BusinessWeek has just published an article entitled A New Twist on Mobile Search which gives some details on the leading “mobile find” companies in the UK, naturally Texperts was mentioned.

The article includes some exciting news on the Texpert service:

Co-founder Sarah McVittie…adds that the startup is evaluating sponsorship deals that could lower prices by placing ads after individual answers.

I’ll blog more about this another time, but for now please post any thoughts you have on the balance between the cost of the service and introducing advertising.

Some interesting information on some of our rivals is their pay model for researchers:

“They only have to pay researchers when texts come in,” says Analysys researcher Grant.

Thankfully us Texperts get paid even if it is quiet, so there is always a pool of Texperts ready to answer questions at all times of the day, and it helps to retain high quality Texperts and keep us motivated. Also, Texperts not on a question help each other out…sometimes when I’ve been stuck a dozen other researchers have stepped in to help out and come up with the answer!

More on our rivals:

The company says it manages to answer three-quarters of incoming questions within five minutes and 95% within a half-hour.

Unless there is a sudden deluge of questions or an answer is particularly complex nearly all questions to Texperts are answered within 10 minutes, and certainly none take over 30 minutes. When I’m out and about and using the Texpert service myself it is because I want an answer fast. Of course the difference is that Texperts only charge for answers so we can ask for more information to get the question answered quickly, whereas our competitors charge per question so they can’t easily ask for clarification.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 by Paul Fairbrother and is filed under In the Press. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.