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Poutsch’s addictive social polling is finally opening up to the public today with the launch of a new iPhone app.

We were intrigued by Poutsch and its potential to “rehack democracy” with social polling when it began privately beta testing its service in March, but now the company is doubling down on its initial lofty goals while also trying to tap into a sense of fun. (Its name is derived from the German putsch, which means a political coup.)

“If you have enough people behind a tool, you can actually influence companies and policy-makers,” Felix Winckler, the cofounder and chief operating officer of Poutsch, told VentureBeat.

The company’s free iPhone app sports a colorful and flat design that practically begs for you to play with it. You can use Poutsch to poll your friends on just about any question (assisted by photos, video, and other media), and you can also see questions submitted by people you follow. What’s key with Poutsch is that you can also embed questions on websites, so just about anyone can participate in the polls (and it’s also a smart way to convince more people to sign up).

Naturally, the company’s big goal with its iPhone app is to make its presence known on mobile. It’s a good move for Poutsch as its bite-sized polls are perfect for when you’re stuck waiting in line or sitting on the bus. The company is positioning itself as a faster and simpler alternative to Q&A sites like Quora.

Poutsch was founded in Paris, but its founders moved to New York City last year to set up shop in the U.S. The company now has offices in Brooklyn.

July 9-10, 2013
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Read our Q&A with the Gov. John Hickenlooper.

BEAVER CREEK, Colo. — Governor John Hickenlooper (D) revealed in a private meeting with the press that Colorado is backing a new venture fund.

Hickenlooper admitted that a lack of venture funding is a big issue for Colorado startups. So he asked local business leaders, including TeleTech founder Ken Tuchman, to pour their personal wealth into a fund. The $150 million fund, of which $100 million has already been raised, is reserved for Colorado-based startups.

The state will also be a limited partner in the fund with money from its retirement program.

“Government doesn’t have a high tolerance for failure,” Hickenlooper said. “So we’ll be doing some seed funding, but it could also be mezzanine rounds.” He revealed that the fund’s legal structure has already been drafted, and they plan to announce it in the summer.

This isn’t the first time that the governor’s office has been involved in venture funds. Colorado’s High Country Venture has a $50 million fund for early-stage startups, and the state has been a limited partner for several years.

According to High Country Ventures’ Chris Marks, a board member from the local Venture Capital Association (VCA) has been contacted for help setting up this new fund.

The relationship between government and local venture funding isn’t always smooth. The state hopes that funding tech startups will create jobs and stimulate the local economy. Meanwhile, investors are focused on bringing solid returns to their shareholders.

Still, it’s a great boost for the local tech market in Colorado, which competes with burgeoning hubs like Austin and Seattle.

“When I got elected, we looked our our economic development program, said Hickenlooper.”People wanted less red tape and better training, but access to venture capital came up all over the state.”

Top image via Change.org 

July 9-10, 2013
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Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s what keeps ChaCha chugging along. This human powered Q&A service, in which humans answer other humans’ questions in real time, has raised a new round of $14 million.

ChaCha was founded in 2006 with the simple mission of answering peoples’ questions accurately, relevantly, and quickly. While some queries like “good restaurants in San Francisco” lend themselves to search engines like Google or Bing, others require that human touch. ChaCha combines algorithms with crowdsourcing to generate answers.

When someone asks a question on ChaCha, the technology checks its database, which contains 129 million questions/answers, to see if the question has been asked before. If so, it sends that answer back instantly. If not, the question goes out to members of the community and returned to the asker as quickly as possible.

“All the big players in digital media, e.g. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…, have tried and failed to achieve ‘answering people’s questions,’” said CEO Scott Jones.  ”All the world’s consumers of information could significantly benefit from any company that makes major strides in the domain of real-time Q&A. I wanted to be able to ‘ask a smart friend’ instantly about anything.  ChaCha is on a journey to fulfilling that mission.”

The service is free and has answered over 2 billion questions for over 45 million people through the web, mobile, text message and voice service. This is its seventh round of institutional funding, with investment from VantagePoint Capital artiness, Rho Ventures, and Qualcomm. Previous investors include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Morton Meyerson. ChaCha has raised a total of $82 million to date.

Read more on VentureBeat. 

LinkedIn will shutter its Answers Q&A service at the end of January, a sign that the service wasn’t driving enough engagement on the site.

It introduced Answers 2007, but this never became a popular feature. The social networking company wrote in an email to users on Thursday:

As of Jan. 31, LinkedIn Answers will be retired from LinkedIn. We will be focusing our efforts on the development of new and more engaging ways to share and discuss professional topics across LinkedIn. In the meantime, members can still pose questions and facilitate professional discussions through other popular LinkedIn channels including LinkedIn Polls, Groups, or status update.

With the demise of Answers, the Q&A startup Quora has a real opportunity. The company has 1.5 million users and has raised $61 million in capital from the likes of Adam D’Angelo, Peter Thiel, and Matrix Partners.

Tech evangelist Theo Priestley believes Quora has a major opportunity to capitalize now that LinkedIn has thrown in the towel. He writes in a blog post:

There’s an opportunity for Quora to capitalise on [Answers'] demise. Right now users of the social Q&A platform can connect their LinkedIn profile and post directly from the app, but if Quora and LinkedIn were clever they could find a way to connect voting up answers to endorsements and drive some value from that feature again. Even if nothing happened in this direction, with 200m members on LinkedIn compared with 1.5m using Quora they can reap the benefits and claim the Answers userbase for their own.

Businessman with questions via Peshkova/Shutterstock

Dan Kurani is the co-founder and CEO of Thumb.

Easily the most talked about companies in 2012, Facebook and Apple, are no strangers to disrupting ecosystems in the tech world. However, despite innovating in almost every segment, including gaming, hardware, and web development, both have failed to make a dent when it comes to information discovery.

Apple’s hyped up voice-activated digital assistant, Siri, was declared a huge failure once users realized the application had under-delivered on its lofty promises. Apple even faced a class-action lawsuit based on the fact that Siri did not perform for users as advertised. Apple also recently backed away from music discovery by shuttering Ping on iTunes.

Recently Facebook demonstrated its weakness in discovery and search, by officially beginning to shut down Facebook Questions, which allowed users to poll and post answers from friends. Facebook Questions proved once again that the social network was trying to do too much, and its features suffered as a result. Facebook also hedged its bet on discovering photos from friends with its purchase of Instagram.

It’s clear that neither company has been able to find a singular solution to the search for information everyone finds themselves doing on a daily basis. But this doesn’t mean that its an impossible feat, companies like Google, Reddit, Yelp and Wolfram Alpha have gotten it right by creating specialized outlets for each type of information search. Services that are working have one thing in common; they reflect the decision-making lifecycle that the human brain uses to discover answers to questions.

Our brain is constantly seeking out information about the world around us, and this information falls into two categories. First is fact-based information grounded on existing data. These second is opinion-based information generated internally by individuals.

People have always turned to friends and family for opinions, advice or data in every phase of the decision-making cycle, but now people increasingly turn to the Web and apps when the time comes to make a decision. Facebook failed at information discovery because it didn’t realize a crucial point: people don’t always want the advice of their friends.

So which companies are winning?

