Hacker Shows It Doesn’t Take $8 Million to Clone Qwiki

http://newsgrange.com/hacker-shows-it-doesnt-take-8-million-to-clone-qwiki-just-321-lines-of-html-will-do-the-trick/

by sharescribe • 16 years ago

126 48 16 years ago

melvinram7• 16 years ago

I just saw Qwiki for the first time today and watched the Natalie Portman qwiki at http://www.qwiki.com/q/#Natalie_Portman and you can count me in as a fan.

The clone (viewable at http://banksytheluckystiff.github.com/fqwiki/) definitely does not compare. It's like comparing the first version of Yahoo to today's Google... and Qwiki hasn't even started to improve their product yet.

Obviously the author doesn't care for the qwiki format but they are being short sighted. It could be quiet useful, especially as it improves over time in areas of giving you options in how much depth you want, the voice synthesizer, etc, by providing just enough info in a pleasurable format.

What I do hate about qwiki is their name. It associates them with wiki's/wikipedia in my mind (without knowing what it is) and it personally is a major turn-off.

nathos• 16 years ago

Its name associates it with Wikipedia because that its data source. Qwiki recites Wikipedia article summaries.

Doesn't seem quite as magical anymore, eh?

melvinram7• 16 years ago

I knew that it got the info from wikipedia. I still don't like the name.

endtime• 16 years ago

Wow, I watched that video and now hate Qwiki. That's the most useless, annoying way to present information I've ever seen.

melvinram7• 16 years ago

lol Hate is a pretty strong word. You sure it's appropriate for what you're feeling?

arpit• 16 years ago

I actually like it and it feel it has some legs. In an era of TL;DR (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl;dr),it seems to be a good way to get a bunch of trivial information really fast. The audience here may not be the target market. We spend a lot more time reading content on the www pretty intensely (well I do anyway), but a 2 minute presentation on a subject I am casually interested in seems worthwhile.

minalecs• 16 years ago

I watched both (well I forced myself to watch as much as possible, because its annoying and prefer to read than listening to it) and in terms of the content, it seems identical. I think fqwiki could be iterated on very quickly to include better visuals. Other than that, I really don't see a huge difference. What do you find to be the biggest difference to say it doesn't compare ?

MichaelReed• 16 years ago

Fqwiki worked on my iPad. Qwiki did not.

btipling• 16 years ago

> over really disruptive ones like CloudFlare

CloudFare provides a great value, but how is it 'disruptive'? Seems like that word is becoming utterly meaningless. Being better at something than your competitors just makes you a good competitor it doesn't make you disruptive. Let's only call something 'disruptive' if it's destroyed an entire industry. P2P disrupted the music industry. Google and Wikipedia disrupted the local library.

Just being a new startup with a flashy website doesn't make you automatically 'disruptive' whether you're Qwiki or CloudFlare.

dstein3• 16 years ago

What I'm tired about reading are these startups who actually have invented no technology whatsoever, being called innovative technology companies.

Qwiki didn't invent the Text-to-Speech system they're using. And they didn't create any of the content. They made a flash file that plays back audio and video -- a technology they also didn't invent. What is remarkable is that technology investors (even really rich ones like a Facebook co-founder) are investing money into things that aren't even technological innovations at all. It's like even they don't know the difference.

melvinram7• 16 years ago

http://www.google.com/search?q=define:technology

Technology - the practical application of science to commerce or industry

Looks to me like they have applied the knowledge of Text-to-Speech, audio/video playback, content curation, etc. to the practical problem of communicating information.

Innovation is not only doing something new but also using existing knowledge and tools to solve a problem differently.

I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority would choose qwiki. If that's not proof that they are solving a problem differently, than we'll just have agree to disagree.

sharescribe• 16 years ago

The hype cycle is a beautiful thing when you are on the receiving end. Unfortunately many worthy projects and concepts never get that opportunity.

jpadvo2• 16 years ago

This is disingenuous for several reasons.

1) They just received $8 million in funding to further develop their product. I.e. That money hasn't been spent making it a better product yet.

2) A few hundred lines of markup does not a product make. What about servers, security, user accounts, marketing, documentation, etc?

3) Polishing a product so it looks nice and has very few bugs is a huge amount of work. If he made a slick, bug-free clone I would be impressed.

3.5) ...especially with an automated system like this. It is easy to create something that automatically generates a shoddy result. It can be fiendishly hard to automatically generate something useful often enough for people to rely on you.

GiraffeNecktie• 16 years ago

Not disingenuous at all. Qwiki won an award for technology innovation, the quick demo simply proved that their was nothing special or unique about Qwiki. Re your three points:

1) What does their future development plans have to do with anything? 2) What does server admin, marketing and documentation have to do wtih technological innovation? 3) What does debugging have to do with technological innovation?

jpadvo2• 16 years ago

I was responding to the claim in the title about "cloning" Qwiki. What Banksy did was nowhere near cloning Qwiki.

Turns out that Banksy is just claiming to have built a proof-of-concept showing that the underlying technology is simple. You are right that the three points I made don't have much at all to do with technological innovation. Point granted. :)

dangrover• 16 years ago

Sigh. Tech startups aren't ever about the tech. That's not the point.

Qwiki isn't about panning around images and playing back TTS. I know that wasn't what the developer was thinking, but I find people making this mistake a lot. Thinking of Facebook as a basic CRUD app you could put together, etc.

melvinram7• 16 years ago

Exactly. It's not the how it's done... it's the problem being solved and how elegantly the problem is being solved.

snippyhollow• 16 years ago

Or... It's about making the right product at the right time and reaching the right market. The problem (even if we consider the social one) that solved facebook wasn't that hard to solve. The timing and bootstrap / first users (universities) was the key. For Youtube the key timing was about bandwidth and for Google about technology/research (as well as a new search vs organize vision of the web).

il2• 16 years ago

It really seems to me that Qwiki is a solution I'n search of a problem.

