BitWine: An expert network tied to Skype
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Dating and answering networks share this common point. Voice provides more comfort than text. With voice, you can size the expertise of someone, just like you could decode someone’ irony better. BitWine takes this assumption into account.
BitWine is an expert network: People get on it to seek advice and solve their questions with the help of experts. Anybody could become an expert, depending on the others’ ratings (and after paying the fee). And like Ether or WDeal, BitWine is a marketplace; experts sells their services. The network is tied to Skype. In fact, BitWine will roll out a Skype plugin when Skype 3.0 launches.
However, what seems a weakness of those guru/experts networks is that they’re acting not as an alternative to Answers.com. Instead, they’re building a complementary service to text answering communities. Without much difficulties, Yahoo and Google could come up with their own voice answering services, based on their own VoIP softwares, and with a considerable bigger network. But, if they manage to build up a big enough community rapidly, they have one chance to outrun the big players, and become the new YouTube of expert network.
And if not, do you think eBay/Skype could absorb one of those marketplace?
UPDATE: We were talking a bit too fast. Google Answers is closing its doors. The site, described as the very first project of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is no longer accepting new questions.
Nov 29, 2006 | By Nuno
1 comment
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While I agree with many of your comments, it seems there is a substantial difference between Bitwine and the other expert oriented sites (for disclosure, I am a Bitwine investor). It is all around building trust.
By writing to Skype, Bitwine is taking advantage of the synchronous nature of video and audio provide people with a trusted environment where they can verify, before paying, that they really are speaking with an expert. For the expert, synchronous linking with Paypal gives trust that they will actually be paid.
A shared interest is that the ‘real’ question, that the buyer really wants to ask, but doesn’t know it, and eats the expert’s time, will be answered…hopefully a win/win.