“Questions about the divorce have been flooding into ChaCha all day, with news that the couple is splitting only 72 days after their wedding,” it says.

Before E! aired “Kim’s Fairytale Wedding: A Kardashaian Event,” ChaCha asked “a select group of users” how soon until the couple broke up. They answered as follows:

One Week (16%)
One Month (28%)
One Year (38%)
Never (16%)

Congratulations ChaCha users, I guess you didn’t need Wolfram Alpha for that one.

A few months back, ChaCha announced that it added knowledge from Wolfram Alpha, which as you may know, helps the ever-popular Siri answer some of your queries.

I wonder if Siri would’ve called it correctly.

In the first day of the ChaCha/Wolfram Alpha partnership alone, Wolfram Alpha answered 32,000 of ChaCha’s incoming questions, the company said.

Here’s an infographic about the expensive Kardashian wedding that we recently ran in one of our daily infographic round-ups:

Brilliance Loose Diamonds

“Search has always been a personal experience but the escalating amount of spam on the Web is driving search to become social, where communities and groups of friends can help call out the best of results,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of blekko. “Foodily’s trusted community of cooks and food lovers will be a tremendous resource to blekko searchers.”

We talked to Skrenta last week about Blekko’s Zorro update, search quality, and filtering. The search engine is now integrating hundreds of its “slashtags” into search results. These are at the root of the human curation element of Blekko.

“Foodily’s mission is to help everyone find the food they want and love, and share it with their social circle. We’re excited to play a role in helping blekko searchers find great resources on food, cooking and recipes,” said Andrea Cutright, CEO of Foodily. “The Foodily community is rising to the challenge of bringing the best recipe content to the top, so we can all enjoy quickly finding that next great meal.”

ChaCha says it has “increased its accuracy and database of information” by adding computational knowledge from Wolfram Alpha. “This partnership means Wolfram Alpha will allow ChaCha users to access computed facts that cover over 100 topics,” a representative tells WebProNews. “This is in addition to ChaCha’s “ask-a-smart-friend” database that has already answered over one billion questions.”

In the partnership’s first day, Wolfram Alpha answered 32,000 of ChaCha’s incoming questions, ChaCha says.

ChaCha is suing HTC over the trademark. ChaCha co-founder Scott Jones gave us the following statement:

"ChaCha has registered trademark rights in the CHACHA mark and has spent years building its rights in its CHACHA brand. 

ChaCha initiated the HTC action in order to protect those valuable rights that ChaCha has established in the CHACHA mark."

Interestingly enough, reports came out nearly simultaneously, that the company Xoom is suing Motorola over the Xoom name it’s using for its new Android tablet. 

ChaCha (the mobile phone answers service) has placed a significant amount of focus on the mobile space throughout the years, so it’s not as if a phone using the name is in a completely different category. I’m sure ChaCha would be cool with it if it had it’s own hardware button too. 

The ChaCha (the phone) does mark a significant milestone for Facebook, as one of the first devices to give the social network an actual hardware button, which should be huge for the already giant company. Think how much more sharing will be done as a result of such a button. Now think if such a button became as standard as a search button on mobile devices. 

That could certainly keep Facebook from going the way of MySpace anytime soon.

Original Article: According to reports, T-Mobile may start charging businesses extra for sending large amounts of texts over its network, beginning at the beginning of October. ChaCha, whose service is largely based on sending text messages to users, appears to be pretty pissed off at the notion. WebProNews received the following statement from ChaCha CEO Scott Jones, indicating as much:

“Given that the costs to deliver text are miniscule, T-Mobile already makes profits from what they charge their customers, aggregators, and publishers.  There, T-mobile is “triple dipping.”  We don’t see any reason for this, other than greed.

Known as an answers service, ChaCha will begin serving MMS ads to its users (ChaCha claims 15 million active monthly uniques). As mobile marketing becomes increasingly important, this might appeal to a range of advertisers. 

"This is a big deal for both our advertisers and users," says ChaCha CEO Scott Jones. "Many marketers view sight, sound and motion as major enhancements to their brand’s message, and we are now in the ideal position to support these objectives in mobile channels. Smartphones have whetted the consumer’s appetite for mobile, rich-media content. MMS allows media to finally reach virtually all mobile phones in a way that advertisers can have their messages seen and heard. Our users will benefit regardless of their phone type."

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 "ChaCha has grown to be the ‘smart friend’ millions of people turn to for all their answers, and now marketers can leverage these relationships by inserting media-rich ads in response to specific questions or keywords," says. Jones. "ChaCha MMS also enables marketers to capture device information so that audiences can be segmented by region, handset, or interest to achieve the highest return on investment. We are the only mobile answers service powered by humans, and are now the only one to provide MMS mobile advertising for our partners within an engaging one-to-one conversation."

The company says that in 2010, 73% of its mobile advertising campaigns resulted from renewals because engagement and response rates are demonstrably higher on ChaCha.                

Users are now able to ask and answer questions from their mobile devices and see the activity posted live to their ChaCha.me page and other social networks such as Facebook. Users can also get instant mobile alerts when someone else asks them a question, allowing responses while on the go.

"Since we launched ChaCha.me just weeks ago, we have seen explosive growth.ChaCha.me is fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter, and now our users can interact through SMS texting," said Scott Jones, CEO of ChaCha.

"This is significant because now anybody with a Chacha.me account can answer questions anywhere within the ChaCha service."

