Hacker Shows It Doesn’t Take $8 Million to Clone Qwiki
newsgrange.com
newsgrange.com
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
Many "great" companies took off because of good execution, not some huge technology breakthrough.
That said, your Fqwiki is still cool.
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...
Qwiki isn't about panning around images and playing back TTS. I know that wasn't what the developer was thinking, but I find people making this mistake a lot. Thinking of Facebook as a basic CRUD app you could put together, etc.
Tesla motors is a technology startup: they're doing something that nobody has done before with technology. Putting something like that in the same categorization as Facebook is an insult to the engineering challenges Tesla faced from day one.
Note: Of course Facebook now has a lot of technology, because they're scaling a website to be used by the entire world, but I'm talking about early-stage startups.
What we need is a better word for startups on Techcrunch. "CRUD app + Graphics" or "local social 2.0 buzzword-compliant little companies"
While I think they are great (and I use and recommend their product) I don't see Wufoo as a "tech" company. They're like Zappos -- a Customer Service company that happens to be run from a website. That isn't a 'tech' company. It's just a company. Having a Building/shopfront and selling shoes doesn't make you a "real estate" company.
Tech Startups are startups taht actually have a technology to sell or a massive technological innovation. Companies like Isilon (had a $2.25B exit last year), or Google or Netscape or PrimeSense.
What problem is it really solving? Could you ever imagine yourself paying for Qwiki?
The problem: People generally prefer not to read. Yet, people are curious creatures. If they could quench their curiosity without having to read, they will.
In Mac OS I have keymapped Option-S assigned to the built-in text-to-speech on the fly, so anytime there's text on any page that I want read back to me I can quickly do so with a keystroke.
You know what? I never use it. I generally prefer to read.
The clone (viewable at http://banksytheluckystiff.github.com/fqwiki/) definitely does not compare. It's like comparing the first version of Yahoo to today's Google... and Qwiki hasn't even started to improve their product yet.
Obviously the author doesn't care for the qwiki format but they are being short sighted. It could be quiet useful, especially as it improves over time in areas of giving you options in how much depth you want, the voice synthesizer, etc, by providing just enough info in a pleasurable format.
What I do hate about qwiki is their name. It associates them with wiki's/wikipedia in my mind (without knowing what it is) and it personally is a major turn-off.
Doesn't seem quite as magical anymore, eh?
CloudFare provides a great value, but how is it 'disruptive'? Seems like that word is becoming utterly meaningless. Being better at something than your competitors just makes you a good competitor it doesn't make you disruptive. Let's only call something 'disruptive' if it's destroyed an entire industry. P2P disrupted the music industry. Google and Wikipedia disrupted the local library.
Just being a new startup with a flashy website doesn't make you automatically 'disruptive' whether you're Qwiki or CloudFlare.
Qwiki didn't invent the Text-to-Speech system they're using. And they didn't create any of the content. They made a flash file that plays back audio and video -- a technology they also didn't invent. What is remarkable is that technology investors (even really rich ones like a Facebook co-founder) are investing money into things that aren't even technological innovations at all. It's like even they don't know the difference.
Technology - the practical application of science to commerce or industry
Looks to me like they have applied the knowledge of Text-to-Speech, audio/video playback, content curation, etc. to the practical problem of communicating information.
Innovation is not only doing something new but also using existing knowledge and tools to solve a problem differently.
I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority would choose qwiki. If that's not proof that they are solving a problem differently, than we'll just have agree to disagree.
> I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority would choose qwiki. If that's not proof that they are solving a problem differently, than we'll just have agree to disagree.
It basically says, "I think Qwiki is solving a problem, and if you don't find my opinion proof enough, then we just can't agree on it."
I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority would choose qwiki. If you don't think that assumption is a safe assumption, than we'll just have agree to disagree.
Very few startups would qualify as truly innovative, and disruptive:
1) They just received $8 million in funding to further develop their product. I.e. That money hasn't been spent making it a better product yet.
2) A few hundred lines of markup does not a product make. What about servers, security, user accounts, marketing, documentation, etc?
3) Polishing a product so it looks nice and has very few bugs is a huge amount of work. If he made a slick, bug-free clone I would be impressed.
3.5) ...especially with an automated system like this. It is easy to create something that automatically generates a shoddy result. It can be fiendishly hard to automatically generate something useful often enough for people to rely on you.
1) What does their future development plans have to do with anything? 2) What does server admin, marketing and documentation have to do wtih technological innovation? 3) What does debugging have to do with technological innovation?
Turns out that Banksy is just claiming to have built a proof-of-concept showing that the underlying technology is simple. You are right that the three points I made don't have much at all to do with technological innovation. Point granted. :)
As an aside, qwiki decided it would be good to start spamming out qwiki of the day to my email. Guess that is an opt out rather than an opt in....
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