In the preliminary hunt for research, Google is still the clear leader in getting you the best data for any question. Wolfram Alpha has also proven itself a leader in computational functionality, by aiming to give people a fact-based answer to a query.

For the more crowd-sourced response, look to Yelp, Quora and Reddit, which have evolved into top sources for consumer-generated information. These networks have proven the input of a community of strangers is often more powerful to consumers than something like Facebook Questions that poses queries to your real life social sphere.

This year, Quora has further established a thoughtful long-form Q&A outlet for people across the world. Yelp has proven a trusted and profitable resource for structured reviews from individuals about anything from lawn care to bars. Reddit has revitalized the cultural information space with its massive base of user-shared and generated information, with even Obama jumping on board to spread awareness.

You will notice that the most disruption is occurring in the opinion-based category. Why are more people turning towards the thoughts and opinions of others instead of trusted search engines like Google?

First of all, it’s hard to disrupt information discovery based on facts, as witnessed by Bing’s constant but mostly ineffective move at dethroning Google. Why? They have built on years and years of algorithms that have constructed the world’s largest databases of information. This isn’t something a startup can disrupt starting in a garage or school.

Another reason we are seeing more interest or opinion-based startups succeed, is that computational approaches, like Wolfram Alpha’s, lack any human element, meaning no way to get opinions, assessments, or the necessary judgment that are often rooted in knowledge, values, beliefs, and experience. This means people aren’t getting everything they need when they have certain questions. These personal elements are essential in helping people get guidance, create context for their thoughts, and make both emotional and non-emotional decisions.

Although database or search engine sourced information will always play an essential role in content discovery, consumer-generated information is a nascent trend that will continue growing in 2013. The growth of networks like Yelp and Reddit are proving that users want a more social approach to information discovery, especially towards the end of the decision making cycle. There may never be a single resource for information discovery across the entire decision-making process, but it’s a safe bet that consumers will continue seeking subjective input from other real people at a growing rate. Those that win in 2013 will have a real opportunity to become the go to service for advice from others.

Dan Kurani is the founder and CEO of Thumb, the mobile social network for instant opinions from real people. Prior to launching Thumb in 2010, Dan Kurani spent the last 10 years as President/CEO of Kurani Interactive, a multi-million dollar digital development firm that worked with Fortune 500 brands like Nike and Universal Studios.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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ME, FAKEGRIMLOCK, WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS ROBOT STARTUP DINOSAUR. ME HERE TO ANSWER READER QUESTIONS ABOUT STARTUPS, AND PUNCH THEM IN FACE WITH ANSWERS UNTIL THEM DEAD.

FIRST QUESTION!

katylevinson
How do you get those first few supporters (for a product, parody account, whatever) so you can make them love you?

HOW TINY ACORN BECOME MAJESTIC OAK? GROW IN RIGHT PLACE, AVOID SQUIRRELS.

TWO WAYS FIND RIGHT PLACE TO GROW.

WAY 1: SEARCH UNTIL FIND UNTAPPED MARKET, BUILD PRODUCT FOR MARKET, HOPE YOU RIGHT.

WAY 2: ADMIT YOU KNOW NOTHING, START LOTS OF PRODUCTS, HOPE ONE TAKE OFF BEFORE YOU BROKE OR DEAD.

ONCE ACORN IN RIGHT MARKET, MAKE IT AWESOMELY USEFUL.

IF MARKET FIND ACORN AWESOMELY USEFUL, THEM HELP IT GROW, KILL SQUIRRELS FOR YOU.

EVEN IF TAKE LONG TIME. KEEP GOING. LONG AS STILL GROWING EVENTUALLY YOU BIG ENOUGH SOMEONE WANT TO CUT YOU DOWN, MAKE YOU INTO CHAIRS.

IF STOP? CUT DOWN ON OWN, PLANT SOMETHING ELSE.

SECOND PUNY QUESTION!

heyehd
You build a product that leverages users’ content to entice more users to sign up. But at the beginning you have no users or user content. Do you:

• generate your own content and fake it?
• ask users to sign up and it’s a desert?
• try to springboard off of another social network?
• blow it off and go B to B?

It’s the first 10,000 users — guerrilla cold start….

PATH TO HAVE CONTENT START WITH CONTENT!

IT LIKE SAYING ABOUT EAT OWN DOGFOOD. IT FASTEST WAY LEARN HOW MAKE GOOD TASTING DOGFOOD.

FIRST USERS? OWN TEAM.

FASTEST FEEDBACK LOOP YOU EVER GET IS DEV NEXT TO YOU.

THAT GET YOU INITIAL CONTENT. AND MAKE PRODUCT NOT COMPLETELY SUCK.

SECOND, RECRUIT EVERYONE. FRIENDS, FAMILY, TWITTER, FACEBOOK, PEOPLE YOU NOT REALLY KNOW ON LINKEDIN, ALL OF THEM. THEM ALPHA TESTERS.

MAKE PRODUCT WORK FOR THEM. NOW HAVE MORE CONTENT. AND PRODUCT THAT ACTUALLY WORK.

THIRD IS BETA. IGNORE CRAP ABOUT BUILD LANDING PAGE, GET USERS. IT LIE. REAL BETA IS WORK ASS OFF FINDING USERS. WHOLE TEAM NEED TO SPEND TIME ON SOCIAL NETWORKS FINDING USERS. DO WHATEVER IT TAKE.

MAKE PRODUCT WORK FOR BETA. NOW YOU HAVE TONS OF CONTENT. AND PRODUCT THAT MAYBE KIND OF GOOD.

YOU SKIP ONE OF THESE STEPS? YOU FAIL. GO GET JOB NOT WASTING INVESTOR MONEY.

Gabriel Martin
Have you considered doing things related to empowering entrepreneurs using means besides writing?

YES.

STILL WORKING ON FIND RIGHT PARTNERS, MODEL. IF INTERESTED, CONTACT ME, FAKEGRIMLOCK.

FIRE WILL BURN.

Darksquid
What do you do about a co-founder who has lost vision, and wants to bail by selling the company, rather than leveraging existing success and going big?

So beyond that, does the vision founder stick around, or take new opportunity with established startup for executive job, with reasonable equity stake and lots of control? So question now is continue with my own startup that I feel like is doomed for fail now, because of Robin that owns 51%, or go with less equity to new company that is full of win and on nuclear fire?

TAKE MONEY, RUN.

STARTUP LIKE VOLTRON. FIVE LIONS UNITE TO FORM UNSTOPPABLE FORCE.

IF ONE LION TAKE NAP INSTEAD OF FIGHT?

THEN VOLTRON SCREWED.

IF PART OF TEAM NOT ON TEAM, YOU NOT HAVE STARTUP. YOU JUST PEOPLE PRETENDING TO WORK TOGETHER. GO FIND NEW LIONS THAT SERIOUS ABOUT WHOLE “UNITE TO KICK ASS” THING.

Eric Dobbs
How does a hacker (32) / martial artist (23) / husband (10) / dad (8) / volunteer (5) level-up in social entrepreneur? Already multi-classed, experience penalties and all. On fire, but it’s a frustratingly slow burn.

BY DOING IT.

IF NOT HAVE TIME, STOP DOING OTHER THINGS.

