Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Lolo — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 09:12:52 -0000

very cool indeed

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

riobravo — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 03:48:10 -0000

"The latest MySpace stuff from Mashcodes:"

Just for the record... the idea for Qunu was born in January 2000 - yes, six and a half years ago. In August 2000, I had a working prototype of it (and the screenshots to prove it!) using the GU IM protocol (which soon then became Sonork) and a client developed by Hernlabs.se (who were later bought by Opera Software).

When it became obvious that Sonork wasn't the right platform for (what was then called) Instant Help, it lay idle for a good while before I presented the idea to Murray in mid 2003, when he visited me in Cape Town.

We then tried to use Mozilla as a frontend, but that failed miserably. Only about (IIRC) ten months ago we made a complete U-turn and went Web 2.0, creating Qunu as it is today.

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

derrick brown — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 16:13:21 -0000

where do you think music is going in the web 2.0 frontier as fare sites or entreprenural sites.

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Shira R. — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:46:10 -0000

Take a look at Sunflower Network -
http://www.sunflowernetwork...
a very similar service to Qunu.
One main difference is that Sunflower is a paid service - customers pay and experts get paid.

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

ned — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 03:50:24 -0000

shaq - actually, qunu doesn't require your password if you'd like to connect via your Jabber-friendly IM client. You simply add quser.alpha.qunu.com (the QunuBot) to your contact list and you're signed up. You can talk to the QunuBot and give it instructions and tag yourself that way. It's super easy!

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

David G — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 21:03:12 -0000

Here's a potential google-replacement Pete - http://www.nownow.com/nowno...

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Helmar Rudolph — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 18:02:19 -0000

shaq, have a look here:
http://www.qunu.com/en/faq/...

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Helmar Rudolph — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 18:00:46 -0000

Hello ventureblogalist,
as I said yesterday in a conference call to the US, we are barely scratching the surface at the moment. There are plenty of applications for Qunu that we aren't even remotely aware of, your designer QA service being case in point. This is why we encourage people to try Qunu, but also to participate in our Wiki (www.qunu.com/wiki/) with ideas and suggestions. It's all out there, down to the Revenue Model (www.qunu.com/wiki/index.php..., and you're all invited! :)

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

shaq — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 17:46:48 -0000

currently its in beta phase but I dont understand why they need users or experts IM account names and password. it is kinda a privacy issue

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

ventureblogalist — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 13:51:12 -0000

Helmar, well done on getting to this point. Looks great. Similar to Ether but IM and without the monetization.

What I would REALLY LOVE is a niche QA service dedicated to interior design. As an apartment or home owner in need of suggestions, give me the tools to browse a directory of interior designers, and then procure services from some of them - examples of designer blogs - apartmenttherapy, designsponge. The designers could see pictures of my place and could freely suggest products using wist/kaboodle like integration and/or they could initiate a chat that gets saved to quno logs and posted to the project history. My responsiblity would be to rank all of these suggestions. Designers could also be filtered and sorted by feedback scores. Motivation for designers is to pull people to their blogs. Monetization could be via a chitika product suggest ad revenue stream and maybe shared with designers??

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Ebrahim — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 03:41:03 -0000

David/Pete,

The concept of real-time help from 'people' might not be a success without a (very, very) substantial user-base.

However, an idea of a giant, searchable knowledgebase is already successful (search engines - GYM). It just needs to be more usable and presentable, like what we're trying to do with 'Siel' at Qelix.

Finding 'people' online doesn't look quite possible, but one is more likely to find a solution in the knowledgebase.

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Pete Cashmore — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:58:29 -0000

David,

Yeah, I'm beginning to see you're right - time/attention is the scarcest resource. It's easier for us to all specialize and pay each other than it is to do everything on our own. I'd rather pay a few dollars for someone to solve my tech problem in 5 minutes than waste hours Googling it.

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

David G — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:50:12 -0000

Like I'm sayin' Pete - Pro-Services is where this is all gonna' end up - and like Helmar's sayin', it may still be ahead of it's time - we may need to get a bit busier still before we realize we need help

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Helmar Rudolph — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 18:47:43 -0000

We then tried to use Mozilla as a frontend, but that failed miserably. Only about (IIRC) ten months ago we made a complete U-turn and went Web 2.0, creating Qunu as it is today.

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Pete Cashmore — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:43:38 -0000

Sam,

That's weird, I went through the process of becoming an expert and assumed that because Google Talk was supported, it must work. Thanks for the heads up - will fix.

I may need to tweak other parts of that description, too - it doesn't read very well.

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Sam Davyson — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:35:36 -0000

Pete how long did you look at the site for?

From the FAQ:

"Why does Qunu not work with Google Talk?
The Google Talk Client doesn't support GroupChat, hence the failure to work with Qunu. If you want to remedy this, please drop the kind folks at Google a note."

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Ebrahim — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:26:00 -0000

Creating an application is easy, but making is 'usable' is quite challenging. Yahoo Search existed well before google, but you know what it is now.

Not that I mean Messagr isn't good, but it needs a lot of improvement to become a 'competitor'.

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

Noah Winecoff — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:13:09 -0000

This could be huge. I love that it is real time. I'm not a very patient person and waiting for a forum reply sucks, but this...this is good.

Re: Qunu Is a Killer Idea

name — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 16:51:45 -0000

See http://www.messagr.com/ for a similar service.