Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, last year’s winner, Qwiki, took the stage to give an update on their business. We originally noted that they may be the future of information consumption. But that information was largely pre-packaged at the time. Today, they’ve starting to give people the power to make their own Qwikis.
CEO Doug Imbruce announced the Qwiki Editor today. With it, publishers will be able to create their own Qwikis. For example, Imbruce showed off a Qwiki made for this TechCrunch Disrupt. This turns the roughly 3 million reference topics that are on Qwiki now into a possibly limitless experience. → Read More
Wibbitz, a new service that functions as sort of a “play button” for the Web, has just raised a seed round of approximately half a million. The service is similar to former TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki, in that it, too, automatically generates videos on the fly using the content found on a given website.
But unlike Qwiki, Wibbitz is positioned as a tool designed specifically for publishers who want to provide an easy-to-digest video summary of an article or articles’ content. → Read More
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. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt: San Francisco 2011 winner Qwiki has a hot iPad app (250,000 downloads in 11 days) and plenty of cash. But one thing they no longer have is cofounder Louis Monier. He’s left the company, he tells me, to join Proximic as Chief Scientist.
And that means Monier won’t be attending Disrupt next week in New York to help hand over the Disrupt Cup to the next winner. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki launched its iPad app in the App Store a less than a week ago and after 11 days has hit the quarter of a million downloads milestone. This is notable for an iPad app, especially when compared to other highly publicized iOS app milestones; It took iPhone app Instagram six days to hit 100K, SoundTracking two weeks to hit 250K and FourSquare a whopping seven months to get to 60K users.
Qwiki PR rep CeCe Cheng tells me that Qwiki.com has “millions of users” but that the Qwiki app, which lets users see notable Qwikis around them in map format, has already eclipsed pageview traffic on the Qwiki site by 5x. By the end of the day tomorrow it’s estimated that the app will hit 300K users after only two weeks. Individual user sessions are now averaging 24 minutes. → Read More
A couple weeks ago, Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce came by my office to talk about his new iPad app (watch video below), but he wasn’t quite ready to show it. This morning it finally hit iTunes, where you can download it for free.
In many ways, Qwiki was made for the iPad because it is like a visual Wikipedia. Even when the startup won TechCrunch Disrupt last September, it was already working on an iPad version of its multimedia search/information consumption service. It is so much better on the iPad, where the narrated animations come to life and become swipeable. But the best part of the new app are the maps. You can see any entries pinned on a map for any location, or find places near you that have Qwikis. → Read More
Ever since Qwiki won the last TechCrunch Disrupt in September, it’s been working on an iPad app. In fact, one of its overexcited developers showed me a peek back then. Well, it’s come along way since then, and Qwiki is currently working on the finishing touches before submitting a real app to the iTunes store sometime in the next few weeks.
Qwiki founder and CEO Doug Imbruce dropped by my office today to give me a preview. Of course, I tried to get it on video, but he wouldn’t show me a demo on camera. But he did talk about it, and you can see what the main screen looks like in the video above. The iPad app will have “a very interesting geography feature,” Imbruce hints. I’ll let you guess what it is. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki is on a roll. The visual search startup raised $8 million earlier this year from a number of well-knowninvestors including early Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. And today, the startup is announcing that it has received $1 million in new funding from Lightbank, the investment fund of Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky. This brings the company’s total amount raised to $10.5 million.
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. → Read More
I was honored to have been selected to launch my social rewards and analytics company, Badgeville, this past September at TechCrunch Disrupt. Badgeville made it to the final round of the Startup Battlefield and won the Audience Choice Award. As a result of our success at TechCrunch, we’ve had the opportunity and good fortune of selling over $1 million in Web-based software, securing 25 clients with 1 billion monthly page views, raising $2.5 million in series A funding, and growing our team from five to 20 people with three offices around the world.
In the first 30 days following Disrupt, our website received 20,000 visitors, often with over 1,000 visitors per day. We were impressed and, at times, overwhelmed by the amount of qualified leads we received as a direct result of the publicity spurred by the event.
Since then, when I first meet an entrepreneur, they are frequently interested in the key factors that contributed to Badgeville’s successful launch. I thought it might be helpful for others to consider our story when evaluating their options when it comes to introducing their companies to the world. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki launched publicly today after a week filled with the news, most notably that of an $8 million funding round led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and YouTube founder Jawed Karim. Qwiki, for those of you who haven’t been following the hype, basically reads heavily Wikipedia-sourced articles out loud with photo and video accompaniments. → Read More
Buoyed by news that early Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin led an $8 million investment in the startup, TechCrunch Disrupt winner and visual search startup Qwiki has hit no.1 on Google Trends ‘Hot Searches’ in the U.S. That’s a pretty impressive feat for a startup that was virtually unknown six months ago. And the company is still in private alpha.
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 startup’s technology is no doubt disruptive and could become a completely new way in which we consume information. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki has closed its $8 million series A financing, which I first reported a couple weeks ago when it was midway through the round. Now we know the investors, and it is a very interesting group. The largest investor who led the round turns out to be Eduardo Saverin, the early Facebook co-founder who was pushed out of the company but walked away with enough shares to make him a billionaire.