REAL LIFE MUTLI-CLASSING PRETTY OLD SCHOOL. ALWAYS COMES WITH SERIOUS XP PENALTIES, NEVER AS GOOD AS SPECIALIZE.

ONLY EXCEPTION IS DAD OR HUSBAND. THOSE PRETTY GOOD PRESTIGE CLASSES, +5 SOUL REGENERATION BONUS USEFUL IN LONG RUN.

EVERYTHING ELSE? STOP SCREWING AROUND. ANY TIME YOU NOT PURSUING GOAL IS TIME YOU NOT PURSUING GOAL.

ShanaC
Is there a mrs. grimlock?

ME, FAKEGRIMLOCK, #1 WITH THE LADIES.

ALL OF THEM.

FAKE GRIMLOCK is the most famous giant robot dinosaur on the entire Internet. He tweets in all caps with advice on how to make your startup more awesome. He is powered by coffee, bacon, beer, and humans. All delicious.

Photo credit: FAKE GRIMLOCK

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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For its pearls of wisdom, Pearl.com has raised $25.7 million in its second round of institutional financing.

The site connects people who have questions with people who can answer them. Inquirers select the type of advice they need, enter their query, and identify the price they are willing to pay. From there, they can have a one-on-one question with a verified professional.

Members include doctors, lawyers, mechanics, veterinarians, computer technicians, and electronic and home repair gurus. These experts can help you understand immigration laws, troubleshoot car engine issues, and diagnose health problems. Rather than spending time and money figuring out how to remove spyware from your computer, computer technicians are on hand at Pearl.com to make the fixing process easier. Wondering where the mysterious rash on your face is coming from? Ask a qualified dermatologist, without having to shell out for a clinical visit.

The company has 10,000 professionals in its database spanning 700 specialties. While question and answer sites like Quora are extremely popular and can be effective, there are some questions that are best answered by experts. Your dog’s fate after eating a box of doughnuts is best not left to an anonymous web persona with no legitimate qualifications. That said, maybe it doesn’t need to go to the vet either.

Pearl.com serves more than 10.5 million visitors each month all over the world. It was founded as JustAnswer.com in 2003 by Andy Kurtzig, who wanted to find a trustworthy yet convenient way for his wife to get answers to her constant pregnancy concerns.

Since then, the company has grown in size and revenue. This funding will be put towards expanding the mobile presence and increasing the levels of personalization. Previous investors, including Glynn Capital and Charles Schwab participated in this round, as did new investor Crosslink Capital.

This investment comes just four months after the $25 million Series A in June, bringing the total to just over $50 million.

Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever will soon move away from day-to-day operations at the popular Q&A site he helped create back in 2009.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Quora offers a vast knowledge base of questions and answers from people the world over. It has had great traction this year. Just this week, Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan used Quora to slam President Obama and the site took aim at Wikipedia with new topic pages. In May, it raised $50 million in a round led by Peter Thiel.

Before Quora, Cheever was a software engineer for Facebook and Amazon. It’s unclear if Cheever is transitioning to work for another company or is simply taking a well-deserved break.

Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo wrote on Quora that he and Cheever decided it was best for Cheever to “step away.” He writes:

We decided it was best for Charlie to step away from his day-to-day role at the company. He will always be a founder of Quora and will be an advisor to the company.

I have a lot of respect for Charlie and we wouldn’t be where we are today without him. Many of his contributions will remain as core parts of the company’s history and culture.

Charlie and I both continue to care deeply about the employees of Quora, the writers and readers of Quora, and want to do what’s best to see Quora continue to grow into a successful company that helps everyone share knowledge.

Quora said it would not elaborate on what was happening with Cheever outside of this posting.

Charlie Cheever photo: TechCrunch/Flickr

Taking advantage of powerful social media channels, Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan has posted criticisms against President Barack Obama on the popular question-and-answer service Quora.

The move closely follows Ryan’s use of a Google+ Hangout this past weekend to connect with supporters. But neither appearance has the resonance of Obama’s Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, which caused the popular site to crash several times and required 60 dedicated servers.

Ryan wrote six paragraphs criticizing the president, mostly concerning the economy.

“Right now, 23 million men and women are struggling for work,” Ryan wrote. “Nearly one in six Americans are living in poverty – the highest rate in a generation. Since President Obama took office, the nation has lost 261,000 jobs, while the unemployment rate has remained above eight percent for 43 straight months, and median household income has declined by over $4,000.”

At this time, Ryan has not answered any questions from various commenters.

We’ve sent the Romney campaign a request for more information to see if Ryan will answer any of the questions posted by Quora users.

Here’s the full text of Ryan’s comments on Quora:

You heard a lot of excuses, a lot of blame, and a lot of baseless attacks at last week’s Democratic National Convention. What you did not hear was a clear answer to this basic question. As a result of President Obama’s misguided policies and failed leadership, we are not better off today than we were four years ago.

Right now, 23 million men and women are struggling for work. Nearly one in six Americans are living in poverty – the highest rate in a generation. Since President Obama took office, the nation has lost 261,000 jobs, while the unemployment rate has remained above eight percent for 43 straight months, and median household income has declined by over $4,000.

Millions of young Americans have graduated from college during the Obama presidency, ready to use their gifts and get moving in life. Half of them can’t find the work they studied for, or any work at all. College graduates should not have to live out their twenties in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.

Everyone who feels stuck in the Obama economy is right to focus on the here and now. And I hope you understand this too: if you’re feeling left out or passed by, you have not failed, your leaders have failed you.

President Barack Obama came to office during an economic crisis. Any fair measure of his record has to take that into account. The problem remains that the recovery he repeatedly promised is nowhere in sight. The Obama Administration has made its choices. And Mitt Romney and I have made ours: before the math and the momentum overwhelm us all, we are going to solve this nation’s economic problems and get America back on track.

Our Plan for a Stronger Middle Class means more jobs, more take-home pay, and better opportunities for all Americans. And we will restore, protect, and strengthen Medicare – for my Mom’s generation, for my generation, and for our children’s generation. Americans have been getting the runaround long enough; it’s time for a turnaround.

Paul Ryan photo: Tony Alter/Flickr

Frustrated by how difficult it is to collaborate on decision-making over e-mail, AdMob founder Omar Hamoui today launched Maybe, a startup that simplifies the process of making decisions online.

Maybe is like a strange hybrid of Q&A sites like Quora, image board Pinterest, and opinion social network Thumb. People are currently using the service to find the best wedding shoes and the best iPad case, but really you can ask just about anything. (Though you don’t need Maybe to tell you which TV show to watch next: that’s Breaking Bad, folks.)

Google bought AdMob for $750 million in 2009, which helped solidify Hamoui as a rockstar in the ad business. He left Google in late 2010 and went on to create the startup incubator Churn Labs, where he dabbled in cool projects like the social app Gnonstop Gnomes. But it was Hamoui’s wife who ended up sparking the idea for the new site while shopping for a new coffee table.

“She spent of bunch of time browsing the web, collecting her options in a Gmail draft, and then sent me an email of blue links that I was supposed to click on one by one to form an opinion,” Hamoui wrote in an e-mail to VentureBeat. “By the time I got to the fourth one, I had forgotten what the first one looked like, what the prices of any of them were, and certainly had not checked reviews or anything else that would help me give her a more informed opinion.”

