Qyuki: A venture worth its salt?
Startup websites proclaiming to be the ‘next big thing’ clog our online traffic every day. Each one of them tries to offer something ‘unique’ in order to stand out from the rest. Only a few of them have gone on to become really successful both in terms of popularity and mileage. (Say flipkart.com or redbus.in)
Six months ago, when Poonacha Machaiah (who previously held leading positions in Motorola and Sasken Communications), returned from the US, his angst was that upcoming talent in creative fields – arts, writing and music did not have an online portal where they could showcase their talent that could be harnessed and nurtured by people from the industry and mentored by experts. In short, he wanted to create a pathway through which budding talents could interact with their ‘role models’ and grow higher.
Thus was born Qyuki.com – a social creative platform with a four pronged aim:
- Showcase, view and share creativity.
- Build your community.
- Learn from the Experts. Co-create. Get recognized.
- And view exclusive content by creative masters
With a big fillip in its start, viz a viz its launch by stalwarts A.R.Rahman and Shekhar Kapur as founding members- and other experts like Chetan Bhagat, Ranjit Barot and Suresh Natarajan who review and rate creations, Qyuki, as its tagline reads promises to be “Your creative world”.
What Qyuki offers:
- Lets you upload, share, view and rate creations (original and adaptations) in - Film making, Visual arts, music, writing, performing arts, design and craft.
- Depending on the number of views it gets, Qyuki handpicks and sends the creation for appraisal from the experts in the relevant field.
- Experts access and rate creations and beam it out to the Qyuki audience.
Despite lot of competition from ‘Touchtalent‘, Qyuki has managed to stay ahead of the curve with some unique features
- Emograph : Lets viewers rate/comment on creations depending on what ‘emotion’ the creation conveys – Love, Joy, wonder, boredom etc
- Qyuki and experts handpick the best creations thereby lending better publicity to the contributor’s film/song.
- One can view exclusive creations from masters like Shekhar Kapur and A.R. Rahman.
Besides tremendous support from the media fraternity, it has tied up with Cisco, using its cloud computing platform to run its website, which lends it the capability to build an online human network in India in addition to money raised from Samir Bangara, former MD (Digital) of Disney India.
Stats
With 20,000 registered users so far who have contributed 18,000-plus creations, the site currently garners 2.5 million views/month and the average time spent on the site is 12 minutes according to Poonacha.
Given all these plus points, Qyuki has still not yet become the toast of the internet community. Firstly, its interface is borrowed from Touchtalent both in looks and features. Also, its features are sometimes painful and slow – like opening a new page while playing a song or clicking on a photo. Six months since its inception,Qyuki hasn’t exactly hit the internet audience like a rage. It’s still a passive website visited by only the ‘regular’ people. However, to its credit, once you visit the website, you will keep visiting the website for newer creations. This is testimony to its uniqueness and utility. Qyuki.com has the potential to become a talent hub from where the industry could derive and develop, but it still has a few glitches here and there and a tough path ahead.
Author : M Shrikanth
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