Something in the Ether

I read with interest on Techcrunch that a new website described as ‘the eBay for services’ is about to be launched. This happens to co-incide perfectly with a plan I have to give tech support advice over the phone- precisely the kind of thing that Ether is being set up for, being a marriage of voip and a kind of eBay system.
Where I live in Spain, people are afflicted with a strange plague known as ‘Telefónica’- the giant ex-monoploy company which owns the telephone infrastructure in Spain. Whereas in the UK people talk about the weather when they need something to say quickly, here people moan about Telefónica, and it is the one thing which unites all the different communities where I live- Catalan/Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Moroccan, South American, British, they all love a moan about TF.

Telefónica has an English-speaking helpline, which is actually pretty good of them as they don’t really need to, the only trouble is that they refuse to give any tech support for their broadband services in English, preferring to send out badly trained and often rude sub-contractors who charge a fortune just for turning up, and intimidate older foreigners by speaking rapidly in Spanish so that they have no idea what was wrong with their ADSL or why they suddenly have to pay €80 for this guy’s 5 minutes of work.

So I’ve decided to offer a telephone support line to help English speakers avoid this plague, and make me some money in the process- I’ve installed Telefónica’s ADSL many times so I know exactly what the problems are and their solutions, and I can talk people through it over the phone. This Ether thing sounds really good, I thought.

I was thinking of using my azulcom number and getting people to pay with PayPal but I don’t really want to run the risk of them getting all the info they need from me and then ‘forgetting’ to pay me, and asking for money before you’ve barely even said hello seems a bit off to me- at least with Ether they will know exacly how it works before they speak to me.
So I’ve done a bit of research on Ether, and it turns out that it is basically a re-run of an old idea which was called Keen. This is now a tarot and psychic site (can you believe people pay $6 per minute for advice they have no idea is going to be remotely accurate?! there is surely one born every minute, and I can feel my slumbering psychic abilities starting to awake…). Tom Keating has done the background on the service here . The comments on the Techcruch page sound a note of warning:

‘Wait, I don’t get it. Keen.com was doing this for forever. And now if you click on professional services on Keen’s homepage (which is now all psychics) you get taken to ingenio.

Keen users almost always only wanted psychics, Britney Spears, or phone sex, despite the company wanting to provide a place for tech support to happen. (I know, I’ve seen their search logs).

So this is just a relaunch of the unwanted services of Keen.com, no?’

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people using the service to sell psychic or sexual services, however I would rather it went for a bit more ‘upmarket’ image because the image of their business will inevitably reflect on your own.

We will wait and see; I’ve signed up to beta-test it and if they let me, I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

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