After e-mail, it is online consulting for Sabeer Bhatia

NEW DELHI: The founder of Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia, has drawn up another online

venture with well-defined revenue streams. This time he plans to offer IT

consultancy online, based on the concept of knowledge arbitrage. "The

collective intellect of the Internet is far greater than the intellect of an

individual," says Bhatia. Therefore, this initiative is aimed at helping

fellow developers who encounter problems that could be easily solved through

collaboration. At the same time, it will allow engineers and IT professionals to

monetize their expertise by participating in the process.

The process is really quite simple. Companies that want to enroll for the

services have to register online with the site and pay a flat subscription fee

on a monthly basis and get unlimited queries answered online. The company, Arzoo,

in turn has a panel of experts to whom the query is flashed depending on their

domain expertise. The experts bid for the solution and the moderators at Arzoo

review the accuracy of the incoming answers before sending them back to the

clients.

Each question is personally handled by an Arzoo site moderator and the

moderators carry the onus for the result of the answers. Questions can be

submitted in any of these six categories: databases and tools languages,

networking, operating systems, Web scripting and programming and Web appliance

servers and API.

The initiative is solely targeted at corporate clients. The panel of experts

could be both working professionals and freelancers who can enroll with the

Arzoo panel of experts after meeting the requisite qualifications. Refuting

possibilities that contributing to Arzoo could bring in legal implications since

a lot of working professionals are privy to corporate secrets, Bhatia replied

that the endeavor would be to discourage experts from indulging in such

activities. "It is only a means of earning some extra income during your

free time. And what is the harm, since it is your knowledge base that you are

capitalizing to earn in dollars?" Supporting his argument, Bhatia says that

studies show that most online purchases have been made from the office so such

participation is not uncommon. Besides, experts bid for queries with which they

are familiar and spend an average of half an hour on each query.

Arzoo's flat subscription fees are part of an indemnity insurance pricing

structure wherein Arzoo will adjust the client's fees based on the amount of

usage they demonstrate over time. By handling the experts' bid online, Arzoo can

keep its costs low and offer the best pricing to clients.

Currently, it has a panel of 2,200 experts, of which 20-30 per cent are from

India. It already has two Fortune 500 companies and four small companies

enlisted as its clients.