What problem is it really solving? Could you ever imagine yourself paying for Qwiki?

mmaunder• 16 years ago

Tech startups are always about the tech. What's confusing you is that investors and successful entrepreneurs often focus on other essential ingredients that are often ignored.

jpwagner• 16 years ago

That's fair. But then did they deserve recognition for their "technological achievement" in this year's crunchies?

bkrausz• 16 years ago

These aren't tech startups: these are web startups. Web startups' main value is the experience, but until they have to scale there's not much value there. Early Facebook, from a technology side, is just a CRUD app that anybody could have written. The value was in the timing, execution, and market.

Tesla motors is a technology startup: they're doing something that nobody has done before with technology. Putting something like that in the same categorization as Facebook is an insult to the engineering challenges Tesla faced from day one.

Note: Of course Facebook now has a lot of technology, because they're scaling a website to be used by the entire world, but I'm talking about early-stage startups.

humblest_ever• 16 years ago

I mentally do a fist-pump every time someone gets this correct.

whatusername• 16 years ago

Tech startups are about the tech.

What we need is a better word for startups on Techcrunch. "CRUD app + Graphics" or "local social 2.0 buzzword-compliant little companies"

While I think they are great (and I use and recommend their product) I don't see Wufoo as a "tech" company. They're like Zappos -- a Customer Service company that happens to be run from a website. That isn't a 'tech' company. It's just a company. Having a Building/shopfront and selling shoes doesn't make you a "real estate" company.

Tech Startups are startups taht actually have a technology to sell or a massive technological innovation. Companies like Isilon (had a $2.25B exit last year), or Google or Netscape or PrimeSense.

erik_landerholm• 16 years ago

The same thing could of been said about twitter when it first came out. Recreating the feature set would of been very easy, but ultimately the feature set was not what made them successful.

ryanb• 16 years ago

No one ever claimed that Twitter was a technological breakthrough, though. People are saying that about Qwiki.

banksy• 16 years ago

Qwiki won Runner up for "Best Technical Achievement" at the Crunchies the other night. Fqwiki is a statement meant to illustrate how ridiculously naive we have become with respect to "innovative technology". Neither Fqwiki nor Qwiki belong even remotely in the same league as Google's Self Driving Cars (which won for Best Technical Achievement).

Building a great company is about more than a hacked-up prototype built in six hours and, with luck, Qwiki might achieve this status. At the same time, however, Qwiki is being disingenuous in promoting a nonexistent technological breakthrough that falsely sets expectations for what "technical innovation" actually means.

Misinformed investors and entrepreneurs will only bring us closer to a bubble that may some day pop. Don't let the hype fool you.

Yours,

Banksy The Lucky Stiff

neurotech1• 16 years ago

I couldn't agree more about the "great company" part. I am 99.9% sure that that Qwiki has more tech behind it than simply going for wikipedia articles. From what I heard at TC Disrupt, they have some content search & discovery tech behind it.

Many "great" companies took off because of good execution, not some huge technology breakthrough.

That said, your Fqwiki is still cool.

funnyguy• 16 years ago

I have some reservations to people saying that $8mn is too large an investment on Qwiki. $8mn is a serious commitment and they don't invest that kind of money unless they see some real spunk in the idea and the team. Perhaps what QWiki has built is an infra layer designed to add scale to their effort. I have been an alpha user on Qwiki for sometime now and they manage to pull me back to their site with very interesting mailers - Qwiki of the day - which is not a trivial accomplishment imo, if they are doing it for a lot of their users.

Plus, as an application, the real power of QWiki isn't on the web - its on the mobile/tablets, particularly in education. Qwiki is in a great position to replace wikipedia as a quick intro to any topic for millions of students round the world - that itself is an interesting usecase for me - and they are achieveing this through technology...

bl4k• 16 years ago

Does anybody have a link to the HN thread where the clone was first submitted? I can't find it, thx

blatherard• 16 years ago

This is the article submitted by banksy http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131563

imkevingao• 16 years ago

Qwiki's value is no longer in its website because the overall Qwiki site is not too complex, but the value lies within its brand. Winning the TechCrunch award, Qwiki is like TechCrunch/AOL's baby. they talk about it 24/7. Free publicity. 2ndly people know about Qwiki, it is now a person's first instinct when they see a Qwiki type of interactive website. Not everyone knows the site, but for those who does, interactive wiki is forever labeled as "Qwiki". That's something hackers cannot clone.

teaspoon• 16 years ago

What is a non-interactive wiki?

gloob• 16 years ago

A euphemism for "web page".

aufreak3• 16 years ago

Anyone here who digs Qwiki's approach to presenting info? I tried it a little bit, found it mind-dumbing, and promptly went back to wikipedia. Anyone found it good for kids maybe?

robryan• 16 years ago

While I don't find qwiki to be a good way to present data at all and it doesn't add anything for me to say this comes anywhere close is silly, it really proves about as much as someone whipping up a stack overflow clone with a question list with tags, badges and logins over a weekend.

As an aside, qwiki decided it would be good to start spamming out qwiki of the day to my email. Guess that is an opt out rather than an opt in....

bloodbought• 16 years ago

Qwiki is the reason why Burst 2.0 will happen in 2012.

Hacker Shows It Doesn’t Take $8 Million to Clone Qwiki

Related Stories