Imagine you’re Phil Gordon, one of the top 5 poker players in the world and host of Bravo’s “Celebrity Poker Showdown.” How many Vegas-bound amateurs do you think are dying to pick your brain before laying their money down? Are they willing to pay for it? Ingenio is betting that they are as the company officially launches Ether, a service that enables the pricing and selling of your “intellectual capital” over the phone.
Scott Faber, co-founder of Ingenio and General Manager of the Ether division, calls it “v-commerce,” or voice-based commerce. Ether is targeted toward niche experts, bloggers, and celebrities, like Gordon, who is embracing the service as a way to offer his expert advice. Faber has in mind “traditional service providers” like computer professionals, legal experts, therapists, and accountants who want to monetize their services in new ways.
“We don’t do Adult,” said Farber.
Sono phone sex?
“No phone sex,” he said.
Here’s how it works: sellers visit the Ether website to acquire a free 800 phone number; something like 1-888-MY-ETHER, with a unique extension, such as 1234. The seller sets a value on their time, a rate a customer must pay in order to be forwarded to the seller’s actual cell, work, home, or SkypeIn phone number.
Dialers are prompted for their credit card numbers before calls are forwarded. It can be set up to charge per call, by the minute, or by the hour and sellers can set a schedule of availability to ensure calls only come in during specified times. Additionally, if phone traffic is heavy, callers can set appointments to call back using a time window.
The Ether Phone Number can be embedded on websites, blogs, business cards, newspaper ads, billboards, you name it. What’s Ingenio’s cut of all this? Ingenio charges a fee of 15 percent of earnings that includes credit card processing and long-distance costs. Ether phone number pages get indexed and are searchable.
“Whenever your phone rings through, there’s money on the other end,” said Faber.
Faber uses entrepreneur and author of the weblog Mashable (where you will see the “Call Me” button to the top right) as an example of someone using the Ether service.
“Whether it’s health advice, tax help, computer support, or wine recommendations, Ether makes it simple for people to get paid for the time they spend sharing their unique insights and expertise,” said Faber, in a statement.
What about psychics and Tarot readers?
“Sure,” he said, “though we try to keep it more highbrow.”
Because, of course, the Internet is known for its highbrow uses.
In addition to the voice service, Ingenio has also launched “Pay-to-View” with Ether that enables people to sell and deliver digital content like documents, photos, computer code, podcasts or video. Buyers read a description of the digital content for sale on a website, but only view it after paying the seller’s specified price.
Ingenio has a fraud team and a “Play Fair Team” set up us as intellectual property rights watchdogs to reduce the unauthorized resale of copyrighted material. After the content is sold, however, it’s up to the content owner to track violations.
Still in development, Ingenio is working on another Ether-connected service called “Bid to Talk.” If your thoughts are so valuable that people are lining up to talk to you during every calling period, this functionality would allow you auction off your time to the highest bidder.
“At a high level the web is becoming more about people than about pages,” said Faber. “We see ourselves building a whole community where you can find the information that you want.”
That may have been a slip of the tongue. When asked if the company was looking down the road to create a centralized social networking-like community where people could search for experts on topics and click to call them (an extraordinarily profitable sounding idea), Faber said the company right now was focusing on the basics – helping people sell what they say.
“We just want to nail it first,” he said. But he admitted a social networking site based on the service was a possibility down the road.
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