The other day I came across a Web 2.0 called Rogomo that helps provide live expert services and charge by minute has launched in public beta. It works exactly like Yahoo! Answers, Baidu Zhidao, Google Answers (shut down in November 2006) and Yedda. Though I feel that this Q&A Web 2.0 has limited appeal, but it definitely takes advantage of openness (can be viewed from the experts’ profile pages) and convenience, i.e. Users are free to choose to communicate via the phone, Internet video, instant messaging (IM), online collaboration tools or any other method they wish.

Rogomo was indeed a project started by three former executives from AOL a year ago, with two co-founders attached to law firms. My sense is that the co-founders believed that professional service has a price tag, if a user want to get a right answer or advice quickly, especially real-time or personalization involved, she must pay for the service. The establishment of Rogomo has thus became a first step toward an online marketplace that they perceived, allow a user to buy or an expert to sell her advice over the Internet. As stated in the above, the expert advice is to be charged by minute, whereby users can browse through all the experts’ profile pages according to categories. Both parties can agree to a fee and the fee is to be calculated according to the time consumed by each professional service, and the experts can offer her advice via the methods such as phone, IM, and etc. At the time of my writing, there are more than 1,100 minutes sold.

Rogomo is viewed as a company that based on the pay-per-answer model. Though this business model is failed as witness by the shut down of Google Answers, but users should expect that they’ll achieve incremental value because the combined expert and her expertise will deliver a much better advice than any of the free Q&A services that they could get on the Web.