For all of us who sell our knowledge and expertise by time, the launch of the new service Ether is cause to celebrate.
Ingenio, Inc. today announced Ether™, a new voice-commerce application that enables the sale of services over the Internet. The announcement was made at the Supernova 2006 Conference, where Ether was selected from hundreds of companies to participate in the Connected Innovators program due to its extraordinary potential to create new markets and shape the connected future of distributed computing, communications, media and business.
By combining today’s most powerful communications tools – the Internet and the telephone – Ether empowers people to sell what they say. With Ether, anyone with something valuable to say can make money from live phone conversations with their customers. Traditional service providers like computer consultants, therapists, and accountants, as well as online personalities, such as bloggers and celebrities, can use Ether to monetize their web presence and engage audiences in a meaningful way.
“Tools like AdSense have sought to make it possible for people to monetize user-generated content based on clicks, but Ether helps people leverage content to monetize their time,” said Greg Sterling, founder, Sterling Market Intelligence. “It creates a range of interesting e-commerce opportunities for experts who sell advice rather than products.”
As a distributed technology, Ether facilitates connections where sellers have already established trust with their audience, such as blogs, websites or talk-radio shows. Sellers earn money while Ether takes care of the rest, managing the scheduling, communication, billing and payments between sellers and their customers.
“Ether’s combination of phone advice plus the ability to charge for digital content opens up all kinds of possibilities for web users,” said Michael Arrington, author of the TechCrunch blog. “By connecting people via calls or email and setting up a billing mechanism between the two parties, Ether’s functionality is bringing something entirely new to the table.”