| Website | answers.com |
| Category | Consumer Web |
| Employees | |
| Description | Information and answer service |
| Total | $45.4M |
| Angel, 2008 Yossi Vardi | |
| Series A, 1/99 Mort Meyerson Mark Tebbe | $300k |
| Series B, 4/99 Ron Conway Bob Lessin John Sculley Jon Medved | $1.36M |
| Series C, 9/99 Dawntreader Ventures Garage Technology Ventures Israel Seed Partners | $2.75M |
| Series D, 5/00 Flatiron Partners Goldman Sachs Highland Capital Partners | $28M |
| Debt, 6/08 Redpoint Ventures | $13M |
Answers Corporation (previously GuruNet) owns and operates Answers.com and WikiAnswers. Answers.com is an advertising supported information reference site aiming to be the internet’s “one stop shop” for information. It covers over 4 million topics from over 180 dictionaries and encyclopedias. WikiAnswers, previously known as FAQ Farm, was acquired by Answers Corporation in November 2006. It’s similar in concept to Yahoo Answers, but unlike Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers is in the form of a wiki. This allows users to change and hopefully improve old answers.
In July of 2007, Answers Corporation announced the intent to purchase Dictionary.com’s parent company, Lexico Publishing, for $100 million in cash. Lexico also owns Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. As of November 2007, the deal had not officially been closed.
In June 2008, Answer agreed to the private placement of up to $13 million of convertible preferred stock and warrants to Redpoint Ventures.
| Website | Answers.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Tags | information-portal |
| Website | wikianswers.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | 2002 |
| Tags | wiki, questions, answers, qa, community |
WikiAnswers.com a wiki-based Q&A project powered by contributors from all walks of life. Anyone can ask, answer or edit questions, building a global Q&A database, covering all topics.
The basic philosophy is that everyone has knowledge or a passion to share, and everyone should have the chance to contribute that expertise to the world. On WikiAnswers.com, users can ask a question on any topic and get a cooperatively written, human-generated answer.
Like on Wikipedia, WikiAnswers.com users can harness the power of the wiki-model to improve content. Unlike Wikipedia, WikiAnswers.com is not an encyclopedia, it’s a question-and-answer system. Contributors are encouraged to add to and improve each other’s answers instead of asking and answering the same questions over and over again.
Contributors are encouraged to keep an eye out for vandals and spammers. There is also a team of over 500 volunteer Supervisors who are contributors especially dedicated to helping WikiAnswers.com Q&A grow in a collective and productive way.
