Subscribe to your friends’ Qiks using the Adobe Media Player and view them anytime – online or offline. Just go to My Favorites in the Adobe Media Player, click on Add RSS Feed and then add the feed for your friends’ qik videos, which is of the format http://qik.com/[username]/latest-videos. That’s it – you are all set to get the latest Qiks from your friends and play them directly from the Adobe Media Player.
Starting tomorrow (July 24, 2008) clients older than 0.08.73 may not be able to connect to Qik due to changes made in the data center. Please update your clients by starting Qik and going through the prompts.
Note: The browser on your phone should be closed, prior to starting the upgrade.
Can’t express how excited we are to be have reached this stage where Qik is now transitioning from an Invitation-only Alpha to Public Beta with additional features, integrations and additional handset support.
Even though we are announcing public beta today, July 21 2008, from today till end f July we’ll be trickling in various features. All I can say is “see what happens” these remaining days of July 
What does this mean?
- No more waiting for approval: YAY!!! Users who have a supported device can signup and start streaming right away. They no longer have to wait for us to be the gatekeepers.
- Anyone with a data plan can signup: Don’t have a supported phone – no worries. You can still signup to participate in the community – comment on videos, participate in groups/events, mark videos as favorite, create their own profile, etc. Then when we rollout support for your phone – they can start streaming with a click.
- Invite your friends to join: You can now invite your friends to join Qik.
Key New Features:
- Groups: You can now create groups / micro-communities that they can then stream to. Details here.
- Events: Create your own events – from small family events to large corporate events – and invite others to join those events. Details here.
- New Player: A better looking player that contains the ability to (a) view the thumbnails of all the videos of the user and play directly from there (b) chat from within the player that shows up as overlay on the player.
- Reduced Latency: Our guys did some more magic over the July 4th weekend and now we have now got the latency down to 1/2 to 3 second. Details here.
- Playback on phones using resident media RSS readers:You can now subscribe to Qiks from your favorite RSS reader on your phone or the Nokia Podcasting application on your Nokia smartphone. Then subscribe to your favorite Qikkers and get their feeds directly to the phone and play the videos directly from the these readers.
- Signup from mobile device:You can now sign up even from your mobile phone. Just go to qik.com from the browser on your phone and follow the instructions on next steps.
New Distribution Partners:
- Go live on Facebook: Go live on your Facebook profile and enable people to chat with you directly from there. The Facebook application can be found here.
- Go live on Myspace: To go live on Myspace, just cut/paste your channel embed code and you can go live on Myspace.
- Go live on Orkut: Cut/paste your channel embed code to your scrapbook on Orkut to go live on Orkut.
- Develop your own integrations:We also have some partners integrating Qik into their application using oEmbed and Media RSS from the Qik homepage and the profile pages. Example of recent integrations –
(a) CoverItLive: the live blogging service now has live video blogging with Qik. Details here.
(b) iPoki: A location based service now shows location of Qiks and Qikkers. Details here.
More Handsets on More Networks:
We now support additional Symbian and Windows Mobile phones on both GSM (like AT&T, T-Mobile) and CDMA networks (like Verizon, Sprint). Go to http://qik.com/sign_up to get details on all the phones supported. Do check back often as we’ll be announcing support for more phones in the coming months.
We are always here listening and ready to help. If you have any questions or feedback please contact support@qik.com.
On June 23/24, Jackie Danicki and I had the pleasure of meeting with Keith McSpurren, CEO of CoverItLive during Personal Democracy Forum. It was an instant match with live qik being embedded into the overall live blogging experience of CoverItLive. We then had a chat with some of our common customers, like TheUptake, and Jason Barnett got excited about the possibility as well.
Fast forward to July 15 and CoverItLive has an integration with Qik enabling live bloggers to quickly (pun intended ) embed live qiks happening during that event to the live blog. Here are some screen snapshots on how this looks:
The CoveritLive Console for the writer of the live blog with a Qik video showing. User simply copy/pastes the embed code for Qik into the Console and clicks ‘play’.
