Qwiki won Runner up for "Best Technical Achievement" at the Crunchies the other night. Fqwiki is a statement meant to illustrate how ridiculously naive we have become with respect to "innovative technology". Neither Fqwiki nor Qwiki belong even remotely in the same league as Google's Self Driving Cars (which won for Best Technical Achievement).
Building a great company is about more than a hacked-up prototype built in six hours and, with luck, Qwiki might achieve this status. At the same time, however, Qwiki is being disingenuous in promoting a nonexistent technological breakthrough that falsely sets expectations for what "technical innovation" actually means.
Misinformed investors and entrepreneurs will only bring us closer to a bubble that may some day pop. Don't let the hype fool you.
I couldn't agree more about the "great company" part. I am 99.9% sure that that Qwiki has more tech behind it than simply going for wikipedia articles. From what I heard at TC Disrupt, they have some content search & discovery tech behind it.
Many "great" companies took off because of good execution, not some huge technology breakthrough.
I have some reservations to people saying that $8mn is too large an investment on Qwiki. $8mn is a serious commitment and they don't invest that kind of money unless they see some real spunk in the idea and the team. Perhaps what QWiki has built is an infra layer designed to add scale to their effort. I have been an alpha user on Qwiki for sometime now and they manage to pull me back to their site with very interesting mailers - Qwiki of the day - which is not a trivial accomplishment imo, if they are doing it for a lot of their users.
Plus, as an application, the real power of QWiki isn't on the web - its on the mobile/tablets, particularly in education. Qwiki is in a great position to replace wikipedia as a quick intro to any topic for millions of students round the world - that itself is an interesting usecase for me - and they are achieveing this through technology...
Sigh. Tech startups aren't ever about the tech. That's not the point.
Qwiki isn't about panning around images and playing back TTS. I know that wasn't what the developer was thinking, but I find people making this mistake a lot. Thinking of Facebook as a basic CRUD app you could put together, etc.
These aren't tech startups: these are web startups. Web startups' main value is the experience, but until they have to scale there's not much value there. Early Facebook, from a technology side, is just a CRUD app that anybody could have written. The value was in the timing, execution, and market.
Tesla motors is a technology startup: they're doing something that nobody has done before with technology. Putting something like that in the same categorization as Facebook is an insult to the engineering challenges Tesla faced from day one.
Note: Of course Facebook now has a lot of technology, because they're scaling a website to be used by the entire world, but I'm talking about early-stage startups.
What we need is a better word for startups on Techcrunch. "CRUD app + Graphics" or "local social 2.0 buzzword-compliant little companies"
While I think they are great (and I use and recommend their product) I don't see Wufoo as a "tech" company. They're like Zappos -- a Customer Service company that happens to be run from a website. That isn't a 'tech' company. It's just a company. Having a Building/shopfront and selling shoes doesn't make you a "real estate" company.
Tech Startups are startups taht actually have a technology to sell or a massive technological innovation.
Companies like Isilon (had a $2.25B exit last year), or Google or Netscape or PrimeSense.
Tech startups are always about the tech. What's confusing you is that investors and successful entrepreneurs often focus on other essential ingredients that are often ignored.
I could imaging paying for a sponsored link at the end of the presentation or below the presentation if someone was watching a presentation on something relevant to my products/services.
The problem: People generally prefer not to read. Yet, people are curious creatures. If they could quench their curiosity without having to read, they will.
In Mac OS I have keymapped Option-S assigned to the built-in text-to-speech on the fly, so anytime there's text on any page that I want read back to me I can quickly do so with a keystroke.
You know what? I never use it. I generally prefer to read.
The problem is that by definition, people will not go to Qwiki for long-tail searches (because they won't have good content on them). And long-tail, specific, targeted searches/users is where the money is for sponsored links.
Or... It's about making the right product at the right time and reaching the right market. The problem (even if we consider the social one) that solved facebook wasn't that hard to solve. The timing and bootstrap / first users (universities) was the key. For Youtube the key timing was about bandwidth and for Google about technology/research (as well as a new search vs organize vision of the web).
I just saw Qwiki for the first time today and watched the Natalie Portman qwiki at http://www.qwiki.com/q/#Natalie_Portman and you can count me in as a fan.
The clone (viewable at http://banksytheluckystiff.github.com/fqwiki/) definitely does not compare. It's like comparing the first version of Yahoo to today's Google... and Qwiki hasn't even started to improve their product yet.
Obviously the author doesn't care for the qwiki format but they are being short sighted. It could be quiet useful, especially as it improves over time in areas of giving you options in how much depth you want, the voice synthesizer, etc, by providing just enough info in a pleasurable format.
What I do hate about qwiki is their name. It associates them with wiki's/wikipedia in my mind (without knowing what it is) and it personally is a major turn-off.
I actually like it and it feel it has some legs. In an era of TL;DR (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl;dr),it seems to be a good way to get a bunch of trivial information really fast.
