Cluefly

What’s the problem

The Internet is a pretty good place to get answers.

But it runs into trouble with topics that are

Debatable

Ambiguous

Nuanced

Complex

Evolving &

Sample DANCE Questions

How can Islam call itself a “religion of peace”?

How come Asians are all

good at math? Why

are black athletes

better than white

athletes?

Are people really “born” gay?

It’s the 21st century. Why do minorities still obsess over race?

Why are women such bad drivers?

What are the hottest hot-button issues about?

Race Gender

Sexuality Ethnicity Culture Identity

Questions about these topics are the most frequently asked — and

furiously argued — on the Internet.

And the same points, often based on misconceptions, are made

again and again.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091010220811AA4S9mT

Example: Yahoo! Answers

No.

A search for “blacks extra ligament” gets 349,000 results.

And most of the top results are misinformed. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=blacks+extra+ligament&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

There are people trying to tackle the problem online — with insight and often, humor

But there’s no single site that brings credible answers to these hot-button questions together in one place.

Books and Documentaries

Wikipedia entry on race and sports

Academic Texts

?

Factchecking sites are now a central voice in political conversation — why not in other debates as well?

is the factcheck desk for the Internet

— an online platform for curating, aggregating and sharing authoritative answers to hotly debated, frequently

asked questions.

How it works

Open Access

Anyone can submit questions

Registered users can uprank, respond to and comment on questions and responses

Logically Organized Questions are put into categories as they are submitted, ensuring that questions are grouped into topics and reducing duplicate submissions

Expert Verified

Topic categories supervised by Experts

Experts provide and update Verified Answers, informed by the crowd

Active users can be promoted to Expert status

VERIFIED ANSWER

THIRD-PARTY LINKS

RESPONSES FROM THE CROWD

Modular Structure

Users can select and assemble questions to create their own customized FAQ pages on the site

Modular Structure

These Custom FAQ pages can easily be linked to by or embedded in external websites.

Publicly Embeddable

<embed>

Publicly Shareable

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091010220811AA4S9mT

Uh…maybe you should check out this: http://cluef.ly/31747

Custom FAQ pages or individual answers can also be linked to in online conversations via the Cluef.ly “shortlink” service.

<cluef.ly>

Business model

Race, identity, culture focus

ADVERTISING

Expand focus to broader range of topics; build out FAQtbase platform

ADVERTISING CONSUMER INSIGHTS EXPERT REFERRAL

Roll out FAQtbase platform for enterprise

PLATFORM LICENSING

NOW YEAR ONE YEAR TWO

BETA

Revenue Sources

§  Advertising, expert referral, insights

§  Intranet: Proprietary licensing of Cluefly’s FAQtbase platform for use in internal knowledge sharing

§  Extranet: Licensing of Cluefly as a white-label, external-facing ExpertNet

ENTERPRISE INTRANET

EMBEDDED EXPERTNET

Opportunity and competition

Market Size

Wikipedia now has over 17 million articles in 270 languages, receives over 400 million visitors per month, and — based on 2010 estimates from Business Insider — would be valued at over $5 billion if it took paid advertising. Pearson PLC estimates that Wikipedia gets approximately 20% of all online reference user traffic

$100 billion

Competition

Revenue model

Advertising (Cluefly.com); subscription (FAQtbase)

TBA Donations Subscription

Content source Crowd + experts Crowd Crowd Published commercial sources

Content validation

Expert verified None (author identity transparent)

None (author identity hidden)

Trusted content creators

Distribution model

Public site; partner sites; proprietary intranets

Public site Public site Proprietary intranets

Summary §  Central repository for authoritative answers to hotly

debated, frequently asked questions — initially focused on race, culture and identity.

§  Crowdsourcing to generate hot-button questions and current, relevant responses. Experts to validate and update “certified” answers

§  Ideal solution for a intranet-based knowledge system

§  Powerful tool for identifying what users/customers want to know — and for turning staff into public experts on those topics

The factcheck desk for the Internet