Ever so often our engineering team blows my socks off and today they did that again!! Well, since CTIA Wireless is just around the corner (April 1 – 3 in Las Vegas) – here’s a thought.

Come visit us at the booths we’ll be at and if you are not impressed in any of them – I am going to buy you a drink at the Qikup/Tweetup happening on April 1st at the the Pool bar/lounge in the Las Vegas Hilton (Facebook Event Page).

Booths we’ll be at during CTIA:
- Nokia: Booth #7553 Central Hall (Wednesday April 1 and Friday April 3)
- Microsoft (Windows Mobile): Booth #5136 Central Hall (Wednesday April 1 to Friday April 3)

- RIM / Blackberry: Booth #5112 in the Central Hall (Wednesday April 1 to Friday April 3)
- Symbian Foundation: Booth #4814 Central Hall (Wednesday April 1 to Friday April 3)

Looking forward to seeing you at the show.

Qik clients are now location aware. Based on your chosen privacy setting you can now share with viewers the location from where you are Qikking. If the location is shared, it can be viewed from qik.com on the computer and from your mobile phone – yes, from your mobile phone too!

Set your location permissions from the Qik client on your phone:
The setting on the client determines whether you want to capture the location for the video you are streaming and if so at what level of granularity. This ensures that you are always in control of the privacy and can choose a privacy level for each individual video. The following are the options available for the location setting on the Qik client:

• Off: When set to this, the location from where you are streaming is not captured.
• City: The location is captured and displayed at the city level, i.e. viewers will see the city from where you are streaming and nothing more.
• Street: The street from where you start streaming is displayed to the viewer.
• Track Live/Precise: In this case as you stream and move around, your location is tracked and displayed. For example: here’s a link to video of a Qikker skiing and a link to a video of a Qikker who ran the Tokyo Marathon.

Setting location permissions from the Edit Profile area while logged into your Qik account on the web:
The setting available from your Edit Profile page is the final mechanism to keep the location of all your Qik videos private or public or only show as an approximation.

This feature is available for both GPS-enabled and non-GPS enabled phones. For non-GPS enabled phones, CellID is used for determining the location. That means that Qik’s technology detects the location of the nearest cell tower to figure out where you are.

Well, as always we welcome your thoughts and feedback. So, drop us a line at support@qik.com and let us know what you think.

You would think that after 15 months of launch of Qik, we would have seen it all. Well – we keep getting surprised by what Qikkers do around the world and the way they use Qik. The latest surprise came a week back when Joseph Tame announced that he’ll be qikking his marathon run in Tokyo (blogpost). Well, we had seen a previous marathon Qik from Boston Marathon – but this was the first time someone would have done such a feat internationally. When we got the email from Joseph – our first reaction was complete jump of joy and excitement and this quickly (or should I say qikly ) became into “we hope Joseph is able to focus on the run rather than Qik”. Then came the realization that this is exactly what we do best – make the technology really invisible such that anyone can stream live with a press of 1-button while we take care of the technology to adapt to various network and phone conditions. So, yesterday when Joseph ran the marathon – it was great to not just see him stream live for hours but also seeing the route he took (video). I would have never thought that I would be able to experience something like this – watch Tokyo marathon from the eyes of a runner, see the route he takes in real-time while chatting and encouraging Joseph as he makes the run. Thank you Joseph! (http://qik.com/tamegoeswild). Here are some Qik clips:

Joseph announcing what he’ll do:

After the run

Have a WordPress.com blog and not happy that you can’t embed your Qik videos there? Well, starting now you can embed both Qik videos and your Live channel to your WordPress.com blog.

Embedding a Video:
To embed a video, grab the permalink of the video and then use one of the following codes to embed it to your wordpress.com blog. An example can be found here.

[qik]video-permalink[/qik]
[qik url="video-permalink"]
[qik url="video-permalink" width="320" height="280"]

Embedding your Live Channel:
To embed your live channel all your need is your Qik username and the shortcodes below. An example can be found here.

