Beepl Adds a Personalized Twist to Q&A ~ Pare News

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Name:Beepl

Quick Pitch: Beepl is a Q&A site that automatically surfaces relevant questions for each user.

Genius Idea: Applying semantic analysis to Q&A.

Another Q&A site is arguably one of the last things the Internet needs. Formspring directs questions to individuals. ChaCha will ping you an answer from one of its guides within minutes. Yahoo Answers and Ask.com have the forum-style answers covered. And Quora has become a haven for expounding on esoteric topics. But when former TechCrunch blogger Steve O’Hear traded pontificating on tech to instead help create it, he noticed an unoccupied corner of the Q&A space (which I guess would make that space a hexagon).

“On most Q&A sites you sign up and declare what you're interested in,” O’Hear told Mashable. “In real life, your interests spike and change all the time…A smarter system where topics follow you, rather than you following them, would essentially make Q&A scale better.”

The product of this observation, Beepl, launched on Monday. Using semantic technology, it analyzes users’ connected LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook accounts to determine what they’re interested in. Then it presents them with questions that fit those interests.

As with Formspring, Beepl users can also ask each other questions directly. A browse tab sorts out popular and “interesting” questions, and there’s a search bar for users with specific curiosities in mind.

But Beepl, which ran a three-month-long private beta with less than 1,000 members, is not going to compete with established Q&A sites as a database or reference. Its point — and only chance to claim a corner of the Q&A hexagon — is to automatically aggregate questions that fit each users’ definition of interesting, creating better-quality answers in the process.

"If you have to go to browse all time,” O’Hear says, “then we're not doing our job right."

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: Beepl, bizspark, q&a

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