Do you ChaCha?

On NPR I heard about this company, ChaCha to whom you can text or call-in a question and quickly get a response. What makes them different is that they employ real people to give you solid answers to your specific question. There are similar apps for google and other search engines, but all you get is internet based search results, in which it can be hard to find what your looking for.

Now the key point here is real people. For all you stay at home mom and dad's, guess what I do now while sitting on my couch watching my son? That's right, I'm one of the 55,000 or so "real people" getting paid $0.10 - $0.20 per question, to answer the worlds random questions.

What are people asking? Literally everything! Want to know if your flights on time? How much wood a woodchuck can chuck? or How much sodium is in a Big Mac? If your sitting in front of a computer, it's not too hard to find an answer, but what if your on the go? By calling 1.800.2ChaCha from a mobile text enabled phone, or texting cha cha, you will get a text answer of 160 characters in about four minutes. You can see some more examples here.

Another blogger talks about his experience, and some of the cultural impact here, describing it as the new magic eight ball. Want to know what to drink at the bar? Just ask ChaCha. We'll tell you. And USAToday talked about us extensively here.

How do I like working for them? It's great, though the pay for a newbie is lousy by hourly standards. (You are paid $0.10 - $0.20/question, which works out to about $2/hr, but this is while your doing other stuff as well. Faster people, focusing in their area of expertise can make closer to $6/hr, or so the company says) But if all your doing is sitting on the couch playing hearts on your computer, it's not a bad gig. Plus, you can sign up as an expert in certain areas of information, allowing you to receive a higher payout, which also allows you to learn new things about items your interested in anyway.

Before you get started, you have to go through an on-line video course of about an hour. You then take a test of ten questions that are not live. They review your answers and then give you the thumbs up or down. If you flunk you can not re-take the test. Your out. Once you pass you go live, answering questions from all over.

Be aware, if you decide you want to get into this, you can be presented with questions of a sexual nature. (Things like "what causes herpes?") They do have a harassment policy which allows you to dump questions, but non aggressive, sexual questions of an informational nature, things you might ask a nurse, are considered good to go.

The company tries to create a fun-loving start up feel, and so far, (a few hours) it's been a good side gig.