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 an 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 an 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.

As expected, Google China and Tianya has jointly launched a Web 2.0 portal, a sort of Google Answers in China. In my another post, I discussed that this site was maintained by Tianya and in matter of fact, the back-end technology was provided by Google China. Google China has well-planned in this “Wenda” project, they are competing for the same offering with Baidu in China again. They chosen Tianya because of the latter’s huge group of Web communities. Tianya, founded in 1999, has provided blog, forum, groups’ services to their users in China. Some reports even mentioned Google has stake in Tianya, may it be 10% or 60%, but I think this is a good move. In the world of venture capitalist, good reputation is priceless, invested in an established firm is always a best choice when you have money.

There are anticipations on the Web that Google is planning to launch its own Chinese version of Google Answers in China tomorrow, in cooperation with a China company named Tianya and the daily operation will be managed by this Chinese firm.

As I visited the Web page, i.e. wenda.tianya.com, it is not available at this moment. However, I’m doubtful of the success of this China version of Google Answers, especially when its number one competitor, Baidu Zhidao has more than 10 million of visitors per day since its first inception in June 2005.

There is an interesting article (in Mandarin) about the huge popularity of Baidu Zhidao in China. According to the Chairman of Baidu, Robin Li, Baidu Zhidao has became the most popular online questions and answers platform on the Web. More than 10 million of Chinese speaking users attended to this platform everyday.

Until last June, the statistics released by Baidu showed that Chinese users have answered more than 17 million questions posted on this platform. On the landing page of Baidu Zhidao, the users have answered 17,076,817 questions and there are still 592,102 questions asked by other community users that need to be solved, at the time of my writing. Out of these 17 million questions, 50.7% are categorized under the Knowledge label, with the average 71,308 questions and 223,907 answers created everyday on Baidu Zhidao.