Startup Qwiki launched a new iPhone app a little more than a week ago, and it now says that the app was downloaded 125,000 times in the first six days, with 27,000 Qwikis created.
What is a Qwiki? Basically, it’s a slideshow-style video automatically assembled from a user’s photos, videos, and music. It still shows the company’s roots as a multimedia search engine, building a video presentation around any topic that you want to look up — it was in that form that Qwiki took the top prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2010 — but the technology has been redirected towards personal storytelling rather than information consumption.
In an email last week, CEO Doug Imbruce told me that the new version of Qwiki (which first launched in invite-only beta last December) was “the ultimate result of all the years we spent building this technology platform,” as well as an extension of the news publishing platform it announced last spring, “now as powerful for ABC as it is for my sister in law.”
And businesses are already starting to experiment with it. A Qwiki spokesperson told me that the most popular users include Wearebigbeat (that’s the record label Big Beat), LuckyMagazine, and Smith Hotels, which all had between 1,000 and 1,500 followers. (Qwiki itself has 3,210.)
It’s still early days for the new app, and but the numbers suggest that there’s some potential here. (The startup had plenty of help from Apple, which featured the app in the App Store shortly after the launch.) You can download Qwiki here.
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