Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble | Hacker News Reader

Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

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Is this that moment in time where because popular opinion says we're in a bubble, we're actually NOT in a bubble?

Just food for thought - check out http://www.qwiki.com/for-publishers.

Let's say that they pick up a reasonable number of tier-1 publishers into this format.

Heck maybe they already have commitments and that was part of their pitch in raising the additional $8m.

How would that change your perception of their valuation?

Beyond that, look at the "team" page.

Content monetization is a HUGE area of opportunity online and that's one heck of a team they've compiled - would you rather give those guys $8m and bet on a huge one or throw your money into the stack at AOL's public offering?

I think the OP is forgetting that what the product does now is largely irrelevant to a good investor. It's what the product can or will do that makes it worth investing in.

I don't know about Qwiki, but these sort of seemingly unlikely capital rounds are often something that happens to well connected startups with business management savvy people behind it (either in the company's executive team or among its early stage investors). These people simply know how to raise money and spin businesses around, and they have access to sources of capital that the average hacker doesn't.

To a hacker trying to get a complex project off the ground on pocket money, $8 million sounds like a fantastic sums, but there are many circles in which investing this amount of money in people you're connected to is trivial, regardless of market mood. It's not even necessarily the case that this is bad investment. If the investors believe, for whatever reason, in the company's executive team, it's probably because they are counting on them to somehow grow the company into a viable business. Many such companies, for example, will be spun into consulting, services or b2b companies you'll never read about on techcrunch, but which at the very least make a modest return on their investment. The fact that Qwiki is very unlikely to become the next huge internet phenomenon doesn't mean that it's a bad investment - it only has to not die and grow into a business worth more than its current valuation.

Unfortunately, there's only so much that a great team can do with a really lousy idea. One of the things pets.com was supposed to have going for it was a CEO (Julie Wainwright) who had been successful at multiple previous ventures, who'd been specifically picked out for the post by one of the VCs (Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad). That wasn't enough to keep the business going.

pets.com is an amusing piece of Internet history, but it is also a rounding error. For every pets.com there are thousands of companies that lost a (relatively) small sum of money and hundreds that made a small return.

actually I think pets.com might have been Hummer Winblad's first losing investment. in any case they admitted afterwards that it was a mistake on their part -- they were worried they were getting to the opportunity late and overcompensated. so it really was a classic bubble situation.

And that's the problem. Being good at "raising money and spinning businesses around" doesn't mean these guys are good at making new technologies or constructing profitable businesses in the long term.

Of course, but this is extremely common. Most money changing hands in the form of investments isn't very productive. Ultra successful hacker startups are the exception, not the norm.

If the author is correct and all Qwiki is doing is reading wikipedia and maybe some of the related sources then yes it is unbelievable that they have gotten funding.

It also makes me realize that most of my business ideas are way too complex in an effort to provide real value. I throw away ideas like Qwiki because I wouldn't feel like I'm providing much value. I need to shift my focus to creating dead simple, but very pretty websites and see what sticks. :)

The thing that bothers me about Qwiki is their "technology" is just a smoke and mirrors reproduction of things we see in the movies when a robot or A.I. talks to the characters. It's made to look and sound like A.I. except what they're doing doesn't involve machine learning or anything A.I-related. It's a simple mashup with a well-oiled marketing campaign (Techcrunch) behind them.

They raised a seed round of $1.5M to build a proof of concept and have now doubled down and raised $8M. What is bothering about that, isn't it ideal to "get something out the door asap" for this ambitious a goal (a visual search engine)?

It depends. Sometimes the goal of raising money is to give yourself enough time to tackle a really hard problem. QWiki's got huge upside so if they've got an innovative approach and a credible plan, $9.5M isn't an obscene amount to spend on the early stages.

I agree to some extent, but wikipedia and similar sites are what A.I. will use to "learn" in the future.

If this were 1990 or I didn't know about wikipedia, then I would be very impressed and think this was true artificial intelligence.

Nothing is being 'learned' here, the only thing being produced is a rote repetition of an article after it's been passed through a mediocre TTS engine.

If this were 1990 or you didn't know about Google, then a simple web directory connecting you to various sites would be very impressive.

I don't understand the need for bench entrepreneurs to ridicule start ups from the side lines. All this effort to point fingers and make fun of start ups which are actually trying to build businesses might be better spent actually trying to build your own business.

All the posts about Qwiki and others recently (Facebook, Zynga, Groupon) all calling for the downfall of all these start ups really make me question the value of this community at times - and it's not like these posts have 10-12 points either, they have some of the highest point totals of any articles on HN.

