TechCrunch Disrupt winner and alum Qwiki took the stage today for an update on news from the startup. What makes Qwiki so compelling is its ability to generate media on the fly that combines text, audio, and animated photos. It presents information in a highly visual way, assembling photos and spoken text from Wikipedia and other sources to create visual guides to millions of topics.

The company recently launched its iPad app in the App Store, and quickly gained an impressive number of downloads. And the company also raised $9 million in new funding.

The company will soon allow you to “Qwiki yourself,” meaning you can create a personal Qwiki of the social data about yourself available on the web. The feature will combine photos and information from Facebook and other social media sites.

Qwiki has also added a number of new employees, including Navin Thukkaram, Chief Operating Officer; Brad Whitaker, VP of Engineering; and Matthew Liu, VP of Product. The startup’s cofounder Louis Monier just left the company to join Proximic as Chief Scientist.

Crunchbase

• QWIKI

Company: Qwiki

Website: qwiki.com

Launch Date: October 2009

Funding: $10.5M

A “Qwiki” is a short, interactive story: a drastically improved information experience provided via interactive video. Unlike traditional rich media content, all Qwikis are created on the fly from web sources (without any human intervention). Today, our technology produces 3MM+ interactive, narrated Qwikis describing all the topics on Wikipedia - complete with relevant images, video, and structured data imported from linked sources. These Qwikis are embeddable anywhere on the web and compatible with all iOS devices. Via the release...

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