Other new features include enabling bloggers and websites to get live feeds of Q&A content posted automatically to their own webpage or blog via simple widget that ties directly to their ChaCha.me profile. Along with Facebook, ChaCha.me also offers integration with Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger.

Other features coming soon to the social network include allowing ChaCha.me users to search all other users by demographic, location, gender and age. Users will also be able to post and find out what others are doing with a new "what are you doing now?" feature.
 

"Search is not where it’s at" on phones, Steve Jobs said recently to reporters at the NYT. "People are not searching on a mobile device like they are on the desktop."

ChaCha tell WebProNews it has just answered its 500 millionth question (in less than two years). "Teens and young adults routinely ask ChaCha questions (about a million a day) from their mobile devices instead of using search providers since they return links instead of answers," the rep says. "Maybe he thinks searching within the Apps Market does not count. And since many Apps are just better Bookmarks the search activity may be less compared to Win Mobile etc. users…Was searching for my phone just the other day. Before that I was searching for an address, restaurant, and looking up a phone number — from my phone."

I think people are doing a fair amount of searching on their phones as well, and that certainly extends well beyond ChaCha’s offerings. Most of the people I know (myself included) do a pretty decent amount of searching on their phones (at least the ones who have smartphones). In fact mobile has enhanced search a great deal with things like voice search and location-based features.

We commented on Jobs’ comments on our Facebook page recently, and commenters seemed to think Jobs was a little off the mark on this topic as well.

We know Apple and Google are becoming big time rivals, even though Google search is still in Apple’s mix. Search also may be becoming a bit more diversified in the sense that how we search for certain kinds of queries is changing more and more, but I don’t think people are going to stop searching from their phones. If you ask me, they’re going to be doing it more as smartphone adoption continues to rise. But I could be wrong. I’m no Steve Jobs. 

ChaCha.me allows anyone who sets up a profile to ask questions directly to people or brands. The owner of the page can choose which questions to answer which will then be seen publicly.

ChaCha is promoting the service with Grammy winner David Guetta. He will help launch ChaCha.me while performing this week at the 25th Annual Winter Music Conference. Guetta will have his own featured page on ChaCha.me where fans can ask questions and receive answers. ChaCha said it plans to feature more celebrity pages in the future.

"David Guetta will answer numerous questions from fans and followers every day this week," says Scott Jones, CEO of ChaCha. "Some people might ask personal questions, but others may be interested in learning a lot more about how this superstar from France is transforming the music business in the United States.

"One of the most fundamentally appealing qualities of social sites like Twitter and Facebook is the notion that people care about what celebrities and friends are doing and sharing. ChaCha.me provides this forum for users, but also takes it to the next level with intimate Q&A interaction," said Jones.

ChaCha answers are now available via Facebook, Twitter, Texting 242-242, the ChaCha.com website, and its iPhone and Droid apps.

In the coming weeks ChaCha.me will include mobile functionality similar to the online version launching today.
 

"Across all platforms – mobile (SMS), online and now Facebook – we are up to nearly 20 million unique users per month," a ChaCha representative tells us. "Our run rate over the past several months has [averaged] 15 million uniques per month.  The user base is split almost half male, half female – with over 80% of users between ages 13 and 24.  We also answer over 1 million questions per day, and over 400 million answers have been served."

With an ever-increasing number of ways to access local business information, one might wonder what ChaCha brings to the table that can’t be found from other existing sources.

"Unique User benefits on ChaCha were the deeper questions, answers and info about the businesses, and in the future, the ability to get mobile coupons, join a businesses mobile lists, get discounts and more," she says. "These are the ChaCha value-adds over other sources, and features and content will continue to expand."

"We will be providing means for businesses to not only upgrade listings to add mobile and online coupons, but to add and edit top questions about their businesses – for example, say it is a Sushi place and a business wants to state the most popular item…they could provide that as one of their key questions and answers," she adds. "They will also be able to add mobile text-based loyalty lists where users can get updates, news and special from that business on their mobile phones."

February isn’t even over yet, and already 2010 has been a big year for local search. A lot of that has come from search giant Google, which could make for tough competition for anyone. Google has, for example, started showing mobile users "nearby places", allowing businesses to post announcements/coupons on their Place Pages, while also showing reviews from more sources, tailoring mobile search suggestions to location, and even suggesting competitors for local business searches.

Other sites and apps are taking advantage of consumer location-sharing, making local search more real-time in some ways. ChaCha has a lot to contend with, but clearly the company is confident it can compete as a go-to place for local business search. The company plans to expand on its local business features in he coming months.

Would you use a Q&A service to find local businesses? Comment here.

The ChaCha Facebook app allows users to ask a question to any of their friends on Facebook and the question is also automatically submitted to ChaCha. ChaCha says it will return an answer from its database of hundreds of millions of answers. Users can also select "add to profile" to get a permanent "Ask ChaCha" prompt on their profile pages.

Facebook users can also select "share" when they submit a question, and it will post to their friends walls. Users receive points for questions they answer and they will receive different titles which are displayed on a leader board.

"We are publishing this initial version of our Facebook application, which gives access to our fun and informative content within the Facebook community, but also encourages Facebook friends to provide answers too," says Scott A. Jones, Chairman and CEO of ChaCha.

"This socially-connected version of ChaCha can be particularly helpful for subjective questions, such as, ‘Where’s the best Thai restaurant, and what should I order on the menu?’"