QWiki, first impressions

Published by Filippo Diotalevi on 26th October 2010 (last update 26th October 2010)

Today I received my invitation to signup for the QWiki Alpha, the product that has recently won the Techcrunch Disrupt; I must confess I couldn't wait to try it, so I went ahead and just tried it:

First impressions

  • the contents available are already massive; they claim to have 2 millions of qwikis already, things that rule out the possibility they're all manually crafting all the entries... there's definitely a lot of automation behind
  • it's not, as somebody suggested, just a voice over wikipedia; qwikis are fairly short and to the point
  • the voice is quite good (as good as can a voicesynthesiser can be, which unfortunately is far from perfect)
  • voice and images are often not perfectly synchronised, but it's a very acceptable first attempt
  • navigation between qwikis (and to external resources) is still limited

All in all, a very interesting first alpha, and I'm very curious to see how it will evolve.

The other interesting question is what their business model is going to be.
The What's Next page lists the first ideas: personal and professional presentation, dating, shop and restaurants advertisement, real estate. All interesting fields, but unless they are willing to build their own thematic portals, they would end up being just a feature in some other existing product.

On the other side, at first glance, I can certainly see a use as an entertainment channel: for example as a dedicated channel/application of GoogleTV or in cable TV.