[qik]username[/qik]
[qik user="username"]
[qik user="username" width="320" height="280"]

Coming soon: The above will be available from the Edit Networks page on Qik.com as well as the Networks tab in the Share widget (the widget that comes up when Share is clicked under the thumbnail of the video).

If you have any questions/comments – let us know by sending an email to support@qik.com.

Last evening an update, version 0.9.56, was released for the Nokia smartphone (Symbian S60) client. This can be downloaded from your mobile browser by going to d.qik.com or starting Qik, which will then prompt you to upgrade. Key features included in this release are:

Enhanced sharing
Now you can share your videos directly from the phone.
- SMS: Go to Options > Share to share the link of the video with your friends and family using SMS.
- Ovi Share by Nokia: Share the video to your community on Ovi

- YouTube: Share the video to your community on YouTube

Save on roaming charges
Traveling? Qik not only consumes less bandwidth, but also enables you to Go Offline anytime enabling you to capture your video offline and then streaming it out when you are back home or in a WiFi area. To go offline anytime – just press Options > Go Offline. You can go Online anytime by pressing Options > Go Online.

If you are traveling for an extended period of time you can set to start Qik in Offline mode by pressing Options > Settings > Connection Mode, which provides the following options:
- Auto: When Qik starts, it will automatically detect and connect to your access point. This is the default.
- Always ask: When Qik starts, you’ll be prompted to connect to one of the available networks.
- Offline: When Qik starts, it will not connect to any network enabling you to capture your video in an offline mode and upload it later. You can go online anytime by pressing Options > Go Online.

Further, you can take advantage of our Boingo partnership – to connect to any of their tens of thousands of WiFi networks globally. To take advantage of this partnership, click here and stream video over wifi worldwide.

Innovative touch interface for Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
On the touch phones, like Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, you can take advantage of an innovative touch interface enabling you to do most functions with one touch.

- Tap the center of the screen to surface commonly used functions

- Move your finger diagonally from the bottom-left to top-right to zoom
- Move your finger from bottom to top or vice versa to scroll chat.

Better battery performance
Plan to Qik for a long time? Go to Options > Settings and set Backlight to “System Default”. This will switch off the viewfinder backlight which can result in significant battery savings.

Go ahead give this version a spin and let us know what you think by sending an email to support@qik.com.

During Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced the Ovi Store, its new application and personalized content marketplace. As you can see on the Ovi Store site, Qik will be a featured app there.

Now we’re equally excited to announce that Qik has integrated the ability for users to share their Qik videos to their community on Ovi Share by Nokia. (Full press release here.)

Ovi Share is the online service that allows users to share photos and videos, from their PC, Mac or straight from their camera phone with one easy step. Users can share content with anyone – no sign-up or membership is required for recipients to view the photos or videos that have been shared with them.

Qikkers can share their Qik content directly from their handsets – the first such Ovi Share integration to offer such easy sharing of live mobile videos. In addition, Qik users can send their videos to Ovi Share with just one click from the Share widget on Qik’s website. For more information on the Ovi Share integration, visit http://qik.com/ovi.

Qik’s CEO, Ramu Sunkara, says: “We’re excited to offer the Ovi Share integration to the hundreds of millions of Nokia device owners around the world. This, in combination with being announced as a featured application for a marketplace as significant as the Ovi Store, is an important progression of Qik’s relationship with Nokia.”

“Nokia’s Ovi Share brings the power of the internet in a simple and intuitive way, by enabling consumers to capture, save and share their photos and videos straight from the camera and gallery applications on their Nokia handset,” said Lior Nir, Director of Product Management in Nokia’s Media Services Group. “Qik integration with Nokia’s Ovi Share strengthens our offering by bringing real-time video sharing on the Nokia handsets using Qik service and re-live it on Ovi Share.”

The East Coast in US has been seeing a lot of snowfall the past couple of days. Steve Garfield took this opportunity to broadcast to the world the snow near his house using Qik. This was simultaneously broadcasted to Mogulus and shown live on the New England Cable News (NECN). Steve describes this further in his blog.

Below is the Qik video that was shown live on NECN.

And here’s the behind the scenes view as Steve was preparing to go live.