Right now, Maybe seems very basic: You can see the decisions other people are making and create decisions of your own. The site differs from other Q&A sites since it works more like a poll. You’re choosing answers from a pre-selected list with a click of the mouse (you can leave comments, but it isn’t necessary). You can also “Re-Maybe” items for your own submissions later.

Hamoui stresses that the site is currently just a preview of Maybe’s capabilities. Eventually the company will add a mobile interface (which he assumes will be the dominant way to browse Maybe in the future) and research tabs to inform you about the decisions you’re making.

Maybe is based in San Mateo, Calif. The company hasn’t yet disclosed funding details.

Q&A site Formspring has added a few new features to shift its focus away from pure social media. The site is now asking its users to focus on topics and tags — you know, the monetizable stuff that marketers are going gaga over right now.

The changes are fairly simple and likely won’t interfere with how Formspring’s audience uses the site. In the top navigation, you’ll see a search bar. And there are Twitter trending topics-like tags in the right-most column. You can also choose to follow tags or topics you like. It’s not a massive, ground-up overhaul, for all the average user can tell.

“It’s not like we’re launching something that’s completely outside of the space where we were before,” said Formspring CEO Ade Olonoh in an email exchange with VentureBeat. “Conversations now have multiple entry points, either via shared interests or topics or with people you know or follow. This is a major shift in design that further aligns us with the interest vs. social graph.”

Olonoh said these changes are ones that users were already asking for and with which they’re quite content. But from an IT perspective, these small tweaks add a lot more structure and organization to the massive amount of data Formspring is collecting. And more structure means a better shot at finding the money in all that user activity.

You see, the “interest graph” of our likes, tastes, and intentions has modern marketers fascinated. With the wild success of sites like Pinterest, the folks who control online advertising are in a sort of gold rush to figure out how to make the most (money) out of all those eyeballs. And the idea so far is that you can probably sell really well to people who are already overtly telling you what they’re interested in.

So, in a nutshell, Formspring has jumped onto the interest bandwagon with a few front-end tweaks and some moderate to heavy lifting on the back end.

“This evolution was [driven] by extensive user research and observations of user behavior shifts over the last 6+ months,” said Olonoh. “We built a product that can better support what users were organically doing on the site. I do think there are interesting monetization opportunities for Formspring given this change, but this launch was about building a core product that we thought our users would love.”

Last year, the startup raised $11.5 million in new funding, blew past the 25 million user mark, and launched a sweet suite of mobile apps. The company also added some new features, such as photo responses.

Formspring is based in San Francisco. The company started out as a data collection and management system but in 2010 turned its focus to what had previously been something of a side project: a social Q&A site where users could answer each other’s questions anonymously. The site has been a particular hit with the teeny bopper demographic. Olonoh said the new features will not have any impact on deals Formspring currently has in place with its advertisers and other partners.

Here’s a sneak peek at the main differences in the new UI:

Top image courtesy of ra2 studio, Shutterstock

As one of the more prominent and vocal opponents of anti-piracy legislation SOPA, social news site Reddit has positioned itself as an organization that deeply cares about tech policy. But sometimes that can work against it.

For instance, last weekend the site’s users started organizing an elaborate Reddit-boycott due to unhappiness over the lack of attention Reddit management had given to the hotly debated cyber security bill CISPA.

CISPA, or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, seeks to give American companies more legal breathing room when collecting and sharing consumer/user data in the scope of Internet security threats. Essentially, the bill’s goal is to encourage companies to share information with the government that may help it fight and prevent cyber security attacks. But the language in the bill is far too vague when it comes to distinguishing how the government can use that information, leading critics to brand it as pure and unadulterated evil. The bill also doesn’t provide an adequate description of what’s considered a “security threat”.

The user uproar was undoubtedly fueled in part by the House’s rushed vote of approval for CISPA last week, which actually contained amendments that make the bill even more vague and degrading to privacy protections. This contradicts most of the prior speculation that the bill would get better prior to going to a vote. And while Reddit eventually did respond to the community, it’s still planning to boost the discussion about CISPA in the coming weeks.

Earlier this week, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin spoke with VentureBeat about the company’s stance on CISPA, and how its strategy for handling CISPA stops just short of activism.

VentureBeat: So I saw the initial uproar by users that called for a strategic boycott of Reddit, which was just like you’d expect from redditors: detailed and multi-tiered. I also saw the follow-up. Have you guys made any progress toward helping Reddit user fight CISPA?

Erik Martin: Right now we’re working on getting as many experts as possible to interact directly with the Reddit community. So, hopefully there will be a lot of informative IAMAs and similar discussions this week, involving experts and stakeholders across the board.

VentureBeat: As for the uproar from users, do you think the timing of the bill passing caught you guys off guard? I know it went from a “bad bill” to a “truly awful bill” in a very short amount of time.

Martin: Yes, we’re not experts or super dialed in to the process. So, we were hearing the revisions and amendments were going to improve the bill, not make it worse.

VentureBeat: I think a lot of people did, at least heading into the weekend. Do you think the update/response to the Reddit boycott was enough to let users know you’re paying attention?

Martin: I think people just want to be sure we give a shit. But just like with SOPA, our role is to facilitate … help the community discuss the issues and collectively explore what to do about it. (For example), we directed people to discuss tactics at http://reddit.com/r/SOPA, but we did not originate or promote any of the specific ideas, like the Godaddy boycott. We’re going to try to do an even better job of that this time (with CISPA). Hopefully the experience of SOPA showed everyone across the board how important it is to communicate directly with the internet communities. So, I’m optimistic.

VentureBeat: With legislation like this (CISPA, SOPA/PIPA, ACTA), is it important for Reddit’s management to draw a distinction between promoting discussion and activism?

Martin: Yes, it is important, but it’s more complicated since Reddit is both a company and a community. I think it’s a fairly new position. We’re not interested in activism, but there are times when we can help make sure the community’s voice is heard. And Reddit is built upon having a free and open internet … we’re open source, don’t require user info, user curated etc. So, anything that might threaten a free and open internet impacts both the community and the company.

VentureBeat: Is there a blackout day for CISPA further down the road if needed?

Martin: No blackout plans, but who knows.

VentureBeat: I’m assuming you’re among the majority of people at this point who hasn’t been able to dig through all the amendments that make CISPA dangerous. Once the week(s) of IAMA experts have explained the situation, will you guys gather all that information and form an official company stance on the bill?

Martin: Not only CISPA, but also the cyber security bills in the senate –  there are like four bills, too.

VentureBeat: In the spirit of healthy discussion, are you guys seeking out an expert that’s for CISPA (and related bills in the senate)?

Martin: Absolutely. And (there are) some good signs that we’ll be able to make that happen. I would love a co-sponsor or the appropriate staffer to discuss and answer questions about the bills on Reddit.

Top image via nComment

You can find the answer to plenty of questions online, but sometimes it’s helpful to chat with a particularly knowledgeable human. New York City-based Wizpert aims to simplify the process of finding and chatting with experts instantly — and in the process, the startup is moving one step ahead of hot Q&A outfits like Quora.

