8 ms·

Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

161 points by shelly 16y ago

poutine 16y ago
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.
coryl 16y ago
Not exactly a bubble; just because a few people give a startup money, doesn't mean every or any startup is getting money.
cfinke 16y ago
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.)
- confuzatron 16y ago
  I was surprised at how good the... cadence? emphasis? was in kwiki's synthesised speech. Compared to the traditional badly emphasized speech you'd hear in, e.g., one of those computer generated 'I want an iPhone 4' videos. I have no idea if that's just because I've not been paying attention though.
btipling 16y ago
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.
matwood 16y ago
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. :)
aresant 16y ago
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 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?
- deleted 16y ago
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- ianthiel 16y ago
  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.
gojomo 16y ago
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."
jw84 16y ago
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.
fedd 16y ago
where's the bubble? i don't feel it. can't see a queue of investors at my door! )))
puls 16y ago
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.
intellectronica 16y ago
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.
- rst 16y ago
  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.
  - intellectronica 16y ago
    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.
    - jdp23 16y ago
      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.
mikeryan 16y ago
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.
spidaman 16y ago
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.
- MichaelGG 16y ago
  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.
  - spidaman 16y ago
    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.
- danieldk 16y ago
  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?
cwb71 16y ago
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?
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  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.
dstein 16y ago
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.
- pclark 16y ago
  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)?
  - jdp23 16y ago
    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.
- davidcann 16y ago
  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.
  - beoba 16y ago
    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.
  - ZachPruckowski 16y ago
    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.
mjfern 16y ago
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!
c2 16y ago
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.
- borism 16y ago
  you should learn to take criticism then.
  - crasshopper 16y ago
    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.
    - Semiapies 16y ago
      Yes, trying to do anything does give people that right, just as it gives them the right to applaud you, too.
- Semiapies 16y ago
  I don't understand the need to dismiss criticism as some mean-spirited activity that only useless "haters" do.
  - c2 16y ago
    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.
techiferous 16y ago
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 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.
- Groxx 16y ago
  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 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.
arnorhs 16y ago
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 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?
- slantyyz 16y ago
  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.
  - arnorhs 16y ago
    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.
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sdizdar 16y ago
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?
Edmond 16y ago
Qwiki might be good for the blind...
- apl 16y ago
  No. They have much more advanced technology at their disposal.
PaulHoule 16y ago
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.
oxtopus 16y ago
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.
plusbryan 16y ago
Does anyone know the story behind the two "Co-Founder Emeritus" titles on their team page? http://www.qwiki.com/team http://www.qwiki.com/team
- blizkreeg 16y ago
  Euphemism for pushed aside, is my amateur guess.
- bermanoid 16y ago
  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 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/ 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.
sfphotoarts 16y ago
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.
holman 16y ago
[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.
bherms 16y ago
Ahh Qwiki on CNN right now.
toephu 16y ago
agreed, all qwiki does is read out loud articles word for word from wikipedia. it also jacks the images. useless.
geekinthecorner 16y ago
I kind of felt that the $8m round of funding given to Zivity a few years back was the first indicator that we were in a pretty stupid bubble.
zackattack 16y ago
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.
kin 16y ago
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?
crasshopper 16y ago
"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.
woodall 16y ago
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.
chopsueyar 16y ago
Surely this is worht at least $16 million... NSFW - http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Fuck http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Fuck

161 points by shelly 16y ago

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.

coryl 16y ago

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

cfinke 16y ago

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.)

confuzatron 16y ago
I was surprised at how good the... cadence? emphasis? was in kwiki's synthesised speech. Compared to the traditional badly emphasized speech you'd hear in, e.g., one of those computer generated 'I want an iPhone 4' videos. I have no idea if that's just because I've not been paying attention though.

btipling 16y ago

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.

matwood 16y ago

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. :)

aresant 16y ago

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 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?

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ianthiel 16y ago
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.

gojomo 16y ago

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."

jw84 16y ago

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.

fedd 16y ago

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

puls 16y ago

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.

intellectronica 16y ago

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.

rst 16y ago
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.
- intellectronica 16y ago
  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.
  - jdp23 16y ago
    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.

mikeryan 16y ago

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.

spidaman 16y ago

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.

MichaelGG 16y ago
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.
- spidaman 16y ago
  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.
danieldk 16y ago
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?

cwb71 16y ago

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?

SoftwareMaven 16y ago
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.

dstein 16y ago

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.

pclark 16y ago
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)?
- jdp23 16y ago
  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.
davidcann 16y ago
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.
- beoba 16y ago
  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.
- ZachPruckowski 16y ago
  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.

mjfern 16y ago

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!

c2 16y ago

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.

borism 16y ago
you should learn to take criticism then.
- crasshopper 16y ago
  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.
  - Semiapies 16y ago
    Yes, trying to do anything does give people that right, just as it gives them the right to applaud you, too.
Semiapies 16y ago
I don't understand the need to dismiss criticism as some mean-spirited activity that only useless "haters" do.
- c2 16y ago
  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.

techiferous 16y ago

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 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.

Groxx 16y ago
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 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.

arnorhs 16y ago

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 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?

slantyyz 16y ago
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.
- arnorhs 16y ago
  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.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

sdizdar 16y ago

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?

Edmond 16y ago

Qwiki might be good for the blind...

apl 16y ago
No. They have much more advanced technology at their disposal.

PaulHoule 16y ago

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.

oxtopus 16y ago

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.

plusbryan 16y ago

Does anyone know the story behind the two "Co-Founder Emeritus" titles on their team page? http://www.qwiki.com/team http://www.qwiki.com/team

blizkreeg 16y ago
Euphemism for pushed aside, is my amateur guess.
bermanoid 16y ago
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 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/ 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.

sfphotoarts 16y ago

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.

holman 16y ago

[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.

bherms 16y ago

Ahh Qwiki on CNN right now.

toephu 16y ago

agreed, all qwiki does is read out loud articles word for word from wikipedia. it also jacks the images. useless.

geekinthecorner 16y ago

I kind of felt that the $8m round of funding given to Zivity a few years back was the first indicator that we were in a pretty stupid bubble.

zackattack 16y ago

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.

kin 16y ago

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?

crasshopper 16y ago

"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.

woodall 16y ago

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.

chopsueyar 16y ago

Surely this is worht at least $16 million... NSFW - http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Fuck http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Fuck