Your time is valuable. Is it by-the-minute valuable? If you think so, Jyve and Click&Buy have developed a Skype-based plug-in called JyvePro to help you monetize your oh so powerful noggin.
At the recent eBay Developers Conference, Skype bequeathed upon JyvePro the Voice Services Award. Jyve already operated an online Skype-powered community of experts, putting people in touch that had similar interests or business needs.
“The underlying premise,” said Jyve co-founder Charles Carleton, “is that at any given time, there are 6 million users online. We’re trying to match these people up and convert them to a pay system.”
That’s where Click&Buy comes in. Click&Buy provides the online payment system that allows these experts to charge for their time by the minute and enable the payment transfer. Click&Buy has developed a metered system that can be negotiated and implemented at the expert’s discretion.
Unlike Ether, which brokers the payment up front and connects interested parties via an assigned phone number that can be placed on websites or business cards, JyvePro also provides a searchable and taggable social networking community, which puts less onus on the intellectual service provider to aggressively market himself.
In future, says Carleton, Jyve will add interactive chat sessions where visitors preview a group of online experts, and click a button to talk to one of them one on one. It will also include video chat and the option to charge more per minute for that feature.
So Ether says it wants to keep its customer base more “high brow.” That means no phone sex or adult services. Has JyvePro set any such standards?
“Not yet, no,” said Carleton. “It hasn’t been an issue. If it starts then we may partner with another company to handle that traffic.”
Carleton said JyvePro’s commission was about the same as Ether’s, which is 15 percent of client revenue. Click&Buy can be used for micropayments or monthly subscriptions. The company makes use of SOAP and XML feeds to automate the billing process for the merchant. There is no charge for the SOAP service.
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