Noticed that the service Ether which lets you setup a billing by phone service officially launched in “zeta” status yesterday.

I missed collecting my private beta invite back on May 3 (got filtered into spam bin). Did you get yours, Sterling? And if so, what do you think? I’m in there and listed now and plan to be trying this out over the coming weeks. It’s strictly a BYOC (Bring Your Own Client/Customer) setup, there is no search engine for listings yet. I’ll be surprised if that doesn’t change once they get enough people in there.

I can think of a few possible uses:

- consulting (lots of web-based possibilities: marketing, SEO, software, blogs, programming, etc)
- technical support
- offering as part of a package deal, people call the number and you give them a product along with the personal call. I’m seeing an opportunity here which I’ll be sharing another day in greater detail.

Ether is a mainstream only service, so no adult phone operations. The create list form is pictured above. You can register and create a listing in a few minutes. You’ll be generated HTML code you can copy/paste to your site as well as an 800 number with extension to start marketing. Will be interesting to see how this service does. As I mentioned when I first read about it, I’m definitely curious about the possibilites.

Also curious to learn how others might be using Ether and there are some onsite community tools: forums and the official Ether blog.

Ether reminds me a bit of Flavorasofa that I wrote about in November on my Mac blog. With Flavorsofa you can buy & sell by the minute with your Apple computer and iSight camera. I see Dori Smith is listed on the front page as being available for JavaScript advice. Can’t go wrong with her and/or her equally talented partner Tom Negrino. I got the privilege of meeting Dori in person at Search Champs v4 earlier this year. I haven’t used Flavorsofa yet either, but then I haven’t gotten much use out of the iSight camera to date. I can see how adding video might be even more compelling for prospective clients/customers. (Note: If you’ve ever seen pictures of a green background behind my desk and/or in the background of pictures and wondered what that was, it is our green screen for video.)

Any readers have ideas how they might use Ether?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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