History
Inq was founded in 2008 by Ken Johnstone, Frank Meehan and Jeff Taylor. In August 2009, the company launched two phones-the INQ Mini 3G (a candy-bar type form factor with Twitter and Facebook) and the INQ Chat 3G (a QWERTY device with Twitter, Facebook and GMail integration). Both models went on sale in Q4 2009 and feature removable coloured back panels. The INQ1 won Phone of the Year at the 2009 GSMA Awards in Barcelona which are known informally as the industry Oscars. The judges highlighted the handset's affordability, deep integration of social networks and ease of use in their winner's announcement.
In September 2010 news reports speculated about rumors that Facebook and Inq were working together on a “Facebook Phone”. To date no Facebook phone has emerged from either Inq or Facebook themselves.
In June 2011 it was reported that Jeff Taylor had left the company to start his own venture with INQ PR Head Soheb Panja This was followed by an announcement in September 2011 that Frank Meehan had been replaced as CEO by Ken Johnstone, co-founder and formerly Director of Products for Inq.
In January 2013 Inq announced that they would be focusing exclusively on producing social software moving forward and would no longer be involved in the manufacture or distribution of handsets. A Venturebeat article at CES quoted Ken Johnston as saying that “We’ve finished up with hardware a year ago, and we’ve been working our app engine since then,” Inq CEO and cofounder Ken Johnstone said last night at a CES 2013 event.
Inq launched a beta version of MATERIAL, a content discovery engine in February 2013. In an interview with Pocket-lint MATERIAL was positioned as a continuation of the Inq business, rather than a pivot from phones, with Pocket-Lint writing that "Inq is no stranger to "social DNA". The brief foray into devices with the INQ Cloud Touch back in 2011 very much centred around a granular integration of services like Facebook, helping important content rise to the surface. That ethos still sits at the core of what INQ is working on.". Other titles presented MATERIAL as a "pivot" for Inq, suggesting a change in business strategy.
Inq followed this with the launch a second beta app, SO.HO in May 2013. SO.HO (short for Social Homescreen) is an Android launcher. On the Inq Mobile blog, Inq say that SO.HO "allows you to put your favourite social networks on the homescreen of your Android mobile so that you can check what’s happening on multiple social networks without diving in and out of apps."
Read more about this topic: INQ
Famous quotes containing the word history:
““And now this is the way in which the history of your former life has reached my ears!” As he said this he held out in his hand the fatal letter.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)