Disrupt Winner Qwiki Arrives In Private Alpha (1,000 Invites)

When Qwiki won the top $50,000 prize at TechCrunch Disrupt a few weeks ago, after much celebrating, co-founders Louis Monier and Doug Imbruce promised the service would start to open up privately in October. Today, they are making good on that promise and launching in private alpha, gradually letting in the 50,000 people who have already signed up for access. But if you are reading this post and are one of the first 1,000 people to sign up at this special link, you can get in now and start trying it out.

Qwiki is somewhere in between a visual search engine and a highly interactive and entertaining Wikipedia. It assembles information on the fly for millions of topics, bringing together images and text in a truly magical way. I've been playing around with it and learning all about Jellyfish, Kanye West, black holes, Thomas Keller's Per Se restaurant, Google exec Marissa Mayer (who was one of the finalist judges), great white sharks,, and even my hometown.

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