Ever wondered what it would have been like to randomly strike up a conversation with the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs?

This is one of the many weird and wonderful questions that people have posed on a website called Quora. In response to this particular question, one user shared a memory of his car breaking down in front of Jobs’ Silicon Valley home. The post received 60 comments and 4,400 “up votes” (Quora’s Reddit-style system relies on the community to push the highest-quality content to the top). To date, the post has received 180,000 views.

“If you’ve written a high-quality post, we will get you readers,” said Mark Bodnick, Quora’s product marketing lead.

According to Bodnick, this post was the impetus for the startup to try something new. With a growing community of authors and readers behind it, the Q&A startup is shifting in a new direction: a blogging platform.

The idea is that Quora has a burgeoning community of readers but needs to build out its top-quality content, and authors need a platform to share their content with thousands of readers. According to Quora engineer Kah Keng Tay, active writers on Quora receive an average of 30,000 monthly views and 350,000 annual views.

Likewise, established blogs are encouraged to republish Quora’s content. When asked about whether the company is transitioning into a “digital media publishing platform,” Bodnick responded, “I think that’s fair.” However, he said there are no immediate goals in how the startup plans to make money with this new feature-set — it appears to be more of an experiment for now.

To help readers find the best content, blogs will be ordered by topics like “food” or “startups.” Bodnick hopes that tagging will help organize deserving, but “stranded,” content from around the web and give it a whole new audience. Authors can link back to their personal or company blogs on sites like WordPress or Blogger, and gain a greater following.

To make it easier for writers to share long-form responses to questions, Quora is improving its writing experience on mobile. Quora’s iPhone app will get a rich text editor in an update, which includes fonts, lists, links, inline photos uploaded from the camera roll or saved from the web, and blockquotes.

The mobile app is a popular destination for consuming content, but the company hopes its users will be able to draft blog posts on the move. It’s a strategic move considering that about 25 percent of overall traffic comes from mobile.

Silicon Valley-based Quora has raised over $60 million in venture capital since it was founded in June 2009.

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

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Quora nabs $50 million to answer your questions

Question and answer site Quora raised $50 million at a $400 million valuation. The site hopes to gather as much information as possible to create a large database of information, similar to Wikipedia. Facebook board member Peter Thiel led the round, and former Facebook employee and partner at Northbridge Venture Partners Jonathan Heiliger participated.

Behance shows off your creative side and a new investment

Creative work portfolio-building startup Behance has grabbed $6.5 million in its first round of funding. Behance is a marketplace for creatives — artists, graphic designers, web designers, writers, and the like — to showcase their work for companies that are looking for talent. Union Square Ventures led the round, with participation from angel investors including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Path’s Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon, Dave Tisch, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Alexis Ohanian, and Garrett Camp.

Starboard Storage Systems manages your crazy data, gets funded

Mixed data workload manager Starboard Storage Systems has raised a $13 million second round of funding from German venture capital firms JP Ventures GmbH and Grazia Equity GmbH. The company works with unstructured, structured, and virtualized data, also known as mixed data, which is often hard for IT departments to manage.

Business intelligence startup InsightSquared grabs $4.5 million

InsightSquared has closed a $4.5 million investment from Bessemer Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Salesforce.com. The company helps small and medium businesses gather insights from their data from places such as Salesforce or Quickbooks.

Woman with question marks image via Shutterstock

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.

Well, Amen, a new company that broadcasts short Twitter-like messages with strong opinions, wants to help you let the world know about your opinion. The company launched at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 conference in San Francisco today. The company is entering a closed beta today.

Amen is a mobile application for “broadcasting a strong opinion.” Users input a place, thing or person and decide whether they think it’s “the best” or “the worst.” You can add a few lines of text after that, but most messages end up something like “This thing is the worst thing in the world.”

“When you feel like saying, ‘oh my god, this is the worst actor ever,’ you feel the urge to pull the app out,” Amen founder Felix Petersen said.

