Welcome to the ChaCha Corporate blog!
As this is the inaugural post of the blog, I’d like to give you an overview of where we have been as a company.
ChaCha was conceived by Scott at the end of 2005 while writing a speech for the National Academies of Science (see the video above). Soon after that he brought Brad Bostic on board. Brad’s natural energy, ambition, and successful track record as an entrepreneur made him an excellent fit as our President and Chief Marketing Officer.
Soon after that our founding group of employees started coming aboard. Tom Cooper, formerly from one of Brad’s companies, Bostech, came on as our Chief Technology Officer. At the same time I joined in the “everything else” category. Working out of a small yellow house (known as “The Yellow House”) on Scott’s property we poured the foundation for what would become ChaCha. Soon after, people flocked to come work for one of the hottest and most buzz-worthy companies in Indianapolis. A team of A-list employees assembled to fuel this people powered search engine, coming from companies like eBay and Apple. This group of “rock stars” are one of the main reasons we were able to attract investment from people like Rod Canion, Jack Gill, Mort Myerson, and Jeff Bezos.
After several months of incubating in the Yellow House ChaCha was ready for prime time… or so we thought. In addition to being featured in notable publications like Wired’s Compiler blog, John Battelle’s Searchblog, Search Engine Watch. we were also featured in a three-minute segment on Good Morning America. As much preparation had gone into gearing up for this moment, the flood of people coming to visit us brought down our servers - we had no idea we’d be so popular!
While we did have some volume issues with visitors, we had no volume problems with the amount of Guides that wanted to join our virtual workforce. Soon after the segment on Good Morning America we were flush with 30,000 Guide eagerly waiting to share their knowledge en masse with the people that needed it.
We quickly solved those minor load issues and with a workforce of that size amassed we were ready to focus on driving traffic and making user-facing enhancements to the site as well as enhancements aimed at augmenting the Guide’s role. We did a complete website overhaul, changed the layout of our SERP, and made some serious enhancements to the usability of the Guide Application. For those of you who don’t know, our Guide Application is essentially the cockpit from which our Guides get connected to users looking for answers. It allows them to send results back to the user, allows us to index those results for later use, and facilitates the communication between both parties that gives us such a unique advantage in searching for precisely the right results.
As always, we’re constantly striving to improve our user experience. Parcel with that is the ability for our Guides to contribute knowledge easier and more effective. On that point we dedicated a significant amount of time to redesigning the Guide Application. What was formerly a downloadable, Java-based application that was available only on Windows is now a streamlined, Web-based application that will eventually have functionality far beyond what is currently available.
Currently, we’re working on what many people around here think is our most exciting venture to date: Text ChaCha. One of our project managers, Chris Lenzo is going to talk more about that so I’ll spare the details here. Suffice it to say that we’re on to something that’s potentially huge here. We’ve been working like crazy to meet all the deadlines necessary to make this happen in time for our official launch of our premium text (sms) service.
We’re coming up on a very exciting few months. I hope you come back to check out the progress we’re making.
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