You can think of Wizpert as an IT help desk for life. The company recruits knowledgeable bloggers, which it calls “Wizperts,” across topics like exercise, health/wellness, and parenting. Advice seekers can connect to Wizperts via their blogs or the service’s website, and most importantly, they can begin a conservation within seconds.

The company is part of NYC-based Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator’s second class of startups, and it’s presenting later today at ERA’s Demo Day.

Wizpert is a win-win for experts and advice-seekers alike. Bloggers will be able to monetize by offering advice in their free time (Wizpert takes a 25 percent cut), and consumers will be able to instantly get the help they need from approved experts. Founder and CEO Michael Weinberg tells me that the company is particularly careful with how it vets experts — they start out offering advice for free, and they only become Wizperts after being well-reviewed.

Weinberg and co-founder/CTO Stefan D’Heedene left lucrative Merrill Lynch jobs to pursue Wizpert in 2011, after realizing that expertise needed to be more accessible. Weinberg previously held strategy and management roles in Merrill Lynch’s advisory platform, while D’Heedene built the firm’s platform for customized hedge fund portfolio advice.

Q&A sites have so far resembled glorified message boards, so it’ll be interesting to see if Wizpert takes off by letting people instantly tap experts for help. The company is currently focusing on general advice, but there’s potential for even further specialization in the future. Weinberg tells me Wizpert now has “hundreds” of experts, and as the service expands, I suspect many bloggers will jump at the chance to be labeled Wizperts.

Wizpert has received $25,000 in seed financing from ERA (along with co-working space and access to advisors) and has additional backing from Welltech Funding.

July 9-10, 2013
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Just a few months after the mobile Q&A company Opinionaided rebranded itself as Thumb, it’s already seeing significant engagement gains — so much so that its users are twice as addicted as Pinterest’s.

Thumb is on such a tear that it has managed to tempt one of its own investors away from the cushy life of venture capital. Hadley Harris (below), former head of business at Vlingo (which was recently acquired by Nuance) and a founding partner in NYC’s ENIAC Ventures (the initial seed investor in Thumb), is now joining the company in the newly created role of chief business development officer.

“I think [Thumb has] the opportunity to build something special here … it was a unique opportunity to join,” Harris told VentureBeat in an interview last week.

Harris told me that Thumb’s users are now spending an average of 3 hours and 50 minutes on its mobile app every month, up from three and a half hours back in December. That’s engagement second only to Facebook. Pinterest, the much-hyped online image-sharing site, meanwhile only sees around 97.8 minutes of engagement per month, according to figures from ComScore.

The Thumb app allows you to ask questions and get instant responses from the company’s highly engaged user base. You can also give your opinion on questions from others. Back in December, users were seeing around 70 responses on average to their questions, a number that’s likely higher now.

It’s simple, but addictive, and that seems to be the key to Thumb’s success.

It was Thumb’s crazy amount of user interaction that sparked Harris’s interest. After he led Vlingo to 10 million users and a “huge exit,” he stepped down from the company and was planning to settle down into the life of a VC, focusing on mobile apps and services. But after serving as an adviser to Thumb (back when it was known as Opinionaided) for years and seeing their massive engagement numbers, he couldn’t help but climb aboard.

“This can scale and become a full-blown social network,” he told VentureBeat, echoing what we heard from CEO Dan Kurani in December. “Opinions are more valuable than interest,” Kurani said at the time, referring to Facebook’s emphasis on user interest.

As head of biz dev, Harris will focus on growing Thumb’s user base. He’ll also be working on strategic partnerships. Brands, for example, could be interested in getting a rush of instant opinions from consumers.

Thumb is based in New York City and has raised around $5.5 million across two rounds of funding.

Beepl allows users to easily sign-up through Facebook or Twitter and then have the option of connecting to LinkedIn. Once you’re connected, Beepl makes it extremely easy to post a question or browse lists of questions that you may be able to answer. It offers a “direct questions” feature that lets you message other users in private if you don’t feel like publicly posting or answering.

Beepl also looks to reward active users by tracking the number of times you post a question or answer one. It keeps a running tally, which determines your “Beepl Rank.”

Several similar services exist currently, including Quora, the popular question and answer site that’s curated by its members. The difference is that while Quora asks you what you’re interested in and what you might be an expert of, Beepl does it through a user’s social graph by pulling in information when you connect to Facebook or Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Beepl’s co-founder, Steve O’Hear, explains the secret sauce by saying “We then analyse these social media profiles to help supplement a user’s interest graph on Beepl (e.g. Facebook Likes, LinkedIn Skills, recent tweets) so that they see and can answer questions most relevant to them.”

The London-based company, founded in 2011, has already secured a “six figure” seed round prior to public beta  from Credo Ventures, a VC fund targeting startups in Central and Eastern Europe.

So the company has decided to simplify things: Today, it’s rebranding itself as Thumb, which is far less of a spelling and pronunciation hazard than Opinionaided, and better reflects the addictive thumbs up and down voting features of its apps.

Under the hood, Thumb’s app, available for free on iTunes and Android (it should come down as an update for existing users), is pretty much the same as Opinionaided. The app allows you to ask questions and get instant responses from the company’s highly engaged user base. You can also give your opinion on other questions from others. There are a few design and performance tweaks, but no major new features.

The rebrand is the first step towards turning Thumb into a full-fledged social network built around opinions. Early next year, the company will add the ability for users to express their opinions more widely and better connect with others, Thumb CEO Dan Kurani told VentureBeat in an interview.

“Opinions are more valuable than interest,” Kurani said, referring to Facebook’s emphasis on user interest.

Indeed, Thumb is quickly catching up to Facebook in terms of how engaged its users are. The company said users typically spend around three and a half hours on the app, and most questions asked receive around 70 responses. “It’s almost like you’re being productive while being entertained,” Kurani said.

Thumb resembles other question and answer services like Yahoo Answers and Quora, but its focus on opinions instead of facts is fairly unique.

In addition to getting a simpler name, Kurani tells me that the Thumb rebrand gives the company a better symbolic tie to what users are doing within the apps. The thumb imagery is easily understandable across multiple cultures, and it’s something that easily imparts a lot of meaning.

Opinionaided is based in New York City and has raised around $5.5 million across two rounds of funding.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Everyone’s got an opinion — something that the mobile question and answer company Opinionaided has tapped into with its popular iPhone app. Today, the company is releasing its long-awaited Android app, which will help to spur on Opinionaided’s skyrocketing growth and increasing use engagement.

As of September, active users are now spending 3 hours and 25 minutes on the app, compared to around two and a half hours in August. Opinionaided users gave over 10 million responses to over 250,000 questions last weekend alone. Clearly, users are finding something addictive about the service, which allows you to take a picture on your phone, ask a question, and instantly receive responses.

“What is most significant to us is that we are creating a social utility based on helping others, with little judgment or bias,” CEO Dan Kurani said in a statement today. “By adding the Android app, we are able to cultivate a larger and more inclusive community of mobile users.”

Kurani tells me it took the company some time to put together the free Android app, which is now available on the Android Market. The Android app still doesn’t have some of the sharing features that the iOS app has, but Kurani says they’re coming soon.

