A new mobile text service promises to shed light on whatever is puzzling you, writes Karlin Lillington

We've all been there - travelling on a train, sitting in the pub with friends, or lying awake at night - trying to remember the answer to a nagging question. The name of the singer of a certain song, the director of a favourite film, the player who scored a famous World Cup goal in the 1960s - all infuriatingly elusive.

But what about building a business proposition around such memory lapses? A trio of wireless veterans in Britain thought it could be done, and 3.5 million queries and two and a half years later, they are adding Ireland to the market for their AQA - Any Question Answered - mobile text service.

Text a question (within certain parameters of decency) to the premium number 57275 and, for €2 (or £1 in the UK), one of the company's 650 researchers will return an answer, 85 per cent of the time within five minutes, says Paul Cockerton, marketing director, AQA, and one of the company's founders. The other two are Bill Batchelor and chief executive Colly Myers.

"There's a lot of times when you are out and about when you just really want to know something," he says, explaining the business plan in a nutshell.

If the idea still seems a bit bizarre, consider that 10,000 people a day in the UK don't think so, and fire off queries ranging from the silly (how many hot cross buns would it take to fill Buckingham Palace?) to the philosophical (what is the meaning of life?) to classic pub quiz fodder (name the Beatles' first three number one hits).

The track record of the founders certainly has helped establish the company. Myers is the former chief executive of Psion, the handheld digital assistant company whose products had a reverential fan base, and of Symbian, the company whose operating system in an early incarnation ran Psion handheld devices. More to the point, Symbian also runs three-quarters of the world's mobile phones today.

Both Batchelor and Cockerton also came from Psion.

"The one thing we loved about Psion was how passionate people were about the devices," says Cockerton. "We wanted to do something again that would bring us back closer to the consumer."

AQA opted for a premium number approach for their service so that they wouldn't be tied to an operator but could do a revenue share with operators. Half the cost of a call goes to the researcher who answers it and the remaining euro is split between AQA and the operator that carries the SMS, he says.

Once they determined that the company could be profitable under such a scheme, Cockerton says they had two worries: "that the service would take off like crazy and competitors would come in, as there really are no barriers to entry; or that no one would use the service".

By taking a low-key approach to launching the question-and-answers service - in the UK and Ireland they have relied mostly on word of mouth - they have managed to grow the company gradually to its current size without being overwhelmed.

And they are well known enough to be issuing a book next week called The End of the Question Mark, 190 pages of questions they've answered which promises to become a favourite for people setting pub quizzes.

Cockerton says AQA currently has about 20 researchers in Ireland but plans to increase this to 100. Many of their employees are retired people or students who can work from home at a computer. Questions come in randomly to researchers, he says, and about 30 per cent can be answered automatically from a company answer database (every query and answer goes into the database).

If a researcher can't answer a query immediately, it can be pushed to the bottom of their question queue. If this happens five times, the query is shunted to a "hard questions" queue which all researchers can see.

Because such queries usually touch upon an area of someone's special interest, they can almost always be answered, Cockerton says. If the service cannot offer an answer, the customer isn't charged for the text.

He says he expects Ireland to grow to become about 10-15 per cent of their total market and notes he thinks there's a market for about 150,000 queries a day from the two nations, 15 times the size of AQA today.

Cockerton attributes the success of the service so far to plain old customer service. They provide answers quickly the majority of the time. Researchers are encouraged to adopt an amusing or whimsical tone, especially for questions like "which came first, the chicken or the egg?".

He says many people use the service to find a good pub or restaurant or even train times - and the service also can be a source of evening amusement for groups in a pub who just want to fire off questions - half of all questions come in between 6pm and midnight. And they believe the majority come in from their key target market, young men between 18-35.

Researchers are told to steer clear of offering any specific financial, legal or medical advice in answers and will only offer a polite and bland response to lewd questions.

"We have to take the view that a questioner could be quite young", says Cockerton, though he wryly notes they do have a stock answer to a favourite off-colour question from men, asking how big their, er, manhood is. The standard reply from the AQA database: "Above average."

As he says, the job is all about maintaining customer satisfaction.

Some of AQA's questions

Q: How far could a car go on the fuel that it takes for a rocket to take off?

A: It takes 61 million megajoules of energy to launch a space shuttle. This is enough energy to drive about 20 million kilometres in an average car.

Q: Which creature has the longest sperm in the world?

A: The creature with the longest sperm in the world is the fruit fly. It is 10,000 times longer than human sperm and 20 times longer than its own body.

Q: What is godzilla's roar (screech) taken from? Is it from a goose?

A: According to director Masaaki Tezuka, Godzilla's sounds are a combination of contra-bass (his roar), lion growl (his growl) and cow sounds .

Q: Who appeared on the cover of Good Housekeeping this week?

A: Jamie Oliver became the first man in 70 years to grace the cover of Good Housekeeping magazine. The last time it happened was in 1937 with King George VI.

Q: Does a wildebeest make a sound? What does it sound like?

A: The wildebeest is also called the gnu. The name gnu is thought to come from the grunt that a wildebeest makes.