This Valentine’s Day, live-stream your love with Qik and Boingo
Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but on Valentine’s Day, it can just suck. Luckily, these days we have technology to help bridge those distances. Of the technologies that help, live streaming video may be the best, and thanks to services like Qik, people can do it from just about anywhere on their mobile phones. Now Qik is hoping to make the connection a bit better in time for the romantic holiday.
Qik is teaming up with Boingo Mobile, a service which provides Wi-Fi access to cellphones in over 70 countries around the world. The downloadable Boingo Mobile program allows subscribers of the service to find tens of thousands of hotspots, and connect to them quickly and easily. Such a service can be a great help to Qik because it obviously works much better over Wi-Fi then on the slower 3G cellular networks.
As part of the deal, Qik users will get 30 days free of Boingo by signing up from http://mobile.boingo.com/qik. So if you’re going to try it out, do it now so you can get Valentine’s Day coverage for free. After the 30 days, the regular $7.95 a month rate applies. That is, unless you win Boingo’s Valentine’s Day contest, in which you must send a Qik video entitled “Boingo love” on the holiday. The makers of the three best videos — judged on style, humor and/or “the most ardent declarations of love” — will win free Boingo Mobile accounts.
This partnership between Qik and Boingo is the beginning of a long-term partnership between the two companies that will include revenue sharing, Qik tells me.
Qik raised a $3 million round back in April. Since then, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have also invested in the company.
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About the Author, MG Siegler
MG Siegler writes about technology trends and new media for VentureBeat, with a focus on mobile topics, social elements and key news stories. Before that, MG wrote about technology on his blog, ParisLemon. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan where he studied film. He's previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he did web development. He now lives in San Francisco.