Qik Blog

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.