A New Twist on Mobile Search

A British mobile phone service is catering to the busy person's desire to know—right now—answers to questions both whimsical and weighty

by Mark Scott

Business ideas sometimes come from the most unlikely places. Take Any Question Answered (AQA), a British-based mobile phone service company that charges a flat-rate of £1 ($2.06) to answer any question customers throw at it via text messaging.

AQA's novel approach to mobile search got its start after founder and Chief Executive Officer Colly Myers was stumped by a friend who wanted to know, of all things, the word for a baby herring. When Myers wasn't able the find the answer surfing the Web from his mobile phone, he sent a text message to a friend who looked it up online from a PC and texted back a reply.

The No-Scroll Search

The answer to the question—a baby herring is called a "slid"—wasn't nearly as important as the epiphany Myers experienced. Why not, he thought, set up a mobile service for people who want fast answers to everyday questions when they're away from their PCs, but don't have the patience to scroll and click through the responses offered via mobile search? In 2004 the South African native, who ran smartphone software maker Symbian from 1998 to 2002, started AQA with about $2 million of his own money.

Now, four years after Myers' light-bulb moment, AQA answers more than 16,000 questions a day from customers, ranging from serious ("What is the gross domestic product of Latvia?") to silly ("What color underwear am I wearing?"). By 2008, Myers figures, AQA will be fielding more than 50,000 questions daily. The cost of the service appears directly on customers' phone bills or is deducted from their prepaid balances, so AQA needn't get involved in collecting service charges.

The company says it manages to answer three-quarters of incoming questions within five minutes and 95% within a half-hour. But it makes no formal promise of response time because some obscure inquiries can take hours to research. All questions are eventually answered—somehow. Revenues are growing smartly, topping $5.7 million last year, up from $846,000 in 2005. AQA earned $413,000 in pretax profits in 2006 after a loss the year before.

A Sustainable Model?

The question, of course, is whether AQA is just a novelty or has latched onto a sustainable growth market. Analysts are impressed so far. "AQA has tapped a rich vein that has the potential to work very well," says Mark Grant, head of broadband and media at telecom researcher Analysys in Cambridge, England. "The service has grown remarkably with little publicity."

It's not alone, though. A pair of former UBS (UBS) bankers have set up a rival company in Britain called Texperts that also charges £1 to answer any question submitted via text message and claims to be growing at 20% per month. "Our service has hit a chord with people looking for a better way to use their phones," says co-founder Sarah McVittie, who adds that the startup is evaluating sponsorship deals that could lower prices by placing ads after individual answers.

The longer-term concern for both AQA and Texperts is that as handsets and the wireless Web continue to improve, mobile consumers may prefer to fetch answers themselves from Google (GOOG) or other search engines, rather than paying somebody $2 to do it for them. Early evidence shows, for instance, that Apple (AAPL) iPhone owners surf the wireless Web far more than users of earlier, browser-enabled mobile phones.

Myers isn't breaking a sweat. After all, the vast majority of today's handsets are still designed primarily for voice calls and text messaging—the perfect setup for services like AQA.