1) They just received $8 million in funding to further develop their product. I.e. That money hasn't been spent making it a better product yet.
2) A few hundred lines of markup does not a product make. What about servers, security, user accounts, marketing, documentation, etc?
3) Polishing a product so it looks nice and has very few bugs is a huge amount of work. If he made a slick, bug-free clone I would be impressed.
3.5) ...especially with an automated system like this. It is easy to create something that automatically generates a shoddy result. It can be fiendishly hard to automatically generate something useful often enough for people to rely on you.
Not disingenuous at all. Qwiki won an award for technology innovation, the quick demo simply proved that their was nothing special or unique about Qwiki. Re your three points:
1) What does their future development plans have to do with anything?
2) What does server admin, marketing and documentation have to do wtih technological innovation?
3) What does debugging have to do with technological innovation?
I was responding to the claim in the title about "cloning" Qwiki. What Banksy did was nowhere near cloning Qwiki.
Turns out that Banksy is just claiming to have built a proof-of-concept showing that the underlying technology is simple. You are right that the three points I made don't have much at all to do with technological innovation. Point granted. :)
1) They just received $8 million in funding to further develop their product. I.e. That money hasn't been spent making it a better product yet.
2) A few hundred lines of markup does not a product make. What about servers, security, user accounts, marketing, documentation, etc?
3) Polishing a product so it looks nice and has very few bugs is a huge amount of work. If he made a slick, bug-free clone I would be impressed.
3.5) ...especially with an automated system like this. It is easy to create something that automatically generates a shoddy result. It can be fiendishly hard to automatically generate something useful often enough for people to rely on you.