Qwiki

» see qwiki.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

qwiki was ipad-only at the platform layer for most of its life. i was on an android phone in ankara through the whole two-year iphone window that followed. this one landed for me through tech-blog coverage, not through the app itself.

the pitch was clean at techcrunch disrupt in september 2010. you typed a search term, qwiki fetched wikipedia text and images, ran a text-to-speech voice over the top, cut the whole thing into a short narrated clip. it felt like an early demo of everything automatic-video would eventually become, ten years too early on the audio and the visuals both.

i was not paying attention for the whole arc, but anyway. doug imbruce ran it as ceo, louis monier co-founded (the same louis monier who had built altavista's index a decade before that). eduardo saverin led the series a in january 2011 at eight million, brad keywell and eric lefkofsky added another million from the groupon side two months later. the ipad app launched in april 2011 and got named apple's best search and reference app of the year.

the iphone version arrived february 2013 and pivoted the whole product away from wikipedia summaries. it made short movies out of the photos and videos on your camera roll instead. that pivot was what yahoo bought five months later, reportedly around fifty million dollars on 2 july 2013.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the disrupt win was the whole marketing engine (roughly). every tech blog i read on ttnet in late 2010 had a qwiki demo embedded. the reference-video promise felt like it might become how wikipedia itself got read out loud on mobile.

the reality was thinner. the text-to-speech voice was flat. the montage leaned on wikipedia infobox stills, with clips coming in shorter than a paragraph of the underlying article. good for a novelty scroll, not for actual reading. that gap between the promise and the output limited how far the ipad app could actually go.

~ the yahoo swallow ~

the acquisition was announced 2 july 2013. marissa mayer was mid-shopping-spree, tumblr had closed a month earlier at $1.1 billion, summly at $30 million in march. qwiki at a reported fifty was part of the same mobile-video bet.

imbruce moved to yahoo new york and became senior director of product. the qwiki iphone app kept running under the yahoo umbrella for another year, unchanged in most user-visible ways. a rebranded yahoo-mobile follow-on never actually shipped. by september 2014 mayer's mobile team had reshuffled and qwiki was on the discontinuation list.

~ what got buried with it ~

the shutdown notice was posted september 2014. the app stopped working on 1 november 2014, existing videos users had saved were no longer accessible. the qwiki.com domain redirected to yahoo for a while, then eventually just stopped responding.

the automatic-video-summary idea did not die with qwiki. it just moved elsewhere and got redone with better tts and better editing, mostly under the same yahoo umbrella that had killed the original.

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