I'm an active entrepreneur and I completely agree with the author of the post. While the economics of the last bubble are drastically different than what's going on now, seeing this kind of exuberance for a company that has a flashy but poorly thought through idea reminds me of 1999.

I don't understand the need to dismiss criticism as some mean-spirited activity that only useless "haters" do.

There is constructive criticism, and then there is a blog post listing a bunch of reasons why this particular individual doesn't think this company should be given any money to give their idea a shot.

Constructive criticism is great, it's just there has been a notable lack of worthwhile criticism lately. In my opinion of course - but honestly, did you read the linked article? Does it contain any valuable insights into Qwiki? Yet it has over 100 points - this is the start up 'criticism' echo chamber at work.

There is constructive criticism

And there are other forms of criticism that are still valid and useful. Not all criticism needs to be reassuring and/or useful to the subject of the criticism. It can be quite valuable to others to point out how and why something just isn't very good or when something unreasonable is being done - like throwing millions of dollars at something that isn't very good.

Now, what exactly is the value of complaining about an "echo chamber" or saying that people would be better off just shrugging, going back to work, and hoping they're lucky enough to get $8 million showered on them regardless of merit?

you should learn to take criticism then.

Why, because trying to do anything gives everybody else the right to criticize you?

He's got a point. Taunts cost little and yield nothing.

Yes, trying to do anything does give people that right, just as it gives them the right to applaud you, too.

Qwiki seems like something that's easy to prototype but hard to do well. And it seems like a product that you have to do well to monetize.

Take the Qwiki entry on polyamory, for example: http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Polyamory

Qwiki pronounces it wrong, which means it actually decreases the value of the information it is regurgitating from Wikipedia.

That's a fairly good example of a failure, really:

>The most common symbol is the red and white heart combined with the blue infinity sign[.] Therefore, [the California SSM ruling] legitimizes polygamy and polyamory.

The first sentence, which is missing a period but it pauses on like it exists (correctly so), goes with their picture of a purple, upside-down, half-twist-on-each-side triangle. Whups.

The second sentence makes no sense in context.

I wonder if they pull phonetic information from Wikipedia. If they do, then polyamory wouldn't benefit from it, as it has no phonetic pronunciation there. If they don't, they probably get a lot of foreign-origin words more incorrect than we're seeing right away.

edit: Another odd pronunciation: http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/.sch

>www...sch.uk

is a) incorrectly written, and b) pronounced "w-w-w [long pause....] s-c-h-uck". (letters, followed by "yuck" minus the y). And the "contents" tab is failing to load for me.

You know, I didn't "get" twitter either when it launched. Heck it still might be suspect.

I have a feeling that Qwiki's value may be more under the covers with respect to its processing of data then the consumer facing product we currently see. Or it could just be overhyped.

With respect to a current bubble. This is a round with 7 investors (mostly individuals) dipping their toes. I think if you're looking for signs of a bubble this is a bunch of people with money to spend and an interesting product. It doesn't really show much irrational exuberance.

I wonder if any Qwiki people read HN would like to respond to this outpouring of negativity directed at them around here. Not saying I disagree with the criticism, just would like to get their point of view.

I share skepticism about what Qwiki has shown so far. But, it's unfair to assume that's all investors have seen.

The pitch was more likely of the form: "On a shoestring, we've launched this public functionality, and can show you this even more impressive private functionality, which needs $8 million to be further improved and scaled up."

I simply don't agree with Eric on this one. His main argument seems to be that this startup isn't adding anything of any value to the space.

The way I see it is this: Wikipedia is not very consumer friendly. It's dull looking and the entries are usually filled with a lot of text. The modern internet consumer is constantly facing more and more attention disorders and a lot of people don't simply like to read.

The search result in qwiki is auditory and visual and you can consume it completely without reading anything. I looked up a few countries I want to visit, a few programming languages and everything worked incredibly well.

One of his arguments is that the technology is something that could easily be duplicated. I think it's true up to a point, but honestly, what hacker couldn't duplicate the base functionality of a twitter of 4sq in an afternoon? I think the inherent value isn't actually with the technology itself but with the implementation, the data, the UI and, ultimately (so it seems), the company's dedication to packaging information in a more-easy-to-consume fashion.

This will work incredibly well on a internet connected TV screen. Who can picture themselves reading wikipedia articles with their spouse in the living room off the TV? Not me. But if I'm going to, say.. Oslo http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Oslo I could picture myself looking that up and listening/watching with my SO. Even if only to get the basic info.

