Qik

Performance Indicators

By the end of 2010 the total number of subscribers of Qik was 5 million. It is interesting that in a year growth of a subscriber base was more than 700% - at the beginning of their 2010 there were 600 thousand.

Products

Clients of Qik exist for 200 mobile devices (January, 2011), including iPhone and different phone models on platforms Android Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile. On a part of the devices sold by mobile operators, the client of Qik is preset.

Management structure

In the Californian city of Redvud top managers, department of investor relations, PR, sales specialists and engineers on support of partners of Qik are placed. The hosting of Qik is also located in California, "in the same data center, as at Facebook".

The head of the Russian office Alexander Motrenko avoids to call Qik the company with the Russian roots, however recognizes that one of its founders and "brain" is grazhdaniin Russia, Qik which is nowadays holding a position of the technical director, Nikolay Abkairov. Earlier it for 9 years worked in the Russian company Spirit.

Alexander Motrenko told CNews that development of Qik is concentrated in Zelenograd situated near Moscow where now 50 people work for Qik, and the company continues to involve mobile applications and server technologies specialists.

History

2006 - foundation of Qik.

• Business of Qik was purchased by Skype company. In January, 2011 the Skype company announced acquisition of Qik company. This transaction was expected since the end of 2010, but representatives of Skype announced its implementation only at the CES exhibition in January, 2011.^[1].

Details of the transaction are not disclosed, however, according to the source in Qik, Skype acquired 100% of shares of Qik, and transaction amount appeared more, than $100 million predicted by observers according to the vice president for consumer products of Skype Neil Stephens (Neil Stevens), the deal will be closed in January, 2011.

Among sellers of the shares of Qik there is the Russian investment fund Almaz Capital Partners. His managing partner Alexander Galitsky wrote on the twitter that it was the first exit of fund from the invested assets.

Participants of the transaction said that it is worth expecting integration of developments of Qik into Skype.

The vice president for consumer products of Skype Neil Stephens added that "Qik technologies will allow to optimize video transmission on wireless networks". Besides, according to him, are interesting to Skype the cloud infrastructure which is available for Qik supporting record, stream video, and services of sharing.

Despite existence of a video chat, Qik is exclusively formal competitor of Skype, representatives of the last company say: on audience number services are incomparable. If in Skype network at the same time there are more than 20 million users, then by the end of 2010 the total number of subscribers of Qik was 5 million. It is interesting that in a year growth of a subscriber base was more than 700% - at the beginning of their year there were 600 thousand. According to Stephens, video is used in 41.5% of all calls between users of Skype.