Today, I got an invite to try out Qwiki’s alpha release. Qwiki, was the winner of this year’s Techcrunch Disrupt held in San Francisco in September 2010.
Getting mentioned by Techcrunch has been the marketing holy grail for so many startups. There are several articles on the web that talk about the different ways one could grab the attention of Techcrunch. The only way to get that attention these days seems to be to get funded by a silicon valley Venture Capital firm. As one startup founder laments:
“a mediocre competitor launched in LA, raised $12M, got their mandatory TC announcement, and another one, and another… basically a TC article for every little feature they would add. That was absolutely devastating…”
Given all this difficulty to get even an article published on Techcrunch, I was under the impression that the eventual winner of the Techcrunch Disrupt event must have something truly disruptive. After all, Qwiki did promise “An Information Experience”. So, when I finally got the invite, I was very excited to give it a try.
The actual experience though, was a let down. It seems to be nothing but a bunch of images shown in a cool looking UI with a voice over of the first couple of sentences taken out of Wikipedia.
Qwiki, of course, is claiming to be a platform that can be used by all publishers and is hoping it will be used by millions. Maybe it will be. For now, though, it seems like reading the Wikipedia article is more of “An Information Experience” than Qwiki.
Another troubling feature of Qwiki is that all Qwikis are only two minutes long. Yep, when all conversations happen in 140 characters, two minutes is sufficient to have an “Information Experience”.
