WebProNews

Tag: Qwiki

  • Yahoo Officially Acquires Qwiki

    A couple weeks ago, reports came out that Yahoo was close to a deal to acquire Qwiki. Now, it’s official.

    A Yahoo spokesperson tells WebProNews, “Today we acquired Qwiki, an app that turns pictures and videos on your iPhone into brief, beautiful movies put to music. We’re really excited about the possibilities this acquisition brings to our media, mobile, Flickr and video offerings.”

    “We will continue to support the Qwiki app, and we plan to integrate the Qwiki technology into Yahoo!’s experiences in the near future,” the spokesperson adds.

    Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Kara Swisher, who first reported on the companies being close to a deal put it somewhere around $50 million.

    Qwiki launched to the public back in January of 2011, with funding led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. At the time, we compared it to a Wikipedia in which all the articles were read to you in a robot voice while showing you related imagery. A great deal has changed with Qwiki over time, however.

    These days, Qwiki is a more focused on mobile storytelling with an app that lets users make little videos using pictures, music and other videos. The company shut down its web platform earlier this year.

    As for Yahoo, the acquisition train does not appear to be slowing down. Yesterday, it was Bignoggins.

  • Yahoo Said To Be Close To Buying Qwiki

    Yahoo Said To Be Close To Buying Qwiki

    Yahoo is said to be in the advanced stages of discussion to acquire Qwiki for $50 million. Kara Swisher at All Things D cites sources close to the company.

    Qwiki launched to the public back in January of 2011, with funding led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. At the time, we compared it to a Wikipedia in which all the articles were read to you in a robot voice while showing you related imagery. A great deal has changed with Qwiki over time, however.

    These days, Qwiki is a more focused on mobile storytelling with an app that lets users make little videos using pictures, music and other videos. The company shut down its web platform earlier this year.

    Yahoo has been buying companies left and right, and has been in the discussion for a number of other acquisitions. Tumblr (which hasn’t actually closed yet) is the big one, of course, but last week, news also came out about Yahoo acquiring conference call software company Rondee and photography software company Ghostbird Software. The company is also rumored to be acquiring Xobni.

  • Bing Adding Qwiki Presentations Among Blue Links

    Before you go off clicking on any of the blue links listed in a page of search results, Bing really wants you to have a chance to know a little something about your topic of search before you go diving off into the depths of the internets. Bing already incorporates small snippets of information about a topic among search results, courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica, and it also will display recent scores and stats of Major League Baseball games and players. Now, Bing wants to give internet users a warm, welcome handshake to topics and that handshake is called Qwiki.

    Bing announced today that users will begin seeing Qwikis, those surprisingly appealing interactive presentations of pictures and videos that are narrated by a calm female voice from the future, among the links of Bing’s search results. The link to open the Qwiki appears just below the Wikipedia link in the search results (see below).

    Bing Qwiki results

    As you’ve likely predicted, users will click the “Watch the Qwiki” link and the presentation will open up directly on the page.

    Bing Qwiki results

    The pictures used in the slideshow are actually links to other pages that will open up upon clicking, sometimes to other Wikipedia pages, to pictures uploaded onto Fotopedia, or maybe even to a page of related Bing searches (like when I watched the Qwiki for basil and then clicked on a picture labeled “lamiacae” that then opened up a new browser tab of Bing search results for the plant family, lamiacae). The Qwikis are only integrated with Wikipedia content, which explains why the narration you hear in the presentation will be the first couple of paragraphs from the adjoining Wikipedia article, but Bing says that eventually it hopes to include content from other search results.

    Qwiki and Bing may be on the verge of changing search into an interactive experience that has until now not really be tested. It’s ambitious, likely looking to produce active browsing instead of having a person sit there passively scanning over a bunch of similar-sounding links.

    “Search can be so much more than text and blue links,” said Doug Imbruce, the Founder and CEO of Qwiki. “For example, with today’s release, searches for ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ on Bing produce beautiful, interactive playable presentations that have demonstrated increased information retention.” Imbruce added that it’s time to start reshaping the way people think about internet search. “Looking ahead, Qwiki and Bing can help any content creator or web site owner help people do more through increased engagement.”

    Bing Search Director Stefan Weitz offered up this short demonstration of how Qwikis will appear in the results as well as what users can get from watching the presentations.

    The Qwikis embedded in the Bing search results are a pretty savvy counter to Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is essentially the same thing – the first bit of a Wikipedia entry, some pictures, a couple of links – but a lot less dynamic than what Bing’s introduced today.

    As far as the category of flair goes, Bing wins this round, but we’ll have to wait and see if this new feature is enough to inspire internet users to migrate from Google.

  • Sweet 16 For Wikis

    Sweet 16 For Wikis

    Today is the 16th birthday of the web’s first wiki. The web owes a great debt to Ward Cunningham for starting the first wiki 16 years ago today at Wiki Wiki Web (although that is debatable, I suppose, for wiki opponents). Without this, we would not have had Wikipedia (and interestingly enough, Google ranks a Wikipedia entry about Wiki Wiki Web over Wiki Wiki Web itself for a search for “Wiki Wiki Web”).

    Here’s a description of Wiki Wiki Web as described on its own Wiki:

    This website and the software it runs on were created by WardCunningham for the PortlandPatternRepository. It is home to an InformalHistoryOfProgrammingIdeas as well as a large volume of material recording related discourses and collaboration between its readers.

    The content is written by the users – people like you and me. Anyone can change any page or create new pages. Read the TextFormattingRules to find out how, and then go to the WikiWikiSandbox to try it yourself. Please use the WikiWikiSandbox if you want to experiment with how editing works. If you make a page you don’t want to keep, just replace its text with the word “delete”.