Another usecase is with mobile operation. Since I got my HTC desire I constantly google stuff by doing a voice search. I have to use my best american accent, but none the less it's very useful. If my search result could be a visual/auditory search result like that, it would suite some cases much better.

I think this might actually mark a new era in the startup space. I'm coining the term:

  Content 2.0

Somebody grab that domain name if it's not already taken?

Isn't the whole point of an encyclopedia to be text laden?

That Wikipedia is already so successful seems to suggest to me that it is very consumer friendly.

I'm not saying this will replace Wikipedia and I'm not saying there's a problem with Wikipedia as it is - I'm just saying that there are use cases where everything is not a nail.

I'll bet you that 90% of the time you hit up Wikipedia you'll only read the top paragraph. At least that's what I do and I've seen more people use Wikipedia like that.

In fact, I love duckduckgo's 0-click result because of exactly that.

I wasn't suggesting you were saying that, I was only making a point related to your two criticisms:

Wikipedia is not very consumer friendly. It's dull looking and the entries are usually filled with a lot of text.

That you read the abstract at the top of the article suggests to me that the article structure is very efficient (and arguably consumer friendly) in that they provide the TLDR summary above the fold, which nullifies the problem that the full article may have too much text.

By the way, my use case for Wikipedia tends to have me reading the complete article more than just the abstract, because I'm usually in research mode when I use Wikipedia. Of course, everyone has a different use case, and I suspect your use case is more common than mine.

No, I would say Wikipedia is very research and student friendly.

Most non-tech people I know would have probably looked at Wikipedia once or twice. I would say Wikipedia is barely scratching the surface of delivering knowledge to the general person on the street.

There is definitely scope for delivering wikipedia information in an alternative format. Particularly through mobile devices. It's like when Facebook was still limited to universities and was yet to bust out into general use.

These are some use cases that I do not deeply consider, actually. They might change the context a bit.

I still don't see it as anything more than a toy, even in these cases, and how the valuation could be at all justified, especially given their usage trend while in the alpha, even with all the TC hype.

I can only think of a weird elementary school analogy to this whole Wikipedia/Qwiki thing.

Back in the days when I was a student, there were two easy (read lazy) ways out of reading a book/play: Cliff's Notes (in Canada, they were called Cole's Notes) or watching the movie version.

Neither was really a good substitute for the original, although the Cliff's Notes were invariably better than watching a movie.

If you were to see Wikipedia as the "Cliff's Notes" of a particular subject area, then isn't Qwiki just the "movie version" of the Cliff's Notes?

That might be right.

It is both a blessing and a curse to judge these things based on your own opinions and maybe that's what I'm doing right now.

Because I actually want to use this. Not for everything, but I for many things I can imagine myself using this. At least I've put it in chrome's search bar under the keyword qwiki, let's see if it sticks :)

What's consumer friendly about waiting for a reader to slowly meander its way through the entire text of an article?

When's the last time you read a wikipedia article from start to finish, without even first checking that it contained the tidbit you were looking for?

Text is skimmable, dialog isn't.

Agreed. It's unbelievable that they raised such an amount of money for something that doesn't really seem very exceptional. Frothy times are here again.

There has been increasing commentary lately about a "current startup bubble." Aside from Qwiki, people have pointed to the valuation of Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, and others. An important question is, do recent valuations indicate a second industry-wide Internet bubble, much like the bubble and subsequent crash in 2000? Or is something else more fundamental going on?

A look at the progression of other infrastructural technologies is useful. Consider the history of electricity. Paul David, an economic historian at Stanford, noted that it took many decades for business and society to reap tangible benefits from electricity. While important technologies were introduced throughout the 1800s (e.g., electric motors, light bulbs, generation stations), David suggests that an observer in 1900 would have found scant evidence that electricity was having an impact on business efficiency. To take advantage of electricity required not only the introduction of new technologies, but also a deepening of our understanding and in turn a transformation of business and social processes. For instance, manufacturing facilities, which were originally designed for steam power, needed to be significantly reconfigured.

Although David’s discussion was focused on the lag in productivity improvements resulting from electricity, it provides some useful insights about the state of the Internet and its commercialization. While the first computers emerged in the 1940s, and the Internet was born in the 1960s, it wasn’t until much later that computing and the Internet were widely adopted by business and consumers. For instance, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that the Internet transitioned from a government/ academic project to a commercially available system, and the Internet wasn’t broadly available to consumers until the mid-1990s.

