Go Ahead, You Can Ask Anything
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
If you're one of those people who thinks he's always right, but can't prove it on the spot, we might have just the technology for you.
This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested a new service called AskMeNow that attempts to be like a digital version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire's phone-a-friend. This service works by answering questions of all sorts in just a few minutes for free, or in some cases for 49 cents per question.
AskMeNow, based in Irvine, Calif., is a division of Ocean West Holding Corp. and is currently only available in beta (or prerelease version), but its full-scale service will come out in the beginning of next month. Its concept is very straightforward: You send questions to the service by calling from your cellphone or emailing directly from a portable smartphone, and answers are sent back to your phone or hand-held via Short Messaging Services (SMS) or email within about a minute.
Questions can be asked for free using a form-entry method, called "auto answers," or by calling in questions that don't fit into one of the form-entry categories. (These are referred to as "AskAnything" questions, and they are the ones that cost 49 cents each.)
To answer your questions, the company employs real people who sit at computers in the Philippines, furiously researching the Internet (using data from content partnerships) trying to respond to your queries within three minutes. This doesn't always mean the response is correct. It simply means that the retrieved information was online somewhere. But our results proved rather accurate.
If your question has been asked before, it's more likely to get a faster response because its answer is already on file. AskMeNow reserves the right to not answer questions that aren't family friendly. The service sometimes answers opinion questions using opinions posted online, but we couldn't get an answer to our question, "What is the hippest bar in Washington, D.C.?"
Posted 5 years ago by Monty Solomon in General Telecommunications Forum
