Qik raises $5.5 million so I can watch U2 through some Italian guy's cellphone

Now that early adopters are all waving video-enabled iPhones at us, demand for personal video publishing will grow exponentially (*). That’s probably why Qik, the company that makes it easy to stream live video from a cellphone onto the Internet, has secured another $5.5 million in funding. Quest Venture Partners and CampVentures led the round, along with several unnamed investors.

Marcus Ogawa from Quest has joined Qik’s board of directors. CampVentures’ Justin Camp has become a board observer.

The company had previously raised $4 million in funding through angel investors including Salesforce.com founder Mark Benioff and Internet poster boy Mark Andreessen. Qik is located in Redwood City. Competitors besides YouTube include Kyte and Bambuser.

(*) I’m not sure if it’s really an exponential function or not. But thank God for cloud computing to hold all this stuff.

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