Each statement has a permanent link, and anyone can then vote up or vote down the statement by giving it an “Amen” or a “Hell No.” If you dislike a statement, you have to give another object that you think is “the best” or “the worst” in that category. For example, If you don’t think San Francisco coffee is the worst, you’ll have to tell the world which city has the worst coffee.

A list for each topic emerges over time and the top-voted comment shows up at the top of the list. So if users are talking about shoes, the best-rated and most popular shoe shows up at the top of the list. The application ends up like a question-and-answer service.

Amen was founded earlier this year in May and has raised $2 million. It is located in Berlin, Germany. The site has around 3,000 users that have made 30,000 statements and 80,000 votes.

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.

Social games were noticeably absent from the list of things available on Google+, the search giant’s long-awaited response to Facebook.  Google likely wants to mimic the success that games like Mafia Wars and Farmville brought to Facebook’s platform — especially since the search engine giant has invested a significant amount of money in social game company Zynga.

Given the vastness of Google+  – which offers a multitude of ways to communicate with various social circles — it’s understandable that Google Games wasn’t included in the testing launch. The same can be said for Google Questions.

A question-and-answer feature is something most social networking sites have added as a direct response to the popularity of Formspring.me. Both Facebook and Tumbler now have Q&A features. So, it would make perfect sense for one to pop up in Google+ at some point.

It’s not clear when we’ll see either games or questions debut on Google+. But since the company is re-assessing its invite process, releasing new Google+ features is probably pretty low on the list of priorities right now.

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

StackOverflow is a lot like Quora, but is largely populated by professionals in technical careers like engineering and programming. It’s a crowd-sourced site where anyone can post a question and StackOverflow users can quickly write an answer to that question. Other StackOverflow users can then vote up or vote down a response, ensuring the most popular or the most correct answer becomes the top answer for a question.

But the site is overvalued despite its cult popularity among programmers and engineers, said Dodge, an evangelist with Google which includes working with its investment arm, Google Ventures. Dodge made the comments on stage at the Launch Conference when the panel of judges was deciding which startups were best. He said he was initially impressed with the product, but that doesn’t mean he’d invest.

“I just saw the valuation for (StackOverflow’s) Careers 2.0 and I had a heart attack,” Dodge said. “No way I would write a check for that.”

Dodge later said that he thought the valuation was only for StackOverflow’s Careers 2.0 site, but said the site still looked like it was overvalued.

“Even for all of StackOverflow, the entire site, it’s a pretty rich valuation,” he said.

The new site, Careers 2.0, features openings at major companies like Microsoft and links StackOverflow users to sites where they can apply. StackOverflow users can search based on a number of keywords or by zip code, city or county. The idea is to connect StackOverflow’s highly technical and prolific users with potential job opportunities.

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.

If the name Jon Fisher sounds familiar, it’s may be because we interviewed him several months ago about his method for predicting the national unemployment rate. During the interview, he alluded to a new startup he was gearing up, which is most likely Predilect. Fisher has found success with a security startup in the past, having sold his company Bharosa to Oracle back in 2007.

Predilect is working to strengthen ubiquitous challenge questions we are faced with so often online when we have to login to a secure site or forget our password. Questions like “what’s your mother’s maiden name?” will now be replaced with a new, stronger kind of question and answer set, one not easily reused or found on a Facebook page.

As more and more personal information becomes transparent online, the company says this can be used to better perform online security and create stronger questions so that there’s less fraud. Fisher writes:

“I think Mr. Zuckerberg should have sold Facebook a while ago but I think he’s right when he said ‘a few years from now, we will look back and wonder why all these sites weren’t personalized in some way already, the world is moving in this direction.”

The company, founded in 2010, doesn’t appear to have any direct competition, though there are several companies that will help with your online security protocol, including McAfee or Verisign. Fisher will act as chairman and chief executive.