Qwiki seems to be spreading. Last month, it announced a new Creator platform for publishers and bloggers that’s already being used by ABC News and others. Now it’s announcing a partnership with Bing.
The companies say that Qwikis, which are essentially multimedia presentations, complete with narration, will now be embedded into Bing results, and they can be played directly inside the search page. Qwikis will initially be attached to the Wikipedia search results, but the plan is to expand the partnership to include “many kinds of search results.”
Obviously, this should help get the Qwiki concept (which can sometimes be a challenge to explain) in front of a lot more eyeballs, while Microsoft says this should take Bing further in the direction of being “more about doing and less about finding.” You can watch a demonstration of the integration here.
When Qwiki won the TechCrunch Disrupt startup competition in San Francisco in 2010, the initial version of the site drew some criticism for being little more than a repackaging of content from Wikipedia. At the time, founder and CEO Doug Imbruce insisted that the site was just a demonstration of the technology, and that the company had a much broader vision for transforming the way information is presented. It’s getting closer to achieving that vision today, not just with the announcement of the Bing integration, but also the broader opening of the Creator platform and the launch of a developer API, which together should make it possible for a broad range of individuals and companies to create their own Qwikis.
The company has raised $10.5 million from investors including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Greylock Partners, and Lightbank.
Qwiki is an industry leader in automated video production. Most recently, Qwiki released an iPhone app that automatically turns the pictures and videos from a user’s camera roll into brief, beautiful movies to share. The company’s initial product, an iPad application that created video summaries of over 3 million search terms, was downloaded more than 3 million times and named by Apple as the best Search and Reference application of 2011. After integrating this technology in the Bing Search...
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