Tonight at midnight the doors open (to beta testers) at Ether, the new super-stealth startup that is wholly-owned by the pay-per-call folks at Ingenio.
The concept of Ether is straightforward, but it has a massive back end infrastructure (thankfully Ingenio already had it built). They call it an “ebay for services”, allowing people to charge for advice over the phone (and by email – more on that below).
Service providers set up an account by providing some personal information and a phone number that they would like to be called at. Any service that can be provided over the phone is a perfect match for Ether. “Sellers” set their price, from free to anything (on a per minute or per hour basis). They can tell Ether the hours they are willing to take calls. Every seller is issued a toll free phone number (with a dedicated extension), which forwards to their phone.
Buyers can search through providers, see prices, feedback, etc. Once they agree to terms, they can place the call. Sellers only get calls once a Buyer has paid the fee and agreed to the terms.
Ether takes a flat 15% of fees for its trouble. They cover long distance charges and credit card processing fees out of this 15%.
And the fun doesn’t stop there. Sellers can also sell any type of digital content through Ether as well. The buyer is able to access the content only after paying the agreed upon fee. This content can be emailed out to people, or accessed via a link/badge that can be placed on a website.
The combination of phone advice, plus the ability to charge for digital content, opens up all kinds of possibilities. At first glance, I saw this as a kind of Web 2.0 elance…but after testing out the service its clear that it goes way beyond what previous services in this space did. Ether brings people together directly via calls or email, and sets up a great billing mechanism in between the parties. I expect Ether to ramp quickly towards success, and it will be extremely hard for competitors to enter the space given the capital intensive infrastructure needed to do something like this.
See Robert Scoble on Ether as well, who met with the team last week and asks “Anyone have any ideas of how they’d use Ether?”
Looks cool and definately seems like an awesome idea, but it sounds quite complicated.
We’ll have to wait until the public beta to check out the usability.
I hope its available in Australia
, even with our government being in the stone age.
They already tried this with http://www.keen.com. Started out as service/advice marketplace…. need legal help call an attorney, need tax help call a CPA. It has since morphed into phonesex and psychic hotline. Will keen/ingenio pull it off this time
Background
Keen.com, founded in November 1999, is the first Live Answer Community, enabling consumers to find the right person to talk to and Keen.com connects them over their standard telephones. Keen.com is funded by Benchmark Capital, the company behind such successful Internet companies as eBay, E-Loan, Red Hat Software, Critical Path, Webvan, PlanetRx and several others. Benchmark hired Karl Jacob earlier this year as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Benchmark’s program gives CEOs the time and resources to develop big ideas and incubate them at Benchmark. Jacob is not new to the Web, having successfully sold his last Internet startup, Dimension X, to Microsoft in 1997. The concept was invented by co-founders Scott Faber and Sean Van der Linden, who joined Jacob in September of 1999 to form Keen.com.
SAN FRANCISCO—January 11, 2000—Keen.com™, the first Live Answer Community, today announced that it has closed its second round of funding, raising $60 million in operating capital from key investors and strategic partners. The company, which received its first round of funding from Benchmark Capital, launched just two months ago on November 8, 1999 from Benchmark’s offices. Integral Capital Partners—known for its investments in Intuit, HealtheonMD, Agile Software, and others—is the lead on a roster of prestigious investors in Keen.com’s second round.
We live in an age of relatively free/cheap information but some will alway pay to have someone talk dirty to them.
Let aside the dumbasses that will use this and the opotunities opened for the adult industry this seems like a great service.
A lot of proffesionals and semi proffesionals from different industries will find it very usefull. The first example coming to my mind (due to my psychological background) is the counselling industry.
BUT without a trust sytem and ranking this will turn into a huge mess
From service/advice marketplace to phonesex and psychic hotline. It’d be interesting to know whether this happened because of how people started to use the service or for other reasons.
I can see that many services would be delivered by talking over the phone — it happens in the real world, so it should also happen in the online world. What I don’t understand is why I can’t just use Paypal. Most everyone has a Paypal account. So if I wanted to sell therapy I could just put out a PayPal button and my phone number. I could keep track of the time spent talking and bill my customers with PayPal.
This is why ebay bought skype for $4 billion. They already have PayPal and once they put those two together (which they’ve said they’re going to do) then they can take all their ebay sellers and give them skype softphones and get them selling their services/advice. They already have the network effect so if anyone pulls this off it will be ebay.
You don´t need to wait for a beta accesscode.
1. Go to http://www.ethe...s/help/menu.asp
2. Klick on “my ether” below
3. Register and test it
Hi Cem,
I’m Ron Hirson from the Ether products team. I noticed your comment and you’re absolutely right. You can register that way, but you’ll only be seeing the customer view of the site (not the seller’s). We are leaving registration open for customers of our Beta sellers so that the sellers can receive calls.
You’ll still need an access code to become a seller and create a listing like Mike’s. You can request one by visiting:
http://www.ethe...icestarter.aspx
We’ll be inviting our next wave of Beta testers in the next couple of weeks. We’re very stoked by all of your interest. Let me know if you have any questions that I can answer. — Ron
Hi Ron,
i´ve already requested an accesscode.
Good luck with Ether
Cem
Hey Guys, good luck with Ether. Looks like a very cool concept to me and wow, we can make use of this in so many different areas. Wow!
OK, I could not wait for the access code either, so here is what I have done. Click on http://www.soft..._an_access_code to find out what I did to sign up. I am not sure if that is the real deal or something else. May be some one else can confirm.