Saverin watched Qwiki’s demo at Disrupt streamed over the Internet from Singapore, where he now lives. Saverin reached out and met with the founders, and they clicked. → Read More
Qwiki, the visual search startup that won the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt last September is in the middle of raising as much as $8 million in a series A financing. According to an SEC filing, it has already sold $5 million worth of the round. Both venture capital firms and individuals are investing. It appears that a large part of the round ($4 million so far) is being taken up by a pooled investment fund from Felix Venture Partners, at least according to this separate SEC filing. The company is still raising money to complete the round.
Qwiki has already raised $1.5 million in seed capital from angel investors including Keith Rabois (from PayPal, Slide, and now Sqaure), Shervin Pishevar (SGN), an Jawed Karim (the third YouTube founder), and Elad Gil (Google, now Twitter). The company was founded by Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier (who founded AltaVista). → Read More
This is too funny not to post. The screen grab above comes from Qwiki, the visual search engine which came away with the top prize at our last TechCrunch Disrupt. Qwiki is still in private alpha , but it essentially assembles a visual narrative for millions of topics by pulling together images and text, which is read out loud by a friendly, female robo-voice.
When you search for “AOL” in Qwiki, it prominently features the slide above showing AOL’s precipitous decline in subscribers from 2001 to 2009. It is amazing how a picture can say it all, even if it is outdated. That slide sums up the perception of many people, and algorithms, out there when you mention AOL. (Qwiki relies completely on its algorithms to select images). → Read More
The world is starting to get a first hand glimpse of TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki. And one of the things they’re noticing is this – Qwiki has no qwiki for Qwiki.
In other words, the site turns up no results for the query “qwiki,” and apparently a lot of first time users are using that as a test query. Just like lots of people type “google” into Google, or “wikipedia” into Wikipedia. And, yes, a surprising number of you also type “techcrunch” into our own search box.
Qwiki knows millions of things, the site says. It gathers data from resources like Wikipedia, Flickr and Yelp and then present that data in audio, video and image formats. Even obscure restaurants bring up cool results. It’s probably a good idea for them to add their own company into their database. Because people really want to see the Qwicki qwiki. → Read More
When Qwiki won the top $50,000 prize at TechCrunch Disrupt a few weeks ago, after much celebrating, co-founders Louis Monier and Doug Imbruce promised the service would start to open up privately in October. Today, they are making good on that promise and launching in private alpha, gradually letting in the 50,000 people who have already signed up for access. But if you are reading this post and are one of the first 1,000 people to sign up at this special link, you can get in now and start trying it out.
Qwiki is somewhere in between a visual search engine and a highly interactive and entertaining Wikipedia. It assembles information on the fly for millions of topics, bringing together images and text in a truly magical way. I’ve been playing around with it and learning all about Jellyfish, Kanye West, black holes, Thomas Keller’s Per Se restaurant, Google exec Marissa Mayer (who was one of the finalist judges), great white sharks,, and even my hometown. → Read More
Yesterday, at Disrupt it took a long time for the judges to decide to award the top prize to Qwiki, the visual information consumption service that presents information in a fluid assemblage of photos, videos, and spoken words. It’s the kind of service that would demo really great on an iPad, where you want to just sit back and watch as information is presented to you. Although the co-founders Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier showed a concept video of an iPhone wake-up app based on the service, they only actually showed it working on a laptop in Flash. During the deliberations backstage, the question was raised whether it would even work on the iPad.
Well, it turns out that it will and Qwiki already has an iPad prototype in development. One of the Qwiki engineers milling around backstage after the awards ceremony showed off one of the iPad prototype’s features (the ability to zoom a video to full-screen in the middle of a Qwiki). The engineer kind of has a Double-Rainbow moment over it. SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar, who is an investor in Qwiki, captured the video above. → Read More
The votes have been tallied. The judges have weighed in. A battlefield of twenty-seven startups was whittled down to a final, elite group of seven. And now the winner has been chosen: Qwiki has taken the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.
In addition to a $50,000 grand prize, the company has just been handed the Disrupt Cup, taking over possession from Disrupt NYC winner Soluto. Upon receiving the cup, CEO Doug Imbruce exclaimed, “Let’s change the world!” → Read More
In the late 1980s, Apple created a few concept videos about a device they called the Computer Knowledge Navigator. These videos came up recently when Apple unveiled the iPad, because the machine in the videos is a tablet computer. But that’s about all the iPad has in common with this conceptual device. Instead, a new startup launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, Qwiki, is much more like the futuristic computer in the videos.
To be clear, Qwiki isn’t a piece of hardware. Instead, it’s a piece of software meant to run on the web and as an app on mobile devices. What it does is present to you data about millions of topics in an extremely interesting and visual way. Imagine if someone created a movie highlight reel of Wikipedia pages — that’s sort of what Qwiki is like. You search for something — a topic, a person, etc — and Qwiki talks to you, telling you all you need to know about what you searched for, while also showing you key things about the subject or person. → Read More
