This is one of those services where you have to ask: what's the business model? Basically, ChaCha is providing a free service where users can text message ques

This is one of those services where you have to ask: what's the business model? Basically, ChaCha is providing a free service where users can text message questions to them and they pay other people to do searches to get the answer. So, how do they make money? In a decade, we might all have phones good enough to google things for ourselves (rather than texting someone else to do it for us). I can't see why an iPhone or other smartphone user would text a question rather than getting an answer themselves. Their plan seems to be building their network into a quasi-SPAM like environment where some questions get paid-for answers: "your advertisement will be integrated naturally into the answers users receive". Maybe they mean that in addition to "organic" answers (appended to the end), but SMS only carries 160 characters so that's a tight squeeze. It's a cool service and great for settling fun bets with your friends or finding information when on the go. However, I guess I don't see how it will become viable especially as more and more people move to smart devices that they could google things on themselves just as easily as asking someone else by text message.