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Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

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Re: Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

#61

Post by Semiapies »

c2 wrote: post #22

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 v…

I don't understand the need to dismiss criticism as some mean-spirited activity that only useless "haters" do.

Re: Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

#62

Post by Evgeny »

borism wrote: post #59
Evgeny wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phrased differently: if you had $10mil, where would you put it? 25% stocks, 25% bonds, 25% gold, 25% cash? (That's literally what the "Fail-Safe Investing" book boils down to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-Safe_Investing )

fail-safe meaning you're ready to lose up to 50% of your investments? cause quite a few things on that list are mutually exclusive...

The author argues that these four types of investments are very unlikely to go down at the same time - if one loses a lot, the other types grow.

    "	It might seem that a Permanent Portfolio
    containing these four contradictory investments would
    be neutralized: As one element rose, another would fall
    and nothing would be gained.
        	On a day-to-day basis, that can be true.
    But over broad periods of time, the winning investments
    add more value to the portfolio than the losing 
    investments take away."
He gives some numbers in the book, from 1970 till 2002 the portfolio lost money only in four years: 6.2% in 1981, 0.7% in 1990, 2.4% in 1994, and 1.0% in 2001. Three of these four years were followed by double-digit gains. The average gain was 9.5% per year.

Re: Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

#64

Post by jdp23 »

intellectronica wrote: post #50
rst wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

#65

Post by c2 »

Semiapies wrote: post #61
c2 wrote: post #22

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 v…

I don't understand the need to dismiss criticism as some mean-spirited activity that only useless "haters" do.

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.

Re: Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

#66

Post by Groxx »

techiferous wrote: post #25

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 Qwiki pronounces it wrong, which means it actually decreases the value of the information it is regurgitating from Wikipedia.

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

>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.

Re: Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

#67

Post by confuzatron »

cfinke wrote: post #4

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.)

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.

Re: Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

#68

Post by Semiapies »

c2 wrote: post #65
Semiapies wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the need to dismiss criticism as some mean-spirited activity that only useless "haters" do.

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 int…

There is constructive criticism

And there are other forms of criticism that are still valid and useful. Not all criticism needs to be reassuring and/or useful to the subject of the criticism. It can be quite valuable to others to point out how and why something just isn't very good or when something unreasonable is being done - like throwing millions of dollars at something that isn't very good.

Now, what exactly is the value of complaining about an "echo chamber" or saying that people would be better off just shrugging, going back to work, and hoping they're lucky enough to get $8 million showered on them regardless of merit?

Re: Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

#69

Post by davidcann »

dstein wrote: post #17

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.

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.

Re: Qwiki Epitomizes the Current Startup Bubble

#70

Post by kin »

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?
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