• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 28, 2011

Marketers that want to create a comprehensive story about a product or service by pulling content from across the Web into one location will soon realize their dream. Qwiki, a rich media platform that recently launched in alpha, will do just that. Today, the site offers three million reference topics: people, places and things. The next release of the product will allow people to connect information about them.

When released later this year, Qwiki will provide people with the ability to "click a button and merge your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles on demand to create a Qwiki describing you," explains Doug Imbruce, Qwiki CEO. "A variety of information about you will get pulled together in one place from across the Web. We're talking about specific structure data, unstructured data, images and information about you such as where you went to school."

The cohesive narrative describing an individual puts that information into animation segments supported by clickable interactive references through pictures. For example, Imbruce went to Columbia University, so his Qwiki might include a link to references that describe the school.

Imbruce says engineers took privacy into consideration and will require the person to opt in before creating the Qwiki. While some of the information gets pulled into the Qwiki on the fly, other data will reside in cache or a database, depending on how often it gets indexed and updated.

Later this year, publishers will have the ability to make their own Qwikis and embed them on their Web sites. It will support any third-party publisher use with their raw unstructured content or data and put it into the Qwiki format.

Qwiki recently launched in alpha to the public. While the engineers building the Qwiki platform make it seem simple, the complex technology combines voice, audio and intelligence delivering rich media on demand.

The company's business model doesn't rely on driving traffic to the company's Web site, but delivering content to the user, making it accessible on any Web site or device -- computers to smartphones to tablets. In fact, the company plans to release a version for Apple's iPad in the next couple of months, followed by the iPhone. Scale will come from exposing the platform to anyone who wants to use it, from real estate to retail, according to Imbruce.

Qwiki's marriage of art and science relies on a proprietary text-to-speech engine, pulling from publicly available sources such as Wikipedia. The future technology will synthesize new information where it didn't exist before.

Qwiki raised $9.5 million to date, with Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, and Juniper Networks co-founder Pradeep Sindhu leading the Series A round.

Good Morning, Doug from Qwiki on Vimeo.