In my brief testing of the Opinionaided service, I was struck by just how quickly responses to my questions came. That near-instant engagement even surprised Kurani when the app was first launched. He says that users are now seeing between 50 and 100 responses per question, with an average of 70 responses. Kurani attributes the impressive users engagement to the company’s focus on on opinion Q&A, instead of fact-based Q&A like Yahoo Answers.

Opinionaided is based in New York City and has raised around $5.5 million across two rounds of funding.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Social network giant Facebook has acquired Q&A service Friend.ly, the startup revealed in a blog post today.

Friend.ly is a Facebook application that allows users to ask and answer questions. Because the service has access to a Facebook user’s account information, it has a slight advantage over competitors like Formspring.me. Although, those who use Friend.ly tend to ask less personal questions.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it seems Facebook was more interested in Friend.ly’s talent than the service itself.

As part of the acquisition deal, Friend.ly will continue to operate as a separate service, while its 10 employees (including CEO Ed Baker) will work on new projects at Facebook.

“We’ve admired the team’s efforts for some time now, and we’re looking forward to having Ed and his colleagues make a big impact on the way millions of people connect and engage with each other on Facebook,” Facebook said in a statement about the acquisition.

Founded in 2010, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Friend.ly previously raised a total of $5 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Balderton Capital and others.

Steve Jobs is a notoriously private figure, but you can learn more about him in Leander Kahney’s book Inside Steve’s Brain. Kahney, currently the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, stopped by VentureBeat to chat about the hurdles encountered while writing about Jobs. Kahney also talks about Jobs’ recent resignation.

Kahney approached over 100 people in the course of writing the unofficial biography, looking for sources who would tell him about the company, and no one would speak on the record — even former Apple employees.

“It was like getting blood out of a stone,” says Kahney. Inside Steve’s Brain required Kahney to fry his own in an effort to write thoroughly and accurately about a living legend.

In the interview we talk about reasons why Jobs is stepping down as well as his greatest accomplishments.

Spoiler Alert: “The greatest product that he ever made is Apple itself,” says Kahney.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Decision-making app Opinionaided announced today it has helped answer 2 million questions and raised $4.3 million.

The investment will help it continue to answer life’s pressing questions, from “If everything was free, would the world be a better place?” to ”Do these pants make my butt look big?”

This is the startup’s first round of institutional funding, and it was led by Softbank Capital and BlueRun Ventures.

We modern consumers like fast things: fast food, fast Internet, fast replies. Because of current technology, instant gratification is a part of our lives. Now, our questions can be answered as quickly as if they were asked in person.

Using Opinionaided is fairly simple. There are three ways to answer questions: thumbs ups, thumbs downs and neutral, with the option to leave a comment. When a comment is left, you open a closed channel for the questioner to reply.

Asking questions is easy as well. You enter your question in the text box and choose a category for that question to fall under.  Then, you add a picture by choosing from a photo search, picking an image from an existing photo library or taking a picture inside the app itself.

“What we built the app for originally was for people who needed to make point-of-purchase decisions,” chief executive Dan Kurani told VentureBeat.

Now the company is seeing a mix of what Kurani calls social and utility questions. Utility questions are structured more for point of purchase. For example, “How do these jeans fit?” queries help make a decision.

Social questions are broader, e.g., “Do you think aliens created the world?”

Q&A services like Yahoo Answers and Quora have already shown their strengths. It seems the mobile Q&A industry is up for grabs, however, and Opinionaided is seeing actual traction. We asked the question, “Do you like to read tech pubs?” 15 minutes ago and already have 42 responses. Kurani says that users on average receive 75 answers.

The company uses mobile analytics company Flurry to watch interactions and events in the product.

My first reaction was that this could be a good sourcing tool for research. Kurani then explained the app actually separates you based on age. This may be beneficial for the teenager who only really wants her peers to weigh in on her latest haircut, but it doesn’t provide a good cross section otherwise.

Kurani says to combat this, Opinionaided will soon be reintroducing the option to pose questions to a variety of age groups, as well as by location.

There’s also the possibility that this could become just another “hot or not” app. Upon opening the app, I was prompted to answer, “Is Taylor Swift hot?”

“Obviously there are images, it’s very easy to respond, so it’s likely people will use this for that kind of purpose,” said Kurani.

But Opinionaided has headed off the “hot or not” crowd by sectioning questions into categories. The “appearance” category was created specifically for this purpose. You can uncheck categories to eliminate those questions from your feed.

The app’s popularity earned it $4.3 million, and the Opinionaided team will use it to extend offerings to Android. It sees an opportunity to dominate the mobile Q&A space, though it does see Twitter as a competitor for real-time answering.

Currently Twitter does not offer a comprehensive page to view and analyze replies to posed questions. Given the real-time urgency associated with Twitter, it makes sense that  Opinionaided has an eye on it.

Opinionaided is located in New York and New Jersey and has 12 employees. The company has raised $5.5 million in total from SoftBank Capital, BlueRun Ventures, General Catalyst, Draper Fisher Jurveston, DreamIt Ventures’ Mark Wachen, Jonah Goodhart, Karl Jacob, ENIAC Ventures and Vince Monical.

With the rise of Quora, Hipster and other question and answer services, Q&A sites have once more become a hot topic. The resurgence begs the question:  What makes a Q&A service successful? Is it the community? The content? The business model?

If you’ve ever asked a question in a search engine, you’ve probably stumbled upon one of the massive legacy Q&A sites. Yahoo Answers, Answers.com and other general-purpose Q&A sites have been around forever, providing solutions with varying degrees of effectiveness. The content is often (though not always) shallow, leaving users wanting more.

Recently, Quora’s “continually improving collection of questions and answers” has seemed to position the Silicon Valley darling as the Q&A leader, but I don’t think we’ll see one Q&A site dominating the market.

Rather than a category killer brand in the Q&A space, perhaps the emergent leaders—yes, I do think there will be more than one–will be the websites that can create a customizable platform to meet the needs of niche communities.

Over 3.4 billion total questions have been answered by Formspring users, the 18-month-old San Francisco-based startup told VentureBeat.

Formspring also released an infographic (embedded below) that illustrates some of the site’s more interesting statistics, like the 877 questions Marvel Comics Senior Vice President Tom Brevoort has responded to about X-Men.

The company faces competition from sites like Facebook and Tumblr that have added similar question/answer features to their services.

Founded in January 2010, Formspring has raised a total $14 million in funding from Redpoint Partners, Baseline Ventures  and Polaris Ventures. The company told VentureBeat it’s working on monetizing the site.

Infographic via Formspring.me

In stealth mode for some time, Hipster first opened its gates for the South by Sotuhwest conference in Austin, Texas, where it received 4,000 signups to its site and 10,000 to its launch mailing list. Attendees to the conference could use Hipster to ask and answer questions about it — for example, “What is the dress code for SXSW?.” While the conference is over, its SXSW page has still been kept online as demo of its concept.

Founder and CEO Doug Ludlow, who previously started MadKast and sold it to sharing widget ShareThis in 2008, told TechCrunch that the company learned a number of things from SXSW. For one thing, it now plans to launch across every city in the U.S. as opposed to expanding by individual cities.