The audience here may not be the target market. We spend a lot more time reading content on the www pretty intensely (well I do anyway), but a 2 minute presentation on a subject I am casually interested in seems worthwhile.
I watched both (well I forced myself to watch as much as possible, because its annoying and prefer to read than listening to it) and in terms of the content, it seems identical. I think fqwiki could be iterated on very quickly to include better visuals. Other than that, I really don't see a huge difference. What do you find to be the biggest difference to say it doesn't compare ?
CloudFare provides a great value, but how is it 'disruptive'? Seems like that word is becoming utterly meaningless. Being better at something than your competitors just makes you a good competitor it doesn't make you disruptive. Let's only call something 'disruptive' if it's destroyed an entire industry. P2P disrupted the music industry. Google and Wikipedia disrupted the local library.
Just being a new startup with a flashy website doesn't make you automatically 'disruptive' whether you're Qwiki or CloudFlare.
What I'm tired about reading are these startups who actually have invented no technology whatsoever, being called innovative technology companies.
Qwiki didn't invent the Text-to-Speech system they're using. And they didn't create any of the content. They made a flash file that plays back audio and video -- a technology they also didn't invent. What is remarkable is that technology investors (even really rich ones like a Facebook co-founder) are investing money into things that aren't even technological innovations at all. It's like even they don't know the difference.
Technology - the practical application of science to commerce or industry
Looks to me like they have applied the knowledge of Text-to-Speech, audio/video playback, content curation, etc. to the practical problem of communicating information.
Innovation is not only doing something new but also using existing knowledge and tools to solve a problem differently.
I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority would choose qwiki. If that's not proof that they are solving a problem differently, than we'll just have agree to disagree.
> I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority would choose qwiki. If that's not proof that they are solving a problem differently, than we'll just have agree to disagree.
It basically says, "I think Qwiki is solving a problem, and if you don't find my opinion proof enough, then we just can't agree on it."
I agree that it's not the most elegant way to state what I was saying. What I meant to say was:
I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority would choose qwiki. If you don't think that assumption is a safe assumption, than we'll just have agree to disagree.
Also in that sample of 1000 people the people who chose Wikipedia will have better understanding on their subject rather than the disjoint pieces spitted out by Qwiki.
1) They just received $8 million in funding to further develop their product. I.e. That money hasn't been spent making it a better product yet.
2) A few hundred lines of markup does not a product make. What about servers, security, user accounts, marketing, documentation, etc?
3) Polishing a product so it looks nice and has very few bugs is a huge amount of work. If he made a slick, bug-free clone I would be impressed.
3.5) ...especially with an automated system like this. It is easy to create something that automatically generates a shoddy result. It can be fiendishly hard to automatically generate something useful often enough for people to rely on you.
Not disingenuous at all. Qwiki won an award for technology innovation, the quick demo simply proved that their was nothing special or unique about Qwiki. Re your three points:
1) What does their future development plans have to do with anything?
2) What does server admin, marketing and documentation have to do wtih technological innovation?
3) What does debugging have to do with technological innovation?
I was responding to the claim in the title about "cloning" Qwiki. What Banksy did was nowhere near cloning Qwiki.
Turns out that Banksy is just claiming to have built a proof-of-concept showing that the underlying technology is simple. You are right that the three points I made don't have much at all to do with technological innovation. Point granted. :)
Qwiki's value is no longer in its website because the overall Qwiki site is not too complex, but the value lies within its brand. Winning the TechCrunch award, Qwiki is like TechCrunch/AOL's baby. they talk about it 24/7. Free publicity. 2ndly people know about Qwiki, it is now a person's first instinct when they see a Qwiki type of interactive website. Not everyone knows the site, but for those who does, interactive wiki is forever labeled as "Qwiki". That's something hackers cannot clone.
The same thing could of been said about twitter when it first came out. Recreating the feature set would of been very easy, but ultimately the feature set was not what made them successful.
While I don't find qwiki to be a good way to present data at all and it doesn't add anything for me to say this comes anywhere close is silly, it really proves about as much as someone whipping up a stack overflow clone with a question list with tags, badges and logins over a weekend.
As an aside, qwiki decided it would be good to start spamming out qwiki of the day to my email. Guess that is an opt out rather than an opt in....
Anyone here who digs Qwiki's approach to presenting info? I tried it a little bit, found it mind-dumbing, and promptly went back to wikipedia. Anyone found it good for kids maybe?
Building a great company is about more than a hacked-up prototype built in six hours and, with luck, Qwiki might achieve this status. At the same time, however, Qwiki is being disingenuous in promoting a nonexistent technological breakthrough that falsely sets expectations for what "technical innovation" actually means.
Misinformed investors and entrepreneurs will only bring us closer to a bubble that may some day pop. Don't let the hype fool you.
Yours,
Banksy The Lucky Stiff