In a mere five years from the commercial emergence of the Internet, we faced the first Internet bubble and bust in 2000. Looking back at history, it’s no surprise that the first wave of applications generally performed disappointingly, both technically and commercially. Broadband connectivity, the Internet backbone, and critical software and hardware standards were still in the early stages of development. Along with an emerging infrastructure, there was a limited understanding of the potential of the Internet among entrepreneurs, established companies, and broader society.

Now that we’ve had 10 more years to develop core infrastructure and to deepen our understanding of the Internet (and computing) from a technical and commercial standpoint, we are witnessing the emergence of a new crop of high-growth companies. Distinct from many of the Internet companies that arose in the late 1990s, a greater percentage of today’s companies receiving venture funding are both technically and commercially viable. Many deliver real customer value and have a tenable revenue model. In addition, to companies such as Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga, there are a myriad of smaller successful ventures, such as Pandora, Dropbox, and Airbnb.

To conclude, the 2000 bubble arose just a few years after the commercialization of the Internet. There was excitement about the potential of the Internet, but the supporting infrastructure and our knowledge was in its relative infancy. A decade later, we have made significant progress on both fronts. The latest new ventures incorporate technologies and business models that reflect significant infrastructure improvements and our maturing knowledge-base. Are select companies overvalued? It’s possible. Does this overvaluation reflect an industry-wide bubble? I don’t think so. In fact, I think we are at the early stages of a multi-decade transformation, catalyzed by computing and the Internet, and we will continue to see significant opportunity and new venture growth in this space. We are moving toward ubiquitous computing and connectivity, where technology pervades our business and personal lives. Personally, I look forward to participating in this exciting and dynamic future!

Your post, while insightful, doesn't really provide much reason as to why there seems to be a huge influx currently of high funding rounds for seemingly basic or non-profitible companies, the likes that I have not seen since the 90s. The companies you mentioned, Pandora, Dropbox, and Facebook are probably the exceptions, and don't release financials to my knowledge. It will be interesting to see what Facebook actually makes when they publish numbers next year. Last I heard Groupon started with huge profitability and now is burning way more money then it makes (I also doubt it to be a sustainable biz model).

There is definitely a bubble right now, I've seen average 8-15mil rounds for companies that offer something tangental to a popular service (it's LIKE FourSquare, or it's LIKE Pandora) despite the fact that original services themselves are not necessarily making huge exits. Perhaps it's just that the horizons on the dotcom VC funds are expiring and there are lots of new funds?

I think the answer is a bit more simple than that. Where else should people put their money if not in high tech?

Industrials correlate to GDP, and GDP is projected to be flat. Same goes with consumer products and volatility is too high in media. If you have capital to put to work, Tech appears to have the highest risk/return profile.

Phrased differently: if you had $10mil, where would you put it?

are internet companies still considered high-tech? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_tech

Phrased differently: if you had $10mil, where would you put it?

25% stocks, 25% bonds, 25% gold, 25% cash?

(That's literally what the "Fail-Safe Investing" book boils down to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-Safe_Investing)

fail-safe meaning you're ready to lose up to 50% of your investments? cause quite a few things on that list are mutually exclusive...

The author argues that these four types of investments are very unlikely to go down at the same time - if one loses a lot, the other types grow.

    "	It might seem that a Permanent Portfolio
    containing these four contradictory investments would
    be neutralized: As one element rose, another would fall
    and nothing would be gained.
        	On a day-to-day basis, that can be true.
    But over broad periods of time, the winning investments
    add more value to the portfolio than the losing 
    investments take away."

He gives some numbers in the book, from 1970 till 2002 the portfolio lost money only in four years: 6.2% in 1981, 0.7% in 1990, 2.4% in 1994, and 1.0% in 2001. Three of these four years were followed by double-digit gains. The average gain was 9.5% per year.

70-02 period is pretty irrelevant in today's world though. how did such portfolio perform during Great Depression, which is more like what we face today?

Would it have been possible to raise $8m in VC funding for a glorified slideshow during the Great Depression?

I think the author wrote from personal experience, so he could be either too young or not even born yet during Greate Depression.

unfortunately investment advice written from personal experience is pretty useless if not harmful.

"GDP is projected to be flat."

This is utterly absurd and shows a complete misunderstanding of economic growth.

