Beepl the next Quora?
London-based Beepl announced substantial seed funding at its launch last summer, and is now finally launched out of private beta and made available to the general public. The service takes advantage of the web culture that consults the internet for any (and all) questions, and emphasizes expertise in their Q&A platform. “Get answers from a real-time network of subject experts and people you trust,” the company says.
Users sign up with Twitter or Facebook and once in can connect their account to LinkedIn. Right off the bat, users can post a question or browse questions to answer, offering “direct questions” which is a private messaging system for users to directly tap the expertise of others.
The company offers a “Beepl Rank” with a number of times a user has posted or answering a question, tapping into the gaming element of web users, giving some form of an incentive for being active in the community.
Rather than assume a user is an expert of some sort, Beepl determines as much through a user’s social graph by semantically searching the social networks they have connected to the Q&A service.
Beepl’s co-founder, Steve O’Hear quit blogging at TechCrunch.com to become the co-founder. TechCrunch writes, “It’s the startup’s use of this semantic technology that makes it different from Quora. Instead of experts having to look for or follow a question, the questions essentially “follow” the experts.”
