Qik Is Shutting Down In April, Three Years After Being Acquired By Skype

Qik, a company that was very early on in the stream-live-video-from-your-phone trend that popped up and then quickly faded around 2008-2009, is being retired by its parent company, Skype. Skype acquired Qik back in 2011 for upwards of $100 million.

Why the shutdown? To be blunt: Skype got what they wanted out of the deal, so Qik is redundant now. While Skype doesn’t make direct use of the phone-to-web broadcasting functionality that Qik focused on, they say they’ve integrated core bits of Qik’s video messaging technology into Skype.

While Qik as a service never got hugely popular (blasting videos to your friends in real-time is only really fun if all of your friends happen to all be free at the same time), the company built some damned cool technology. These guys were doing video recording on the iPhone before the iPhone even officiallysupported video recording..

If you’ve still got any videos lurking on Qik’s servers, you’ll need to get them off by April. Given that Qik pitched itself as a means of sharing things like your kid’s first steps with friends and family in real time, there’s probably quite a few precious moments still tucked away on the service.

Source: TechCrunch

Viber reports 12 million users in Vietnam, but a local rival is surprisingly close behind

Source:  TECHINASIA

Yesterday, VNG announced that it has hit over 10 million registered users on its chat app Zalo, up from three million users from July last year. In less than one year, the scrappy mobile project under the Vietnamese tech giant pulled in over seven million users. That’s in a market with about 21 million smartphone users. Zalo’s biggest chat app competitor is Viber. We couldn’t resist asking how the two stacked up against each other. Viber reports that it hit 12 million users in Vietnam this monthm, up from 8 million last November. This isn’t surprising as Viber has actually started spending money on marketing in Vietnam, something it didn’t do until last Christmas. In other words, the battle for Vietnam’s mobile users has considerably accelerated. But all this hubbub over chat apps foreshadows an incoming battle over mobile. Right now in Vietnam, we are starting to see a steady increase in mobile commerce apps, loyalty apps, mobile content distribution systems, and mobile payment models that are capturing users. Thus, this battle for mobile users could, at any time, pivot into the above juicy categories.