On the contrary, it makes sense. There were a huge influx of liquidities from the central banks around the world, and this money needs to be invested into something. Western GDP is pretty flat now and has been for a while if you don't take into account the various credit bubbles, and will probably stay so for the foreseeable future - as long as oil prices stay over 75$ a barrel at least, which may very well be forever.

Should companies only be highly funded if they are similar to popular companies already making huge exits? Wouldn't this sort of be "missing the train"?

This comment should be upvoted a ton more.

If you're pitching your business as X for Y and X is still a massively unproven startup - you've missed the train.

Work on creating your own X - you want to be the market leader - its the only way to truly win in the consumer web.

Good points. It's hard to say what specific factors are driving the substantial influx in capital. However, I agree with the comment about investment alternatives. Where else can you invest today and expect a significant return? On this point, there might be a bit of resulting froth in the angel and venture capital markets, but I don't think this reflects an industry-wide bubble as what we witnessed in 2000.

Take Facebook as an example. Is Facebook worth $50b, per the recent Goldman Sachs investment? It's possibly worth much more, if we assume that Facebook is the winner-take-all in a network market (social networking). Are there significant uncertainties related to Facebook's revenue model and the company's ability to fend off substitution threats? Yes. But this is consistent with the risk/reward profile that comes with an equity investment in a privately held, high-growth tech company.

Wonderful comment. One of the reasons there has been a huge influx of funding is that there was A LOT of sideline cash in 2008. A lot of the fear has since evaporated, and funding and liquidity has increased, albeit, with some pent up back pressure.

As always, incredibly insightful remarks. The bit about developing core infrastructure rings especially true. The emergence and success of these web businesses has a lot to do with the absurdly low barriers to entry for creating software for the web. This is largely thanks to the development and proliferation of open source tools.

It's not surprising that so many successes should shake out the other end of the sieve when it's so easy for someone to launch a successful site from their bedroom or dorm.

Thanks Danilo! I appreciate the kind words.

Some constructive critism: you make some good points, but it's hard to digest them in such a long format. I'd suggest you try editing your thoughts down more aggressively so that readers can digest them quickly. If you find yourself having to write a conclusion paragraph to a comment, odds are you're not editing your key points down enough to get them across.

This isn't meant to be offensive, it's just one of those things that until someone tells you about it you'll continue to go on unknowingly making the same mistake. I had someone do this with me recently in regards to my presentation 'skills', or lack thereof, and it was very helpful.

If you asked me, "Why is Wikipedia Better than the Encyclopedia Brittanica?" my answer would be, "Because it lets people make things like Qwiki."

No, Qwiki isn't the be-all and end-all in this space, but it's an example of the kind of thing that's possible when people re-mix wikipedia content and respin it for different purposes and audiences.

That said, $7M gives them a lot of rope to hang themselves, in particular, a lot of time to hire people and make commitments without the need to focus on something that's profitable.

My guess is that there are quite a few people working on things in their garages without an early round of funding who are going to produce things that are more interesting and make more money in the end.

I think Qwiki raised $8 million becasue they have excellent team (Louis Monier, Christian Le Cocq, etc.). However, I'm bothered with the fact that such a excellent team is working on something which is not really groundbreaking nor disruptive. Not something it will change the world (as search engine changed it).

However, it could be also that they have vision of the world which is hard for me to comprehend or imagine. The question is: what is their vision?

Does anyone know the story behind the two "Co-Founder Emeritus" titles on their team page?

http://www.qwiki.com/team

Gregory Smith is not involved in the day-to-day of Qwiki because he's actually a television actor, and I assume he's too busy to be there all the time - he was the lead role on the WB series Everwood, Doug (Qwiki's CEO) knows him from when he worked at the WB. IIRC Gregory played a big part in coming up with the idea for Qwiki, and provided a lot (maybe all?) of the initial funding.

Jay Oh was the tech lead at Doug's previous startup, The U (http://www.theu.com), which shot and sold video tours of colleges (Gregory Smith and several other actors from the WB appeared in and helped promote many of these videos, so it's all very connected); I'm pretty sure they achieved a very nice exit from that when they sold and started to work on Qwiki. I don't know why Jay left Qwiki, specifically, but he's now one of the leads at http://howmutch.com/.

FWIW, I'm not part of Qwiki, but I was good friends with Doug when we were younger - on that note, just based on what I know about Doug, if I had to bet, I'd say that Qwiki has a very good shot here, regardless of what it looks like now. He has an impeccable business sense and will pivot without hesitation if it looks like he needs to, not to mention that he's one of the most driven people I've ever met in my life.

