Qwiki was popular long before Yahoo grabbed it for a price tag ranging between $40 million to $50 million (unconfirmed). With the acquisition, Yahoo hopes to reimagine Yahoo!’s storytelling experience, giving more sharing opportunities for its users. The Qwiki app will continue as a standalone entity inside Yahoo!
As Yahoo reinvents itself, how relevant is the acquisition and how successful will this strategy turn, in a world dominated by Instagram and Vine? Keep in mind that Qwiki is not the only app that turns pictures into movies to share. Long before it, KLM Passport allowed users to do the same, while TripWow, although just a desktop edition, did create beautiful memories from still pictures too.
But Qwiki took an old idea and made it better, allowing richer video production, which included both still pictures and videos, plus the ability to edit these on special soundtracks.
By providing a unique set of tools that were not (yet) available with other similar apps, Qwiki managed to step way ahead of the competition: users can rearrange, add, or remove pictures & videos, customize captions, select a filter, and edit the pre-selected soundtrack with a favorite song from their music library, share via Facebook, Twitter, Email or SMS, embed the videos on websites or blogs, and even connect to other users within the Qwiki community.
As you see in the two video examples above, the Qwiki experience is rich, shareable, and enjoyable. The app could make a great companion for your travels, allowing you to create close-to-professional travel videos with virtually no editing experience. But is this enough to boost Yahoo!’s popularity?