Market Your Advice Online

Pay per call company Ingenio announced a service that enables experts to charge per hour to give their advice. Ingenio provides the phone number and handles the billing, and the expert takes calls either on their phones or through Skype.

Ingenio is using VoIP as the back end for Ether, and takes a 15 percent cut for facilitating the transaction. The company is targeting accountants, tech support services, and wine experts.

This seems like a relatively limited niche as charging per hour for advice isn't something that many companies do.

But perhaps the technology could be broadened for hosting virtual conference calls through a website. Imagine that instead of a web chat, you could take calls through your website and have a system to automatically manage the queue. You wouldn't be required to setup an account and pay the hefty telecom fees if it were all done through IP. And it could be ad-supported as people listening in would have to be looking at something on their screens.