Euphemism for pushed aside, is my amateur guess.

In Qwiki's defense, perhaps what they have been demonstrating is only one manifestation of the technology behind the scenes. The stated mission is to improve the way people experience information, with an emphasis on valuable information -- that is, information that, when consumed, could result in a transaction like "planning a vacation on the web" and "evaluating restaurants on your phone".

Currently they are mining wikipedia because (I'm guessing) it's a convenient source for a massive amount of data to feed into an automated system. No one really cares about turning wikipedia entries into slideshows, but I know from experience that car dealers and real estate agents pay real money to have their pictures and data converted into videos.

I wonder about the timing of this backlash. Where was the outrage when Qwiki won TC Disrupt back in September?

Is it just because $8m > $50k, or has something changed in the last four months?

I think the complaint is that nothing (visible) has changed. Based on what I've seen, I really doubt the value of this company has anything to do with reading Wikipedia, but rather in making vast amounts of content and relationships between content more accessible.

I find the article to be slightly contradictory. There's certainly a lot of potential in Qwiki. Visual presentation of data is a hard problem to solve and I think Qwiki's current slew of examples many can agree are quite nice. In that case, wouldn't that answer the question of why they need $8M in funding? To solve the problem of meaningful data and produce results more in-tune to their provided sample searches?

where's the bubble? i don't feel it. can't see a queue of investors at my door! )))

It's possible that they raised the money to pursue some significant tech behind a portion of their product; it could be possible that they are on the cusp of making vast advances in text-to-speech synthesis, and they needed more funds to see it through. (Possible, but not probable.)

Yeah, but you have to admit it's fun to use. I have high hopes for Qwiki just out of how well they've defined the experience with their product.

Whether or not it's useful is something I doubt we've really come close to answering yet.

I really like qwiki. If my second monitor isn't in use, I'll toss qwiki up and watch the promoted videos. I think what they are getting at is some type of TPRS(Rosette Stone), but online.

while I agree that like many I don't see the point in having wikipedia read to me, in their favor they do have pretty design. This looks more like a visual communications senior year project than a company, but maybe they have something else up their sleeve.

Then again I thought the same about dropbox, its just rsync, some server managed storage and a webapp on top. But they seem to be well liked. It's hard to predict what will stick and what won't.

Surely this is worht at least $16 million...

NSFW - http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Fuck

Not exactly a bubble; just because a few people give a startup money, doesn't mean every or any startup is getting money.

[Qwiki's] $8 Million round was led by primary investor Eduardo Saverin, a co-Founder of Facebook.

Through my extensive knowledge of The Social Network (watched it twice!), I'm pretty sure Saverin was that guy whose girlfriend lit his bed on fire. This may shed some light on why the author thinks Qwiki seems poised for failure. I think.

"Qwiki is little more than a toy." upvote

(and compare to AirBnB, which has a function in the real economy outside the web)

The author does not explain, though, how this is emblematic of a general trend.

Qwiki might be good for the blind...

No. They have much more advanced technology at their disposal.

Ahh Qwiki on CNN right now.

Seems you fancy yourself an iceberg hunter. You see just the tip and you seem to know everything underneath? How about you stop knocking other's hustle and focus on yours? You have to learn to let go of this immature angst; it will eat you alive and taint everything you do.

you guys are idiots. banksy the lucky stuff is actually a qwiki team member stirring up controversy to propel his startup. any publicity is good publicity.

The author needs to get a grip, a lot of technology bootstraps on top wikipedia with a capacity to scale from there. Powerset unveiled their natural language search on the wikipedia corpus and were acquired by Microsoft for $100M a few months later. I'm sure MS wasn't just acquiring an index of wikipedia.

PowerSet had many key NLP people and a LFG grammar/parser.

Can you elaborate what QWiki has to offer, except a nicer user interface for Wikipedia?

So, what's Qwiki's technology that's so powerful here then? I think the sentiment is that their technology isn't anything special, and they don't have any other particularly distinguishing feature, so why such investment?

With Powerset, the value was supposed to be in the technology, even if the demo was on Wikipedia. With other companies, say, Twitter, the power is in the size of their network and potential for something, even if the technology isn't groundbreaking.

Sure, just don't judge a book by it's...

I don't know what, if any, magic Qwiki has cooking but I think the OP is excessively harsh. My point was that a lot of startups have needed a big round to go to the next level from a limited proof of concept where there's nothing special on their public facing service. So what? Hopefully the vision and potential is evident under the hood and that's what the investment was predicated on.

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