Battle of the next-gen online consultancy tools: BitWine Versus Skype Prime

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Did you ever have this dream:…about sitting somewhere under a palm-tree, far away from traffic jams, you boss, living there and just make some money online occasionally? It will become a reality and for some it already is.



With that in mind I had a closer look at an application called BitWine and found myself a nice terrace in the south of Portugal to try it out. First let me explain what BitWine is. It is much like Skype, in fact it uses Skype as a tool where you can talk to people online. You thus can share your expertise with people you have never met before but who are trusting on your expertise in their specific area of interest. BitWine has a nice layout and easy website taking you one step at the time, helping you to subscribe as a BitWine expert.
After subscription, you download a toolbar, which settles at the bottom of your screen and which you can make to disappear at will. No annoying pushy toolbars here, just the plain basics.

Talking about basics, one of the best features of BitWine is its’ simplicity. They understood what we want to see in order to assess a profile and some-ones expertise. You can share your video to your audience by uploading a video-profile to Youtube and copying the code or hyperlink to the profile. I mentioned it over and over again, but a good video-profile is a great enabler to build ‘confidence’ on the internet especially when money is involved.

The BitWine team only concentrated on using best practice tools to integrate with. I already mentioned Skype, but it also interacts with PayPal so you can fully benefit of all the PayPal payment protection and insurance during your BitWine experience.
Using it with clients I noticed that people sometimes didn’t understand that I was going to charge them for it. BitWine helps to streamline that process as well, because you can have endless conversations using the tool without charging anything, the meter only starts ticking if and when both parties agree to it. Very reassuring to customers and they can always bailout without having to pay.

For BitWine advisors that means that you have to agree with your customer where the counter starts running, which part of the conversation will be charged. Naturally you can contact me to help you with some ideas about that.

So installation was easy, using it even simpler. And it worked! All I needed was my laptop and a wifi connection to be online. Payment was automatically done, it was already there on PayPal when I looked at it 10 seconds later. Furthermore, when I closed the application I noticed that the experience could be rated as well. Best practice consultancy portals such as Guru.com and Elance always used rating systems, but this one is instant giving much better feedback to the real experience.

One reader informed me about a similar feature which will be in Skype 3.1 Prime beta. I had a short look at it and can tell you that it is no-where in the same league as Bitwine and clearly targeting a non-quality marktet. There are no quality ratings (and who wants to talk and pay to someone if he can't be sure about the quality of the advisor?), commission for Skype is very steep (30% !) and the maximum allowed fee is 2 Euro per minute (which self-respecting senior consultant will work for that?)...

Since that first review a few months ago, thousands of new BitWine consultants have joined. The success strengthens itself as more people are joining. The areas of expertise have increased as well.

This week I spoke to Alon Cohen, co-founder of BitWine, who assured me that BitWine is coming to your mobile platform or phone as well soon. They even intend to make a version for Mac OS X with the upcoming Iphone in mind. They even have a solution for Second Life now, which any self-respecting web 2.0 networking company should have these days.
That might be another great enabler. Can you imagine meeting people from under your palm-tree in Real life on a business location in Second Life enabling making money in Real Life…No? I can understand that that might sound a bit too far off, but it might prove a real winner and a first moneymaking enabler for Services on Second Life…

So where is the catch you might ask? Interviewing the team of BitWine I am perfectly sure that there isn’t one. In the past I frequently noticed collaboration or referral tools that promised a lot of money to its’ subscribers, but in fact where not even having an integrated payment system. BitWine has been made around PayPal and Skype and that is a winning strategy.

Alon was also very honest on where BitWine will earn it’s money from (something else you don’t often hear from web 2.0 companies…): for now they are doing it for free, but in the future they will ask for a modest commission on each deal. No deal, no expenses for the BitWine consultant and that is something I like too. Often you have to pay for a service like Elance and you discover that no business comes in at decent fees…


Summary
BitWine is build around best practice and is totally basic, no-nonsense. That has worked for all the (now) big names such as Google, Yahoo, Skype and Ebay. It will be in the same League, it just needs time…


Key-web 2.0; factor Points (1-10); Remarks

1) Manage and view profile; 9; Good: simple user interface. Video & ratings!

2) Manage contacts; 3; Not build for that. Suggestion: integrate some networking tools to it. So that you can see who’s connected to whom. It will instantly make the first quality network (now there’s a thought..)

3) Communication options; 9; Email, Skype-integration

4) Effective business use; 9; Simple, hurray for PayPal integration

5) Growing potential; 9; Huge, who will invest or take it over?

6) Money making potential; 7 Depends on the insight of their staff

Total; 46; Verdict: Best-Practice..

If you want personal advise regarding your online strategy, just call me, I became a Bitwine advisor too…