The intended audience is consumers, but WayIn's real target is big business. It hopes to amass a vast database of consumer sentiment, which it will then sell to businesses along with the analytics tools to parse the data, for marketing and other purposes.

Businesses can also pay to slip their own questions onto the service. For example, if Ford needed to choose a design for the grille of its next Mustang, it could post two photos and ask people which one they liked best. "We can give them an answer in two hours, and it will be statistically significant," McNealy said.

A friend approached him with the idea about a year ago, he said, soon after Oracle took control of Sun. McNealy is the company chairman and the biggest investor in a group that has raised US$6.3 million in funding. He recruited a team of former Sun Java engineers to build the service.

WayIn also has an interactive TV component, the part McNealy seemed most enthused about. "We've solved the interactive TV problem," he declared.

Players can enter forums where people chat and answer questions about live events, such as the Oscars or a big sporting event. This helps broadcasters, according to McNealy, because it will encourage people to watch events live, instead of recording them for the next day and skipping the ads.