Buy & Sell Expert Advice with Skype, BitWine and PayPal

Only last week we published a review of BitWine – a social network intended for people to get expert advice on a wide variety of subjects. And today I have received their press release about Bitwine partnering with Skype.

As you well know, Skype 3.0 was launched yesterday. This new version includes quite a nice package of third-party applications. At least I toyed with some of them and I really loved them. Bitwine – called a Trusted Advice from Real People Service – is one of these new third-party extras. With the BitWine Extra, Skype users have the ability to provide paid advice or instantly purchase the knowledge needed using Skype and PayPal.

Alon Cohen, BitWine’s cofounder stated:

We followed bloggers and answer leaders on different forums, and a recurring theme was the desire of skilled, knowledgeable individuals to be able to charge for the advice that they had been dispensing for free. By combining the power of Skype’s rich media audio and video communications, we can now open our service beyond dispensing advice to a whole set of diverse rich media services ranging from music lessons to language tutoring to securing a second opinion on legal and medical issues.

You may take a look at the Extra, rate it, recommend and leave your comment here. After downloading the new Skype you simply use Extras Manager to find BitWine (choose Do More/Get Extras from Tools menu). BitWine is located in Community group (Where else would you expect to find it anyway?). After you download and install the plugin you are prompted to register with BitWine right from within Skype – there’s no need to go to BitWine and register to get advice.

Currently the BitWine Taskbar only works with Windows XP, but Macintosh version is promised to come soon. With the Taskbar you may initiate search for experts in the field you are interested in, call them, view your BitWine history of calls, view advisor information, add credit to your account using PayPal, send checks after your call is completed. You can even record your calls.

In addition to features for selling and purchasing expert advice, BitWine offers an interface for bloggers to invite readers to call them for personal discussions that can be converted to revenue in real time.

I guess for any Internet professional this new tool will become an additional source of online-generated revenue. And this all sounds very promising. I’ll be looking forward to your comments about your experience with BitWine for Skype - both selling and buying advice.