INQ

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. 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.