partners, Benchmark Capital, eBay (NasdaqNM:EBAY - news) and many others. It plans to make money by taking a 30 percent slice of the transaction between the customer and the ``Keen speaker.'
The selling price of the transaction is determined by the market for the category of topics, which range from financial advice to automobiles to personal questions. Jacob said the average selling price on Keen.com is about 75 cents per minute.
Keen.com provides its customers access to its 40,000 experts with a telephone system that protects the anonymity of both the customer and the expert offering the advice. This also lends itself to an opportunity to target the 900/976 number market and international calling market, with better profits for the experts offering their advice.
``We are really fired up about Keen,' said Roger McNamee, a partner at Integral Capital Partners, one of Keen.com's investors. ``It has this ability to morph into being a lot of other interesting things that cut very deeply into the 900 market, the 976 market ... in telephone industry parlance.'
Menlo Park, Calif.-based EXP.com, on the other hand, provides various ways to interact with its experts, ranging from e-mail to Internet chat sessions to phone calls to meeting in person. EXP.com (http://www.exp.com), which has raised about $30 million in venture backing, also touts the qualified background of its experts, with profiles of 20,000 experts on its site currently.
For example, EXP.com just launched a Tax Center service at its site, to provide 1999 tax preparation assistance. The company said its tax experts have all been screened and their qualifications have been verified by a third party.
``We have a former IRS field agent giving advice on the site,' said Mark Benning, founder and chief executive of EXP.com. ``It's hard to find that kind of person, there is no listing in the phone book for former IRS field agents. ... On our site you can dig deep into someone's background.'
EXP.com plans to launch a live telephone feature in about two weeks, in response to customers who have said they would like immediate answers, rather than wait for an e-mail. Benning said that EXP.com will make money by taking a cut of the transaction between the expert and the consumer or business, and is also looking at doing some tie-ins with e-commerce sites.
For example, if a customer received advice about online trading from an expert and then decided to open up an online trading account, EXP.com could get an affiliate commission.
As the plethora of advice and expert sites try to distinguish themselves and find their appropriate markets, the current glut of sites is already leading to consolidation. Analysts said that expert advice could easily become a component of big portal sites such as Yahoo Inc. (NasdaqNM:YHOO - news), ExicteAtHome (NasdaqNM:ATHM - news) and others and that many of these companies will likely end up in deals with or acquired by portal companies.
``That is the million-dollar question,' said Benning. ``But our marketplace is a pretty huge opportunity. ... Unlike the pet opportunity, which is pretty niche, there is room for a stand-alone player. ... But that being said, all the major portals are looking to expand in a wide variety of areas.'
Just this week, Seattle-based Go2Net Inc. (NasdaqNM:GNET - news) said it would invest $10 million in XpertSite.com, which includes a multimillion-dollar marketing deal to prominently feature XpertSite throughout the Go2Net Network. Go2Network users will have access to XpertSite's AskMeNetwork. The AskMeNetwork is a free question and answer service with over 30,000 experts and advisors.
In January, About.com (http://www.about.com) (NasdaqNM:BOUT - news), a network of niche Web sites based in New York, said it would buy ExpertCentral.com (http://www.expertcentral.com), which will continue to operate as an independent Web site and a subsidiary of About.com. And last July, The New York Times (NYSE:NYT - news) bought Abuzz.com (http://www.abuzz.com), a free service where users can ask questions, get answers and publish and share knowledge, linking a community and its user-created content to the venerable newspaper's site.
``In this category we are not going to have 15 or 20 expert sites in a year's time,' said Anya Sacharow, an analyst at Jupiter Communications. ``Either they will drive commerce sales or they will be integrated into large businesses.'
Sacharow said there is growing interest by many Internet companies in consumer-created content and that Jupiter just completed a study in which almost 90 percent of the executives queried said they plan to or will include consumer-created content on their Web site. |