In comparison to Yelp and Foursquare, which operate in a similar territory while not directly offering question and answers, Ludlow said that Foursquare “provides a very poor web experience for accessing, augmenting, editing, or sharing [local information]” while Yelp lacks a good method for “submitting knowledge when it’s freshest in your mind (namely, while you’re currently at a location.)”

With the financing, the Los Angeles-based startup is planning to make the move down to San Francisco. Angel investors in the round included Mitch Kapor, Dave McClure (500 Startups), Lightbank, Charles River Ventures, Max Ventilla, TechStars, Don Dodge, Paige Craig, Ludlow Ventures, and Lerer Ventures.

The Santa Barbara, Calif. company’s goal is to become the definitive destination for finding the information you need to make choices, whether it’s buying a smartphone or choosing a school. The site’s data is arranged into charts (aka comparison apps) showing the relevant facts about each item. And if you find the charts a bit overwhelming, the site has added other ways to compare products.

For example, FindTheBest just announced a new feature that lets you build slideshows ranking items on the site. To help attract some attention for the feature, it asked some well-known figures in the tech world to contribute. So you can see the best motorcycles as selected by Randy Komisar, who is a member of the company’s board and a partner at FindTheBest investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Or you can check out Foodspotting cofounder Soraya Darabi’s favorite dogs.

FindTheBest has also added a question-and-answer feature. O’Connor told me that the company doesn’t “fashion ourselves to be a Q&A site.” But FindTheBest contains the answers to many of the questions people ask on sites like Google. By adding questions like “Which ski resort gets the most snow?” FindTheBest can make those answers more visible to search engines.

As for where the site goes from here, O’Connor said he wants to focus on making the service more social. FindTheBest raised money from Kleiner’s sFund for social networking startups but, as yet, has relatively few social features. O’Connor said the challenges is to balance user input and social features with FindTheBest’s need for reliable data. (The company’s information is mostly compiled by its employees. Businesses can also submit data, but FindTheBest verifies submissions before posting.)

O’Connor also revealed that he owns the FindTheWorst.com Web domain, so that could be another way to expand.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Stack Overflow, which runs a popular programming question-and-answer site, has raised $12 million in a second round of funding. It has also adopted a new name, Stack Exchange.

The programming site supposedly received 95 million pageviews in February, so it may seem like a bad idea to rename a property that has already built a big audience. In fact, it looks like StackOverlow.com will continue to operate as a programming Q&A site. (It also recently launched a job-finding service called Careers 2.0.) The new name, meanwhile, should signal that the company’s goals are bigger than a single website, no matter how popular.

Specifically, the Stack Exchange Network now includes 45 similar Q&A sites covering topics like cooking, photography, and physics. The company says the network received 20 million unique visitors last month.

The new round brings Stack Exchange’s total funding to $18 million. Index Ventures led the funding, with participation from previous investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Marc Bodnick, the cofounder of Silicon Valley private-equity firm Elevation Partners, is leaving to join Quora, according to multiple reports. (VentureBeat first reported his pending departure yesterday.)

Quora is a hotly watched, much-discussed question-and-answer service that won buzz from the Silicon Valley crowd early on — including from Bodnick, who proudly notes that he’s the service’s 137th user. It also stirred talk of a startup bubble when it raised $11 million at an $86 million valuation last March, in a round led by Benchmark Capital.

What exactly is Bodnick going to do there? It’s our understanding that he’s agreed to join Quora, but without any set title. Fortune.com first suggested he was going to become Quora’s chief financial officer but then backed away after hearing from a source that he might have another role. Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch speculates he might become president or CEO, which seems like a big stretch for someone whose career has been as an investor, not an operating executive.

It’s true that Quora desperately needs a public face. Founders Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo, both former Facebook engineers, are painfully shy, as evidenced by their awkward turn accepting an award at last week’s Crunchies, an event cohosted by VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and GigaOm, which celebrates the best products and startups in the tech industry.

Bodnick did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Benchmark partner and Quora board member Matt Cohler. We did, however, ask Bodnick, Cohler, Cheever, and D’Angelo to answer a question on Quora about how Bodnick was recruited. (Stories about how key employees were recruited to startups are a popular subject on Quora.)

In a way, Bodnick’s leap to Quora is a plus for Elevation Partners, which is in the process of raising a second fund. The remaining partners can spin his departure for a high-profile new job as a positive personal development for Bodnick rather than a negative for the firm. Bodnick was, nevertheless, a key partner who helped secure its investment in Yelp, the local-reviews site, and establish Elevation as a player in the highly valued world of social media after its troubled investment in Palm, the smartphone maker.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Formspring, the online question/answer service, has raised $11.5 million in Series A financing, bringing its total to $14 million. Now all the company has to do is figure out how to make money.

“$14 million is a ton of money, especially for a site that’s only a year old with no revenue,” notes Liz Gannes at All Things Digital.

It not only has no revenue, but no business model. CEO Ade Olonoh “has not yet figured that out,” reports CNET’s Caroline McCarthy.

Along with the financing, Formspring announced the creation of a “Respond” button that can be incorporated on outside Web sites, allowing the service to be distributed across the Web rather than centralized on Formspring’s own site. Sites such as Huffington Post and AskMen.com are already incorporating the button, which works somewhat like Facebook’s “like” button. Answers to questions are housed on the publishers’ own sites.

Again, there’s no indication on how this will yield returns for the company’s investors. Redpoint Partners and Baseline Ventures led the new round. In March, the company raised $2.5 million from a group of angels along with Polaris Ventures.

Most of the attention the company has drawn has been negative: The site, which allows people to ask each other questions anonymously, became a hive spam and nasty insults and bullying among its teen users.

The microblogging company announced today that it had “acquired the team at Fluther, Inc.” Fluther makes a question-and-answer site, a popular category of Web startup as of late. (See Hunch or Quora for examples of better-funded competitors.)

When I asked Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner what kind of deal it had actually struck, she characterized the event as a “talent acquisition.” I pointed out that there’s no such thing, really, as a talent acquisition: Either a company acquires or merges another company and takes on its employment obligations, or it hires employees as individuals. I also pointed out that under the U.S. Constitution, acquiring people was technically illegal.

The conversation pretty much devolved from there, and apologies were later issued by Twitter direct message. (Sorry, Carolyn, I can get pretty pedantic, I know.)

Apologies aside, Penner didn’t shed any further light on the deal, but an insider deeply familiar with the workings of the Twitterverse told me that Twitter hired five people who worked at Fluther but didn’t actually acquire the company or any of its assets. That squares with Twitter’s blog post, which noted it wouldn’t be taking on the Fluther.com website, but wouldn’t be shutting it down, either.

So what does this mean? In the absence of clear statements from Twitter, one can only speculate. A strong possibility is that Twitter’s concerned about looking cheap — hiring people away from a startup usually costs less than buying it. Twitter may also want to avoid being seen as the force responsible for shutting down a site with a voluble community of users, as Facebook was with the recent “talent acquisitions” of Drop.io and Hot Potato.

It’s an irony that these services, devoted to creating cultures of openness, transparency, and sharing, can’t come out and state the obvious: a lot of startups are failing to gain traction, and they’re happy to snap up engineers, but they’re not going to dilute their shareholders or spend their cash actually acquiring smaller companies. Dressing up this event as an “acquisition” makes it sound fancy, and may salve the feelings of the new hires.

