AskMeNow, based in Irvine, Calif., is a division of Ocean West Holding Corp. and is currently only available in beta (or prerelease version), but its full-scale service will come out in the beginning of next month. Its concept is very straightforward: You send questions to the service by calling from your cellphone or emailing directly from a portable smartphone, and answers are sent back to your phone or hand-held via Short Messaging Services (SMS) or email within about a minute.

To answer your questions, the company employs real people who sit at computers in the Philippines, furiously researching the Internet (using data from content partnerships) trying to respond to your queries within three minutes. This doesn't always mean the response is correct. It simply means that the retrieved information was online somewhere. But our results proved rather accurate.