News and the news-makers are the ones adding up to the trend and data and leveling up the technology to make content consumption smooth and fast. No matter what field or profession you are designated to, you are not suppose to run away from the news. The data is not meant to push you to the chaotic world but to smarten and evolve you, and give birth to change makers.
NewsCo a content discovery and aggregation engine, evaluates multiple news source, blogosphere, social media and many other attributes of a story every day and identify few selected stories which will be interesting to you.
We got an opportunity to quiz Sunil, the Founder and know more about NewsCo and the technology behind it.
Online news aggregation has become a very competitive niche, How is Newsco different? How would you describe the USP?
Newsco.me’s USP is mainly in its design and technology. It offers a simple card layout and when you hover your mouse over a card, it flips and provides you a point by point summary of the story. The card links out to the source site and within the site itself, it gives you a more detailed synopsis. Newsco summary is a unique feature and It keeps things at a need-to-know basis, and it suits the not-so-long attention span of today’s online reader. Newsco technology also identify currently trending topics and people and extract more information about them from wikipedia. It gives a more context to uses about key players in the news.
At Newsco we are trying to build a smart news aggregator with main focus on news quality.
We use machine learning techniques to identify and extract most important part of the news and present news highlights to user. With so much content available today this is really helpful for user to consume lot of news and read in detail what excites him. Our algorithm also identifies key entities from news and get more information from the web for those entities to give more context around the story.
NewsCo algorithm ranks news according to their popularity across social media and multiple other factors to filter to surface the most popular stories.
Newsco filter already read news by user implicitly and explicitly and do not show it to him so that with every visit user can get fresh news.
How does Newsco determine the relevant news that a user may be interested in?
We evaluate multiple news attributes to identify if story is popular and we match them with user preferences, browsing history, location, gender etc. Currently Newsco algorithm is evolving and very naive but over time it will going to get better and also its accuracy increases with higher usage by customer.
Can a user get his own RSS feed of his Newsco account which he can add in his feedreader? Or can a user add his external feeds to his Newsco account?
Newsco current focus is to deliver relevant and interesting news and summaries to our users. We will add these personalization features as the products evolve.
What are your plans for revenue generation?
Newsco website and entry level apps for mobile devices will be free from its user forever. In future, revenue model will be based on un-intrusive advertising and premium paid mobile apps. We might also look into premium content distribution as we grow our user base.
Is Newsco bootstrapped or have you received fundings?
We have not received yet and it is working on bootstrap model.
Tell us something about the team behind Newsco?
Newsco has been founded by ex-IITians with vast experience in premium silicon valley companies like Facebook, Apple and Sales Force.
What are your future plans for Newsco?
We are totally focused on building very effective and fun to use service. We are constantly working on improving our algorithms. Our product is still very young and we need user feedback to improve our service. User preference and personalization aspects still needs to be developed fully.
We are working on adding intelligent personalization with will offer relevant and interesting stories to its readers based on user taste and settings. Our iPhone app is also in the making and should be available on App Store later this year.
We will look for funding on expanding our user base and develop our product as we see necessary in the future.
