Kurani Interactive gets a shot of angel funding to get the Internet’s opinion on the fly

Kurani Interactive, developer of the Opinionaided iPhone application, announced today that it has secured $275,000 in funding from crowdsourcing angel investor Chuck Chesler and Al Angrisani, a former CEO of market research companies.

Opinionaided is an application for the iPhone and iPad that lets users post questions that any other user can answer. The idea is to get the consensus opinion of the Internet on matters ranging from fashion to which restaurant to visit. Users can post a picture and ask a question to go with it. Other Opinionaided users can then give the question a thumbs up, thumbs down or neutral vote and leave a comment with their vote.

Active users can become experts in certain categories and will receive badges that flag them as experts. So if users aren’t convinced that the rest of the opinions are right, they can seek out the opinions of experts. There’s also a social networking element to the app. Users can become friends with other Opinionaided users and track their activity. Friends on Opinionaided can also chat in real time, similar to chat services on Facebook and other social networking sites.

Opinionaided is one more app in a long line of question-and-answer applications that are seeing a lot of interest from investors. The biggest player in the space thus far is Quora, which has raised around $11 million so far. Facebook, the largest social network in the world, has also introduced a question-and-answer service.

But a large component to the success of the Q&A service is how quickly users can get responses. Quora is particularly speedy, and Facebook actually includes a number of questions in the right rail on a news feed to generate quick responses. Opinionaided has so far generated around 6 million responses to 80,000 questions. Kurani Interactive said the application had 3 million responses to questions in the past week alone.

The newest Q&A player on Apple’s App Store also looks like it has a bit of a jump on the rest of the market. Quora hasn’t released an official mobile application — although there is a version of its site optimized for mobile Internet browsers. It was appealing enough to investors to pick up the angel funding, and that brings Kurani Interactive’s total funding up to $775,000 after an earlier seed funding round.