Cloe

Yesterday morning I found this in my mailbox: Curious, I texted "Cloe". Here's our correspondence: First off, great marketing. Secondly, what a delightful experience. Cloe spoke personably and did enough research to know that I'm a UofO graduate and the Ducks were playing later that night. Some people might find that creepy but I've given up on privacy. Cloe is remincent of ChaCha, a human-powered, SMS-based search engine before smartphones were ubiquitous. Cloe is also similar to Ethan (cc @gliechtenstein) but without the friction of needing to download yet another app (although this also comes with other downsides). Cloe is an invisible app, which @kylebrussell and I have chatted about (we both still need to write about this), in which the the product itself is embedded within existing interfaces (in the case SMS/iMessage). That said, I'm curious to learn more about Cloe and the makers' plans to turn it into a scaleable business (if that's the goal).

whoa. how are they sending via iMessage ?! this most not be done programmatically.

Hey everybody, Wanted to introduce myself, I am one of the co-founders of Cloe. Hope everyone is enjoying the service, we've been absolutely swamped lately, but we're chugging along! We have a wait list at www.meetcloe.co and feel free to watch the two videos to get a better feel for what we do!

Hey Guys. Whooah! First off thanks for all the interest. We are doing our best to service as many users as possible. For those who have been redirected to the waitlist we are clearing it up quickly.

Welcome, @hildebrandchase, and thanks again for the restaurant recommendations. What's your plan with Cloe and why will this work where others like ChaCha and Aardvark (sort of) failed? I'm naturally skeptical about the scaleability and business model of person-to-person Q&A. Although, Path Talk is onto something here. cc @davemorin

As for how Cloe will succeed where others have struggled is predicated upon our laser focus. For example, we do not prescribe to the jack of all trades king at nothing approach. We don't aim to field queries that you could find quickly through a Google search (I.e movie times, weather and sports scores) Our focus is on curated SMB recommendations. This is absolutely vital to not only scalability but also profitably. To delve into those two areas further 1. Scalability we've built out a proprietery tech algorithm that allows us to answer peoples queries effectively and efficiently (can currently handle thousands of users per day) as for 2. Profitability we have several revenue streams and were currently testing them out.

Reminds me of a more thought-out version of Aardvark and I like it. Sometimes you just need the right answer, right now from a human. As Cloe learns my specialties, I'd gladly answer real-time queries via text message to help the better whole. Nice work @hildebrandchase.