On QWiki

This is a new start up based on an idea of providing better information experience. They fetch Wikipedia data, extract topics and probably headers (named entities) then extract relevant images from either Wikipedia or from other sources. Then they construct a video with the still photos and then just convert a few Wikipedia sentences to speech. They got about 8.5 million dollar funding. This means that the investors believe that it can have at least 50/60 million dollar business. I like the demo and it is done quite neatly. However, I will need to see some negative cases to have more confidence in the implementation they had. In one glance the technology looks cool. However, it is doubtful how much business value they can have. It may be interesting for automatically constructing audio books for kids. I do not know how much the web site may be useful. May be it will be. It is yet to see.