Qik: Live video blogging for the win
If you're desperate to share what you see with your buddies at the click of a mobile button, Qik lets you do just that by allowing you to stream live video from your phone
Qik -- that's 'quick', pronunciation fans -- is a video-streaming service that lets you gush live moving pictures from your mobile phone on to the Internet. It's essentially a live version of YouTube. It's been around for a while, but yesterday it announced support for BlackBerrys.
We had our doubts about Qik -- the idea that people would shoot live video and then stream it to a captive audience seemed ambitious, but it is working and the number of users is growing every month.
The live streams consist of everything from news coverage to people filming themselves singing -- you can be damn sure there are live cats on there too. The immediacy of Qik makes it very exciting, as you know you're watching something unravel at the same time as the person shooting it.
By allowing users to embed Qik videos in blogs, Facebook and other media, it's gaining traction with bloggers and journalists alike, keen to show off their coverage as it happens, rather than having to wait until they get home to upload a video file.
If it sounds like something you'd be into, visit the Qik site and sign yourself up. Here's a list of supported phones so you can see if your phone will work with it.