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...
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