Internet Start-Up Promises Direct Line to Expert Advice

A certain segment of the population has already proved itself willing to pay for a particular type of conversation over the phone.

Now, an Internet start-up backed by the people who brought you EBay is setting out to explore how far that business model can be extended.

How much will people pay to ask strangers about nice restaurants in Milan? What about how much to spend on an engine overhaul? Or how to hurry along a roasting Thanksgiving turkey?

“It’s EBay for chat. Parties come together over a negotiated price to have a phone conservation,” said Reed Hundt, the former Federal Communications Commission chairman who is advising Benchmark Capital of Menlo Park on this and other start-ups.

Here’s how Keen.com, which is set to launch today, is supposed to work: Experts offer to talk on certain topics. Their names are listed in a searchable database that shows whether they are available at a given moment and how much they charge per minute for the advice.

If a consumer clicks to be connected, Keen.com will automatically dial the telephones of both parties and connect them. After the discussion, a disembodied voice asks the consumer to press a number between 1 and 5 to rate the expert. The company takes a percentage of what the expert charges.

The ratings are compiled and posted next to the expert’s listing. In theory, the higher the rating, the more the expert may be able to charge for chatting in the future.

But Keen.com may lurch a little in the beginning. In a demonstration last week, the system didn’t put through a call at first and then charged more than the listed amount per minute.

Karl Jacob, chief executive of the 15-employee San Francisco company, said the problems were being fixed. And he said the concept would prove its worth quickly.

“While there is an incredible amount of information on the Web, it still lacks the power, simplicity and depth of a live conversation with someone who actually understands the information,” Jacob said.

The bigger problem is that while the company has a Yahoo-like hierarchy of help topics, it has not yet lined up any experts to take the phone calls.

So Keen is offering 100 free minutes of long-distance time to those who volunteer early. (Chatting may still cost more.)

Exp.com, which was launched in July as Advoco.com, also matches information seekers and experts that get rated by users. But the initial communication there is by e-mail, with follow-ups arranged by the parties themselves.

Jacob said his site, which has $7.5 million from Benchmark and a patent pending, is aimed at a broader audience.

Keen combines the matchmaking and bidding models with a voice connection like talk radio.

Jacob and Hundt said that could evolve in unexpected ways--picture Tiger Woods talking to 100 people at once at $10 a minute per, or Texas Gov. George W. Bush doing a virtual fund-raising dinner.

Telemarketers could even reverse the charges, paying people to listen to their pitches, Hundt said.

Ultimately, Hundt said, “It’s the killer app for voice over Internet protocol”--the nascent movement toward speaking through personal computers. That would eliminate the need for an extra phone line and the wait while Keen.com connects the parties.

But that’s a ways off: For now, Keen should probably concentrate on getting its site to work as advertised.

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Joseph Menn can be reached at joseph.menn@latimes.com.