An embedded Viewer Window on a blog, with a live video playing
Blog with CoveritLive Viewer Window embedded where reader has expanded the live video window and dragged away for better viewing
Well every day we learn new things and come across uses of Qik that continue to amaze us. Today we came to know that the The Vatican has started using Qik (qik.com/h2onews) to document Pope’s travels and events that will primarily be made available through h2onews.org.
The first large use of Qik in this scenario will be during the World Youth Day (WYD), the largest youth event in the world that will be held in Sydney from July 15 to 20. WYD08 will be the largest event Australia has ever hosted. It will attract over 125,000 international visitors and will mark the first visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to Australia.
We made some significant changes to the Symbian client and the data center and are therefore requesting all our users to upgrade their Symbian clients to the latest 0.08.70 build.There’s a remote chance that folks not upgrading may have problems connecting to our service starting this weekend.
To upgrade just start Qik on the phone and follow the prompt to upgrade.
We are always here to help. If you have any questions please contact support@qik.com.
If you’re recording Qik videos that you want to have professional quality audio, it’s relatively straightforward to attach an external mic to, for example, your Nokia N95. This will deliver sound that is much enhanced over what you can capture with the Nokia’s existing internal mic. All it takes are two cheapo connectors from Radio Shack (or similar), an external mic, and the output cords that come with your phone.
Pat Phelan, a very early Qik user (the one who recruited me into Qik fandom in the first place, in fact), got me to do a little demo video of how this works. Camera work by Daniel Brusilovsky, aka “appleuniverse”.
Many thanks to Shelby Highsmith and Mobile Jones for the tips!
This morning we released a new version of our Symbian client 0.08.70 that further raises the bar on live. Below is a test that we did here in the Qik HQ on a 3G network to show the performance improvement.
Test using the Setting “Optimize For = Min Delay”
In this test you can observe the latency by seeing the time difference when the hand appears in front of the phone camera to the time when it shows up on the website right after.
To download the latest client, start Qik on your phone and you’ll be notified of the available update. Then press OK to download and start streaming.
Ever wondered how to easily share your Qiks with a select group of people – like your family, friends, colleagues? Well now you can. Introducing the ability to Create, Manage and associate your Qiks to specific groups.
Group Types:
There are 3 types of groups that can be created:
- Public: These groups are open to any Qikker to join. The Qiks associated with this group can be viewed by anyone.
- Restricted: These groups require approval to join. The Qiks associated with this group can be viewed by anyone.
- Private: These groups requier approval to join. The Qiks associated with this group can be viewed only by the members of this group.
Creating Groups:
To get started go to People > Create New Group and filling out the form. Here you can even add / edit new members or approve membership requests.
Groups You Belong To:
To view the groups that you belong to or groups that you have been invited to go to People > Groups > My Groups.
Assigning Qiks to a Group:
By default, all your Qiks are assigned to the groups you belong to. To change the default assignment select the video and then click Group Settings and then change the Privacy setting as well as the Groups that you’d like to associate this Qik to.
So, go ahead start forming your groups and streaming Qiks to your groups. As usual we are always ears and welcome any feedback you have. Send your feedback to support@qik.com.
Conducting or going to an event where you or your fellow Qikkers will be Qikking? Well now you can create and manage your own events through the Events tab.
Creating Events:
To create an event go to the Events tab and selecting Create Event. Once the web form is filled out, the event is created and a permalink is assigned to that event. This link can then by sent out to others or posted on your blog for anyone to view the Qiks, chat at these events, and for other Qikkers going to “attend the event and have their Qiks also be associated with this event.
Qikking at Events:
Any Qikker going to an event can “Attend Event” and their Qiks will automatically get categorized into the events page apart from their own profile page
Finding, Viewing, Interacting with Qikkers at the Event:
Anyone can go to Events tab to search, view and participate in the events they are interested in. From here you can view (a) events happenning right now; (b) past events and its associated Qiks; and (c) upcoming events.
So, next time you are out at an event and plan to Qik, go ahead and give the Events capability a spin. We will soon be adding capabilities like RSS feed for Events as well so that you can subscribe to the event of your choice and view it from your favorite RSS reader and iTunes.