    There’s no question that wikis have come to be a dominant part of the Internet experience for many, many users. According to the comScore Media Metrix report released this week, Wikimedia Foundation (which runs Wikipedia) Sites rank number 13 in the top 50 web properties, based on unique US visitors alone. That’s more than Apple, the NY Times, and the Huffington Post. It’s just under Demand Media.

    Wikimedia Properties Rank on comScore Media Metrix

    Earlier this year, Wikipedia marked its tenth anniversary. Users have essentially increased at the same rate as Internet users in general – very close anyway.

    Wikipedia-Users

    Wikis seem to be winning out in the search engines too. After Google’s Panda algorithm update, wikiHow was one of the winners. DuckDuckGo, which made it a point to block content farms from its search results as it launched, even recently went so far as to include wikiHow content in an instant answer-style box for search results on how-to queries.

    “Most people only experience wikis as occasional readers of sites like Wikipedia or wikiHow,” wikiHow Founder Jack Herrick tells WebProNews. “Surprisingly these treasure troves of information are actually just a bi-product of the community collaboration that happens behind those information dense articles. It is this community collaboration that makes wikis so special.”

    “Humans have an primal desire to collaborate, connect and build something bigger than themselves. And wikis continue to be one of the best ways to collaborate with others online,” he continues. “I’ve met several wiki contributors who have told me ‘wikis changed my life’ or ‘wikis made me a better person.’ I don’t hear comments like that frequently about most other web sites.”

    “So yes, the fantastic information resources that wikis build are wonderful and worth celebrating, but the collaboration they enable among their communities are really what makes wikis so special,” he adds. “So thank you Ward Cunningham for sharing this beautiful gift with us 16 years ago today.”

    Herrick recently detailed the quality control process for wikiHow content with us here.

    @JackHerrick
    Jack Herrick    Happy birthday to wikis! The first wiki launched 16 years ago today. Thank you @WardCunningham for your beautiful gift. 2 hours ago via Twitter for iPad · powered by @socialditto

    @eekim
    Eugene Eric Kim    Happy Sweet 16, Wikis, and thank you @WardCunningham for everything that you do! http://bit.ly/gQPQMD 2 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    We continue to see innovation inspired by the rich history of the wiki. Take Qwiki, which opened up to the public just in late January, with funding led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. It’s not a wiki site exactly, as its name might suggest, but it does utilize info from wiki sites like Wikipedia to pull together information to create an image and video-rich Wikipedia-on-Steriods kind of user experience. It does call upon users to help improve “Qwikis” by suggesting images and videos. It also provides links to more info at Wikipedia after its videos finish playing.

    As a matter of fact, Qwiki made Wiki Wiki Web the focus of its daily Qwiki email today. “WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki, launched this day in 1995. Back then, people thought ‘wiki’ was a sport,” it said.

    View WikiWikiWeb and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

    View Ward Cunningham and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

  • How Qwiki Brings Interactivity to Information Consumption

    Qwiki, the startup backed by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim is, not surprisingly, gaining a lot of attention. The company can add winning TechCrunch Disrupt to its resume as well. So, what is this startup doing to gain all this attention?

    According to CeCe Cheng, Qwiki’s Communications Director, users like the experience that the service offers. While Qwiki has gained a lot media attention, she believes that it is largely a result of the favorable response from users.

    “People use Qwiki, and they really like it… we believe that part of the reason is because that this is the way that people want to get their information,” she said.

    In summary, Qwiki is an information resource that gives users interactive wiki knowledge through audio/visual presentations. As Cheng explained, Qwiki’s algorithms crawl the Web to assemble the most relevant information on any given topic.

    Although some have labeled Qwiki as a search engine, the company says it is not one. Cheng said that while Qwiki does possess some of the same qualities as a search engine, it plans on rolling out more products that will clearly distinguish the two.

    For example, the company is expected to release an iPad app in the coming weeks. Cheng hinted that it would be releasing more new features soon as well.

    As consumers, do you prefer receiving information through an interactive experience like Qwiki provides, or not?

  • Qwiki Opens Up to the Public

    Qwiki Opens Up to the Public

    Qwiki opened up to the public today in alpha form, after being in private alpha since launching in October. 

    Qwiki was in the news last week, as it secured a new round of funding led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and now the world can see what all the fuss is about. 

    Just what is Qwiki? From a user perspective, think about it as Wikipedia if the articles were read to you in a robotic voice while showing you related imagery, and offering you easy ways to share and embed the content. At least that’s how it appears. 

    Qwiki’s mission statement says:

    We are the first to turn information into an experience. We believe that just because data is stored by machines doesn’t mean it should be presented as a machine-readable list. Let’s try harder.

    Think of asking your favorite teacher about Leonardo Da Vinci, or your most well-traveled friend about Buenos Aires: this is the experience Qwiki will eventually deliver, on demand, wherever you are in the world… on whatever device you’re using.

    Here’s what a Qwiki looks like embedded:

    Qwiki has a long way to go before it becomes as broad a resource as Wikipedia, but given that it’s only just launched to the public in Alpha status, we can probably give it some time. 

    "Based on the overwhelming positive response to Qwiki’s private testing, I’m pleased to release the alpha version of our reference product to the public," said CEO  and co-founder Doug Imbruce. "We believe Qwiki has created a more organic method of information consumption by merging art and science and are excited to improve the product in response to more user feedback."

    "Qwiki is not search — it’s a new media format and a groundbreaking method of consuming information, said CTO and co-founder Dr. Louis Monier. "The future of Qwiki is to allow mass creation and customization of rich media via our platform, and our new public alpha features represent the first step towards that vision."

    I’ve been signed up for the private beta for a while, and I have to say I’ve simply enjoyed getting the daily emails from the service, which give you random facts for things that happened on that day in a different year.