There’s a lot of awkward terms for these admittedly awkward exits from a startup: “manquisitions,” “acq-hires,” “talent acquisitions.” We at VentureBeat stand for brutal honesty, however, and prefer to call them what they are: “engineers who need jobs.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Kurani Interactive, developer of the Opinionaided iPhone application, announced today that it has secured $275,000 in funding from crowdsourcing angel investor Chuck Chesler and Al Angrisani, a former CEO of market research companies.

Opinionaided is an application for the iPhone and iPad that lets users post questions that any other user can answer. The idea is to get the consensus opinion of the Internet on matters ranging from fashion to which restaurant to visit. Users can post a picture and ask a question to go with it. Other Opinionaided users can then give the question a thumbs up, thumbs down or neutral vote and leave a comment with their vote.

Active users can become experts in certain categories and will receive badges that flag them as experts. So if users aren’t convinced that the rest of the opinions are right, they can seek out the opinions of experts. There’s also a social networking element to the app. Users can become friends with other Opinionaided users and track their activity. Friends on Opinionaided can also chat in real time, similar to chat services on Facebook and other social networking sites.

Opinionaided is one more app in a long line of question-and-answer applications that are seeing a lot of interest from investors. The biggest player in the space thus far is Quora, which has raised around $11 million so far. Facebook, the largest social network in the world, has also introduced a question-and-answer service.

But a large component to the success of the Q&A service is how quickly users can get responses. Quora is particularly speedy, and Facebook actually includes a number of questions in the right rail on a news feed to generate quick responses. Opinionaided has so far generated around 6 million responses to 80,000 questions. Kurani Interactive said the application had 3 million responses to questions in the past week alone.

The newest Q&A player on Apple’s App Store also looks like it has a bit of a jump on the rest of the market. Quora hasn’t released an official mobile application — although there is a version of its site optimized for mobile Internet browsers. It was appealing enough to investors to pick up the angel funding, and that brings Kurani Interactive’s total funding up to $775,000 after an earlier seed funding round.

The same can be said about the numerous Question & Answer players that people unwisely dismiss but which are working hard to develop fangs and become a danger to Google’s current search dominance.

Q&A companies like Quora, Peerpong and others are seeking to become the next Google in what many are eyeing as the next stage of search: capturing specific knowledge and providing the best answers to any question through the Internet.

One example U.S. players might follow is Naver.com, which is South Korea’s leading search engine. In 2002, it launched its “knowledge search” service, a user-generated Q&A service that helped Naver displace rival Daum as the market leader. For the past several years, Naver has retained 70% of Korea’s search market and is number six worldwide, while keeping Google at a distant 2% or less of the Korea market.

One twist to its market leadership in South Korea is that Naver keeps all of its content blocked off from all other search engines. This strategy is unlikely to work for a small, new startup entrant in the search market, since it would need traffic and revenue from Google’s search queries. But what if a large existing company, say Facebook, built a massive Q&A database and closed it to Google and others? Already having 500 million devoted users would create a compelling reason to keep its new Q&A content walled off.

Analysis of the Q&A Landscape

The U.S market is crowded with various approaches to Q&A. There are targeted expert networks, such as Gerson Lehrman and LivePerson that pay people for their time and expertise to answer specific questions about an industry or field of study. Gerson Lehrman is the gold standard for expert networks and has been for over a decade. Its primary clients are hedge funds and private equity funds seeking industry knowledge that helped them generate over $300 million in revenues. LivePerson is a poor man’s Gerson Lehrman, with a stable of less top-tier experts, but it still generated a healthy $87 million last year. The problem is that most if not all of the Q&A sessions for these two companies are conducted over the phone, so the content is not searchable or indexed for the Internet.

Mahalo is a user-generated search engine that has tried paying users to incentivize them to generate answers. This hasn’t worked out too well for the company since the overall content quality is low. I assume it’s driven by how Mahalo’s user base was seeded, since they targeted casual users versus experts or leaders within a specific field.

The quality of the questions and answers on many Q&A sites — Mahalo, Fluther, Yahoo Answers, and Formspring — reminds me of grade school textbooks or reading through grocery store tabloids. Which really excludes them from being serious contenders for a position as the next Google. Meanwhile, Gerson Lehrman, LivePerson, JustAnswer, and others are excluded because the majority of their content is not online. Niche services such as LinkedIn’s Answers, FixYa (product problems), and StackOverflow (programmers) are too narrowly focused to be considered rivals to Google.

The Real Competition?

I currently see four viable players in the next-generation Q&A arena: Google (because of its recent acquisition of Vark), Facebook, Quora, and PeerPong.

I believe Google acquired Vark as insurance against the potential threat to its core search business. It will be interesting to see how Google integrates Vark’s technology into its social efforts and the widely rumored competitor to Facebook it’s said to be working on. Vark’s semantic engine integrated with Google’s existing vast amount of user data could develop into a powerful application.

It looks like Facebook currently doesn’t have a semantic engine behind its Facebook Questions product, but through the sheer size of its user base Facebook has already created an active service, which will only keep exponentially growing.

Now that Quora has opened up its platform to the general public, it seems as if Facebook Questions and Quora are on colliding paths. Quora still has far more high-quality answers but will inevitably see a decline in quality as it scales. My question: how will it scale effectively in an increasingly competitive space and maintain its initial — and desirable — high quality?

PeerPong is another entrant with a public-facing Q&A platform, but is similar to Vark in that it has an analytical engine to find the best experts to answer your questions. PeerPong is also more focused on providing its technology as a white-label to other platforms.

The Ultimate Answer

It will be fascinating to see how the Q&A market develops over the next several years. Will startups like Quora and PeerPong be able to rapidly accumulate a massive database of knowledge, or will an existing Internet juggernaut such as Google or Facebook win out? Can Quora organically build a serious contender while maintaining quality, or does PeerPong’s white-label strategy make sense?

It seems Facebook is in the best position at this point with its 500 million social network users, social graphs and public interest graphs. Google doesn’t have the in-depth layers of information on people that Facebook does to target, connect and create a massive, high quality Q&A site.

Twitter could be a dark horse in this race. With the type of information and quick back-and-forth conversations it records, it could be very interesting to see Twitter launch into this space.

I asked Quora cofounder Charlie Cheever and PeerPong CEO Ro Choy how they would define success for their companies a year from now. Here’s what they said:

Cheever: It’s hard to talk about specifics in the long term, but we like to talk about getting the 90% of information that is in people’s heads but not on the Internet yet onto the web, so we’re pretty focused on building up that database of knowledge and helping people learn what they want to know from it.

Choy: Our expectation is that we will reach a 100 million people index, so that for any query we will have 20-100 people who have a material amount of knowledge for the query. We will be able to find the very best people to answer that question and a large number of people that link back to that question.

Whoever comes out on top, it will be exciting to see how this space develops over the next few years.

Bernard Moon is Managing Director of the Lunsford Group, which is a private holding company consisting of entities in technology, media, research & consulting, health care, and real estate. He blogs at Silicon Moon.