INQ

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. This announcement was followed by a company rebrand, at which the company redesigned its logo and began to write the company name as Inq Mobile rather than the original INQ.

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 on 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."

In August 2013 Inq launched the iOS version of Material and brought the Android version of Material out of beta. The launch of Material for iPhone was covered by many key press titles including Engagdet, TechCrunch and Venturebeat.

As of 31 January 2014 they have ceased operations, the last issue of Material was on the 28th. SO.HO will continue to work but will no longer be offered/updated.

Inq launched two software only products in 2013; Material a discovery app that delivered each of its users a personalised magazine based on their interests and SO.HO, a launcher and app that brought together Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in one place. Shortly after its release, the Material iOS app became a and achieved a number 4 rank in the Free News chart in the US app store.

Inq describe their apps as social software and parts of the functionality are based on surfacing social networks or using elements from the social graph.

Material

Inq describe Material as a "personalised magazine" that "hunts out content based on your interests". The app delivers a fresh update of content twice a day, grouping each delivery into a "morning/evening edition" The topics and stories in each edition are personalised to match the interests of each user and users can also add topics via a menu. The more a user uses Material, the more it learns about his or her interests. Users may also add additional topics of interest. In a press release regarding the product, CEO Ken Johnstone positioned Material as an anti-dote to content overload stating "With the avalanche of content out there, we're focused on finding new and exciting ways for people to get directly to the things they love. Material was the result of this thinking, an app that takes all the hard work out of finding great stuff.” and Inq state that the discovery app will help users "discover new content from new places". Material is available for iPhone and Android smartphones.

Inq released Material in BETA as an Android only product. The BETA app was praised by press for "its colorful and intelligent design" and UI. Similarly the Android public showed an interest in the app with the BETA achieving over 50,000 installs. In August 2014 Inq launched an iOS version of Material which had a redesigned UI and improvements to Inq's “interest extraction engine,” which forms the intelligence behind the app. Shortly after its release, the Material iOS app became a number 1 app in the Free News category and achieved a rank of number 4 rank in the Free News chart in the US app store.