Bitwine – Professional Advice over Skype

I have for sometime been interested in highlighting different ways with which the tremendous talent in Pakistan is able to tap into the global market and make a buck or two in the process, since we continue to face a number of hurdles which include visas to economic restrictions by the Government of Pakistan. The Internet era should in fact melt away the boundaries of intellectual trade but sadly users in Pakistan remain crippled with no access to a Paypal account as discussed previously. Surely, we then easily miss out on the wealth that eludes us due to bureaucratic red-tape.

In the effort to locate possible streams of revenue for people, I happened to stumble upon a very interesting site called Bitwine. This is a place where one can go to get professional advice on any issue, could easily be compared to a system like Google Answers and Yahoo Answers, both of which I saw to be slow and cumbersome, where one has to sit down and type a question and then you sit in hope of quick and correct response.

Bitwine takes the process a step further, it has slowly started to aggregate a number of professionals who are willing to share their advice with anyone willing to pay for their hourly rate. Literally anyone can be an expert as long as you have a specialty. Experts can be anywhere from computer specialists, bird experts or more specifically in the case of Pakistan we may even have a professional ‘mobile snatcher’ who might give advice to the world on how to snatch a cell phone.

Quite simply, leave it to your imagination and sign-up, set your rate and wait for someone who might share the interest and he/she will call you via the Skype portal, you don’t even have to remain online to receive the call as Bitwine can even setup an appointment with your client deciding on a mutual time to initiate the discussion.

Personally I see a tremendous potential in this concept as it merges the concept of Internet telephony to real people, other sites have tried but have more of a US presence like Ether who don’t have Pakistan in their international call list since they physically make the call. So for Pakistan an VoIP solution is perfect and with even a decent dial-up connection, one can easily make a little pocket change for all the hot-air you may choose to deluge out to your clients.

I, as a dentist also see a potential in the concept as it allows me to share my expertise (though I can’t perform any treatment) but can surely give good honest no-financially motivated second opinion on any/all dental problems. This service can even be used for primary consultation (tapping those people who have no dental insurance, or are too lazy to drive to a local dentist) or even second opinion to confirm a treatment in progress. (We dentists can deny all we want, but globally there is a significant rise in dental malpractice where dentist are slowly becoming financially motivated in prescribing treatment, which is unethical but thousands of ignorant people fall through the cracks). I have listed myself on this service and am available to offer dental advice.

Try out Bitwine for yourself, maybe it can generate a steady stream on income to help you achieve your goals.