

Qwiki wins Techcrunch Disrupt SF - bl4k
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/qwiki-techcrunch-disrupt-winner/

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alex1
Am I the only one skeptical about CloudFlare? I, for one, would not be
comfortable changing my name servers to them. Shouldn't we actually find and
patch security flaws instead of putting it behind some 'firewall in the cloud'
(security through obscurity, anyone?) which can cease to exist any second?

And, why do they call themselves a CDN? I watched the video on their site and
I still don't really understand how they work. Do they work like a reverse
proxy? A reverse proxy would create an even greater security concern than what
it tries to solve. An attacker would be able to deface thousands of sites by
attacking just one of their proxy nodes.

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staunch
I'm very skeptical about Qwiki. It's a text-to-speech Wikipedia/Flickr
slideshow mashup. The most useful demonstration they gave was for a smart
alarm clock. Not exactly a burning problem.

I'm surprised the judges were so easily impressed by this kind of flashy
widget.

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jeromec
I thought it would be fun to judge along with the real judges and this was my
winner too, although it was tough. The strongest companies for me at first
were pinger, cloudflare, and badgeville. I thought those companies just had
tons of potential -- actually do have it -- but qwiki was stuck in the back of
my mind. To force out a winner I asked which would be the one company, if none
could exist except for choosing one, to win. I felt I could find
alternatives/workarounds to all except qwiki, which was the one I still really
wanted to exist (the morning automated info stream is compelling). All
finalists were strong to tell the truth, a really impressive, disruptive
field.

~~~
bl4k
The field was good this year. The only company I didn't really like/get out of
the finalists was Badgeville.

My favorite was Cloudflare because I had a similar idea years ago that I was
going to do as a startup, but chose another idea instead.

The tl;dr version of it is a forwarding proxy for your website that speeds up
page delivery (gzip, etag etc), filters out vulnerability and exploit
attempts, filters out spammers, filters out mis-behaving bots etc.

I am not sure if Cloudflare is application aware. The way that I was going to
do it was to build modules for popular web applications and optimize based on
that (eg. it would recognize Wordpress and compress the JS/CSS, sideload
images, etc.)

Clickable link: <https://www.cloudflare.com/>

That is an impressive website (even with flash disabled) and a welcome change
to the standard screenshot/header/sub-menus/links in footer boilerplate that
we see too often.

(As an aside, the winner, Qwiki, is co-founded by Louis Monier - link for
those who don't know him or don't recognize the name:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Monier>)

~~~
jeromec
Badgeville is going to be huge. For some reason game mechanics really can
affect user on-site behavior. For example, HN would still probably be just as
awesome as it is without the karma counter, but there is something about
having it there, even though it means absolutely nothing. I care way too much
about it -- in a subconscious way. I don't let it affect my commenting, but I
would be lying if I said I didn't glance at it, and wasn't aware of it in an
almost hypnotic way. It's just there. Maybe it's growing up in the gamer
generation that's permanently internalized any on screen score as being
important. :) But, yeah, Badgeville has already signed up something like $50K
(or was it 500K?) worth of new customer subscription revenues, including
TechCrunch. They're just getting started.

~~~
marknutter
You know what the sad thing is? I was going to apply for YC with this idea.
Good thing I have backups..

~~~
aberkowitz
There are at least five other companies, that I know of, all trying to do the
same thing. Inevitably one or two companies will succeed in the e-wards
market, while others will fail. At this point it is anybody's game - including
yours.

TL;DR: Get going!

~~~
marknutter
In truth, providing badge API's was corollary to my main idea, so it's not the
end of it. Thanks for the pep-talk!

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aberkowitz
For anyone who's curious, like me, Qwiki (Query Wiki?) is auto generated
"wiki" pages on subjects pulled from multiple data sources. I haven't been
able to find a demonstration video, but this seems similar to DDG / Google /
Bing zero click information, only with more pictures.

~~~
carbocation
That makes it sound like Cuil. Is it?

~~~
blasdel
It is.

One of the founders of Cuil decided that the final mystery-meat feature from
Cuil (cpedia) needed to be its own company, plus automatic powerpoint creation
with text-to-speech narration.

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jonathanjaeger
The fact that I could sign up to CloudFlare's site and finish changing all my
settings and nameservers before they even completed their presentation is a
testament to their UI and ease of use. Their site went down for a few minutes
a little bit later, which briefly caused some problems, but other than that
I'm excited to see what results come from using their service. Oh, by the way,
they had my vote for first.

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cmelbye
"Qwiki"?... That's a rather unfortunate name.

