What Do Microsoft, eBay & The Carlyle Group Have In Common? - PHONE SEX

[matcom]

<snip>

What do Microsoft, eBay and the Carlyle Group -- employer of a number of former high-ranking government officials -- have in common?

Phone sex.

And pet psychics.

The two West Coast tech titans, along with the influential Washington financial firm, are investors in a small San Francisco company called Ingenio, which offers pay-per-minute telephone advice on a variety of topics.

Some of those topics, such as accounting and personal finance, will cause no eyebrows to be raised.

Others might seem, well, a bit unusual for respectable outfits like Microsoft and eBay, not to mention Carlyle, which in recent years has counted among its associates the likes of ex-President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker.

One Ingenio service, NiteFlirt, essentially serves as an online mall at which customers can choose from among hundreds of purveyors of pay-per-minute phone sex.

Another service, Keen, is a dial-a-psychic site that links the spiritually needy with assorted pay-per-minute clairvoyants, pet psychics, astrologers and people claiming a pipeline to "voices from beyond."

Ingenio supplies the online forum through which independent practitioners of these exotic skills seek customers, as well as the technology to facilitate calls.

The company also gets a 20 percent cut of all calls made through NiteFlirt and Keen, which typically cost between 99 cents and $4.99 a minute (although some calls can run considerably more).

Microsoft declined to comment on its relationship with Ingenio.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/08/03/BUGSFE1S5J1.DTL

[GOPisEvil]

1. Sex sells. This proves it.

As if there were a doubt before this.

[Goldom]

2. that's a pretty loose connection

to claim that they're doing anything. They invest in a company, one of which's sub-companies does such a thing. Only one step from saying that everyone who has stock in Microsoft is supporting phone sex lines.