There used to be be some 1-900 billing providers that were doing something similar. It’s really about billing more than providing a voice-based service. The 1-900 providers had the advantage of putting the charge on the phone bill (a huge advantage for yellow pages publishers for example). What I really want is the Ingenio Pay-Per-Call API so that I can offer the PPC service to advertisers on my blog.
A question: ¿This site (http://www.indexforsale.com) is advertising 2.0?
Thanks.
Wow the site looks awesome. Very polished. I know that this is the same reason that eBay bought Skype but I personally think eBay has the wrong brand image (it is sort of lower end in my opinion because of its history as an online garage sale) to do what Ether is trying to do. Ofcourse eBay cannot be counted out; maybe they will build a subsidiary with a new brand image to take on ether. Best of luck to the ether team!
No Jota, it’s more like yours is comment-spam. If you want that kind of stuff, which btw has little to do with advertising, you’ve got 1000tags.com and the hundreds of spinoffs that followed. “tagvertising” is cool, but *that* isn’t it.
Back to the issue at hand, it’d be interesting if eBay sellers started to use Ether as a way to contact them directly, bypassing Skype, and in the end, eBay were forced to do something about it. Kind of like eBay first had Billpoint, then it made more sense to actually acquire PayPal. Just a “what if” scenario, nothing more.
MC Hammer, Gary Colement, Corey Feldman and Kato Kailen will probably be the first to sign on.
I wouldn’t mind having my own web oriented ‘1-900′ service either – rather get paid a little to give advice than lose time and money giving it away.
Fits into the Ingenio structure too, like calling lawyers direct for legal advice.
Hi Potter,
I am Virginia from Ingenio. If you are interested in building on top of the Ingenio Pay Per Call APIs please email majoraccounts@ingenio.com to get set up with documentation, sample code and access.
Thanks,
Virginia
Wait, I don’t get it. Keen.com was doing this for forever. And now if you click on professional services on Keen’s homepage (which is now all psychics) you get taken to ingenio.
Keen users almost always only wanted psychics, Britney Spears, or phone sex, despite the company wanting to provide a place for tech support to happen. (I know, I’ve seen their search logs).
So this is just a relaunch of the unwanted services of Keen.com, no?
Why is this 2.0?
Keen = Ingenio
Good post. VoIP blogger, Tom Keating has a good overview of Ether as well.
He points out that Ether is leveraging open-source SIP and VoIP for the termination.
From TechDirt: “Okay, so Ether.com is following the same original Keen business model… except the relationship is even closer than that. Ether is Keen.”
..
“They’re both a part of Ingenio, mostly known now for it’s pay-per-call advertising service. Emails sent to Techdirt asking for a briefing even came from the keen.com domain.”
This is getting funny. I remember Keen. I suddenly feel 20 years old again.
It sad when good idead (Keen) go south because of the audience that ends up using the service. I hope that Ether works better. I see a mashup of Prosper or Zopa with Ether being a nice mix of service/payment. How about a retainer for services on Ether, financed on Zopa or Propser?
Good idea gone south? Or good idea that found it’s natural market?
Ever looked at the rates that the psychics charge?
Scoble mentioned an hundred dollars an hour for his time, which sounds like a lot.
Almost every psychic on Keen.com charges double that.
Kudos to Keen for not fighting its natural usage. A lot of companies have died because they refused to cater to a market they did not envision.
Isn’t this is the same 1-900 sex call concept except you use a VOIP??
Now I can sell my tech support. =D
This didn’t work for Keen which is the same company that morphed into ingenio (although I think they still keep Keen around as their phone sex and porn business which I suspect is where they make most of the money). Why would it work now?
Believe it or not, but we do have this service in Germany since 2000. Check: http://www.questico.com. It just works within astrology, horoscope, tarot, clairvoyance and scrying. In all other areas as financial, medical, technical advise they failed.
Well, americans might be different. So, good luck!
Why I don’t like this service.
It’s too hard for the customer.
If I want advice, I want a number I can call and a person I can talk to.
Paying first = bad
Registration of customers = bad
Lack of rating = bad
Delayed Response/Callbacks = bad
The funny thing is that there is a service like this already. I can buy a 1-900 number from the phone company and make money that way. All people have to do to accept charges is dial the number.
Now if Ether could significantly undercut the rates charged by the phone companies then that would be great, but right now, I don’t see this as the “as easy as picking up a hammer” tool that they think it is.
-Ian
vonity.com is doing something like this as well. Out of Pleasanton, CA. They’ve been in beta for about 6 months.
I see it as being a little different from 900-numbers, but I do understand what Ian Danforth is saying when he discusses the negatives. But the application for selling your ideas and services is exciting…I’m going to write about it at landingthedeal.com because I think it has some exciting possibilities for sales professionals who want to set themselves apart from their competition. Just my take…
Something similar if not the same was launched in Germany a couple of years ago.
Check out http://www.questico.com
It started with experts on all walks of life, but soon narrowed down to horoscopes , astrological and esoteric advice.
I wish them good luck any way.
Florian Wilken
I totally echo what Ben (#3) has said. Keen.com already tried this and it failed miserably. /Josh
Hey is there a way I can get a beta invite /code for ether?
thanks
If anyone is looking for an ether directory, there is one here:
http://etherdir...tory.kasrak.com
Sounds like something my sneezer friends could use. I call my friend Ques “Stealio” because he finds the best deals on earth. Check out Squidoo.com. Experts create lenses on what they are experts on.