i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Is Qwiki the multimedia search engine of the future?

For those of you in Section C, you may recall when Rami mentioned that a startup named Qwiki, working on a multimedia information retrieval service, had won the grand prize of the venture competition at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference.

They have now moved into alpha, allowing testers to use their system and provide feedback. You can request an invite at http://www.qwiki.com or email me for one.

What is Qwiki?

You can watch the TechCrunch demo at: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9900486

Qwiki takes a search term and creates what they call an 'Information Experience' from multiple sources on the web. It is a short slide show, narrated by a computerized voice, accompanied by multimedia. The interface is based on movies like Wall-E where humans ask computers a question and get narrated answers with relevant images and information.

The innovation is in the completely machine created content while being fully curated. Qwiki strives for quality and precision on just about any topic you can think of. The data is linked to other relevant data, providing a Memex type navigation of information.

It seems to be pretty useful for a quick and easy overview on almost any topic you can think of. Multimedia and narration take the work out of finding and understanding key points on a topic amid the incredible amounts of information on the web. On the other hand, are we just moving further into "the shallows" with this? 

"The Shallows" - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127370598