Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Remember Qwiki? It Will Now Appear on Millions of Bing Search Results.

Qwiki, the start-up that turns reference materials into interactive videos, has scored a deal to be featured in Bing search results.

You’ll be forgiven if you forgot about Qwiki — after launching as a somewhat hard-to-categorize start-up more than a year ago, the company had gone quiet. This Bing deal has been in the works for more than a year, said Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce, and it just took a long while to come to fruition.

The Bing partnership is similar to the Qwiki you may remember: Listen to Wikipedia entries read out loud while you look at related pictures and videos and clickable maps. Playable Qwikis will show up below millions of Wikipedia entries in Bing search results. Eventually, they may appear more broadly. For now, they are English-only and will play on some mobile devices.

Qwiki is also branching out in a couple more directions, with its interactive story-creation tools as the common element. First, it just announced a deal with ABC News to feature Qwikis created by the news team within stories. And second, it is giving everyone access to its Web-based Qwiki creation tool, encouraging them to create how-to guides and other content.

On the Web, the original Qwiki is now shelved away at a separate page, qwiki.com/reference.

Qwiki has raised $10.5 million, mostly from individuals like Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin; last year, it relocated to New York from San Francisco.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald