Greetings fellow Rodinhooders!
I am the co-founder of the venture we recently started – NewsDeck120.
As a two-line short pitch, this is what we do:
NewsDeck120 is a next generation news platform aimed at the fast-paced Indian. Curated and handpicked news stories from the major sources summarized and presented in 120 words with just the things you need to know.
You could also checkout https://www.newsdeck120.com/landing for a more interesting presentation of what we are.
BTW here are the resources: Website (https://www.newsdeck120.com). Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newsdeckaplha.newsdeck)
Facebook page: http:www.facebook.com/newsdeck120
Twitter: @NewsDeck120
While all that explains the what part of the equation, here’s they why part.
Too many young Indians are skipping out on mainstream news. The reasons are many. Their fast lifestyles, overload of entertaining and amusing social content or simply the lack of appeal of present-day media. We wanted to change that and went ahead with the vision of:
People shouldn’t adapt to news. News should adapt to people.
And we created NewsDeck120 where every element of factual reporting is brought down into 120 words. No prose, no poetry. But we decided to integrate a key element- wikipedia snippets. For example take the article about the recent release of Microsoft Cortana.
https://newsdeck120.com/#/article/meet-cortana-microsofts-rival-to-siri-google-now
If you open that link, you will see that the article is only 120 words but it has short infocards about each of Google Now, Cortana and Siri. Things like this ensure that you are in the right context when reading through something.
Competitors and misinterpretations
In India ‘News in shorts’ has a similar offering but we have enough differentiators. We built a concept of Deck. Take it to be the news equivalent of a music playlist. This lets us string any number of related articles and make very interesting stuff! Check out the editor decks on https://www.newsdeck120.com. We also beat them on content and summarization algorithms.
Most people we meet always come off with “Oh so this is like Flipboard (or Circa or Pulse). Anything different? “. This usually drives us nuts. We are Indian. That’s our focus (not handicap). How many India-related news do you get to see on Flipboard anyway?
Questions we have
We are developers by trade. If went on building, we could add a dozen other features but that wouldn’t get us anywhere. But how do we market and communicate our product to users? General ‘growth hacker’ approaches lead us to creating viral content but we are afraid we may dilute the seriousness of the product.
Is our approach too radical? Please download our app at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newsdeckaplha.newsdeck and let us know what you think. You will be probably be amused by the simplicity of it. It doesn’t have categories or lists but it has content that you will appreciate! Also it embraces the same approach we have for website.
How much time have you got? We’ll show you news based on that!
While we as founders very passionately believe in this concept, we want to understand if its too radical a design for people.
Kindly let us know your thoughts,
Harsha
asha chaudhry
hey harsha,
quick q – any particular science behind “120 words”…?
yep – i’m curious about the story behind the story!
🙂
Harsha Bornfree
Yes we know people get quite curious about the number. No astrology behind it really 🙂
When we initially started out with our research on summarization, we came across a few Stanford papers. On of them presented a graph of summary lengths in a Reuters corpus.
By common logic, we should have chosen 90 as the length because that’s the maxima in the graph.
But we instead asked “What’s the maximum length an article goes to but still stays a summary?” and we decided on 120.
Infact two of our competitors do summaries that are 60 words long(lower end of the graph) but we thought 60 words isn’t really a summary. It’s a preview. 😛
Moreover 120 seems to have a nice ring to it! Doesn’t it?
Abey John
Eh? Viral content not a “serious product”? Perish the thought. Close your eyes and do everything to take it viral.
To avoid feature bloat define your engagement metric(s) and test each new feature that you want to roll out against this metric. Does the feature increase engagement and user growth? Yes? Keep it. No? Kill it.
Read the FB development lifecycle to get an idea oh how to keep or kill feature enhancements. Have downloaded the app will report back after playing with it.
Shalini
I liked your idea quite a lot 🙂 I have been looking out for something similar, Between running my startup and managing my 1 year old, i am unable to browse through news papers or lengthy articles on web.
Just installed your android app, will share my feedback in few days! Does your app takes into consideration what topics can interest me more as a women, as an entrepreneur?
Good luck!
Abey John
App looks good. A few observations:
– the opening screen requires an extra touch to access the actual news. this could probably be replaced with a teaser card for each section
– why have 5 mins and 10 mins news? your usp is 120 words. stick to that.
– not enough content in the feed. that’s the biggest drawback as I see it.
Ananta Kumar Roy
Hello Harsha,
I went through the site and found it really helpful for a quick dose of daily news.Excellent work done. I would still recommend something about the interface to make it feel more faster for the user-We need to click on each and every article on the side deck.If the news articles could be scrolled up-down or side to side , it would be a faster experience. And that is what news deck is about.
Aman Jha
Hi Harsha,
I have just downloaded your app, its not working, it crashed everytime I tried to go for 2 min news.
Plz sort out the problem.
Hire a social media guy or do it yourself but the internet on fire for your app, somehow make it cross a milestone number of downloads and get good ranking on play store, rest things will fall into place.
Regards
Harsha Bornfree
Hey Abey,
I’m so sorry I missed the conversation. There wasn’t any action in the first week so I thought it the post got buried!
Thanks for the feedback! 🙂 On the points you outlined here are some of our thoughts
– Yes the opening screen could indeed use a sneapeek at what’s coming. We solved that for the web last week (newsdeck120.com) but haven’t found a way yet to do with app
– The 2, 5, 10 mins were put in place to emphasise the importance of the reader’s time. Beacause otherwise people couldn’t tell us apart from Google news etc.
– On the lack of content, it is intentional. When you’re done with news, we want to say ‘Today’s news is done. Have a great day’. We felt giving people 50 short summaries is just as frustrating as giving them 5 long ones.
Let us know what you think.
Cheers
Harsha Bornfree
Hello Shalini,
Thank you for your words. Yes, we built it too for ourselves after being fed-up with the long lengthy articles.
Right now, we aren’t doing personalization because
1) We dont have so much content to be categorized
2) Personalization has usually led to people creating narrow funnels and ending up with the ‘missing out’ syndrome. We were thinking of tacking this in a different way. Instead of asking people what they want to read, we thought we would ask them what do not want to. Say you check off ‘politics’ and ‘glam’ we’ll show the remaining set.
Hoping that makes sense. 🙂
Harsha Bornfree
Hello Ananta Kumar,
You are spot on the UI pattern! Actually we decided to move to the scrolling fashion like time.com. Could really reduce effort and improve stuff.
Harsha Bornfree
Hello Aman,
We’re sorry. Yes we did notice this bug on a few devices. But it’s fixed in the latest build. Please check it out.
The bug had to do with app registering with google servers for push notifications.
Play store link: goo.gl/Yqe1cT
Thanks for the feedback! 🙂
Karan Ahuja
looks great .
this will be very useful for summary .
personally choosing a deck looks not useful feature for me .
i am at your site for news summary – i dont know what a deck is and why i should choose one …
also – it somehow looks like you have only collected headlines from many newspapers and are showing the most popular headlines .
somehow you need to offer more value than headlines .
how can you collect insight from many sources , news articles and summarize those insights .
i mean what if you try and answer deeper questions like :
whats general sentiment on elections ?
which teams are ahead in ipl
we need to figure out what insight people are looking for .
the news in shorts guys have nailed it here – https://www.newsinshorts.com/read?tags=business
they have the headlines as great summaries . the summary answers key questions that i want answers for .
your quick wiki is amazingly cool as it answers queries i might have about the news .
also it would be great if you can filter out somehow only the important news .
the headlines here – https://www.newsdeck120.com/#/menu
offer very little value .
your value needs to be in a direction additional to what news in shorts is providing or in a different direction altogether .
their algo is nailing it quite well .
some of my feedback might seem negative but i wish to clearly present what i thought so that you can run faster and towards the right direction .
also i could be wrong like everyone else so take my thoughts with a pinch of salt – you are the best judge …
cheers
karan
Karan Ahuja
in case you havent checkout summly app and articles about it on reddit
Harsha Bornfree
Heyy Karan,
Thank you the feedback! And yes, we would definitely appreciate critical feedback. 🙂
We concur with the deck feature isn’t really proving to be of great value for everyday news but makes sense when we play an editor’s deck. As of now, we are trying to make changes and move a more simplistic interface.
While trying to understand and interpret data and statistics sure looks interesting, we do feel it’s a different ball game.
And lastly about the categories, we were wrong in imposing it on people to read all kind of news. In the upcoming design we are adding controls to trim the news streams to your interests.
Let us know any other things via team(at)newsdeck120.com.
Cheers
Karan Ahuja
yes . the moment i come to the site – i need to see news summary as thats your main offering .
let me again try and better explain what i meant by interpreting , analysis .
i was talking about creating a mind blowing summary of each news item and that being the clincher in this business .
example – if the news is about a fire disaster .
then summary should not be key lines from the news post .
it should instead answer key questions :
example summary for fire disaster :
1) fire at <location name> , started at <time> , current status,action by fireman / authorities , number of casualities
example summary of a court case :
case against <name> accusing for <topic> . started at <time> <current status/ verdict>
if you can do this then impact happens as people are interested to easily find out main points and then can take the right actions based on news in their lives .
once this is done – personalization kicks in .
check this link out once – https://ai.cs.washington.edu/projects/open-information-extraction
if convenient – lets catch up one day and share learnings 🙂
i am also learning this stuff for our new product called choiceman – https://choiceman.in
tc cheers
Karan
Harsha Bornfree
Hey Karan!
That’s so dot on! Try watching this video of one of the very early versions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ef4CzXdi5I
We really went ahead with exactly the same thoughts you have. Key info details instead of prose and poetry.
But sadly, we couldn’t automate it good levels for us to gain coverage volume. I’ll look into the information extraction link you provided.
And we should definitely catch up some time.
I’m on 9949500406 and at facebook.com/harsha.xg
Abey John
IMO wrong move based on the faulty assumption that people want less content. We live in the ‘river of news’ world. Unless you are intimate with your reader (read personalization heuristics) you have no way of knowing when the reader’s “news is done” gland will kick in. Coz you have really no idea what constitutes “news” for me and how much of news I need to read to satisfy myself. One short time remedy is to never repeat the same news item for the viewer. That way you at least give the illusion of of a continuously updated stream.
asha chaudhry
how are things in newsdeck120-land harsha??
Harsha Bornfree
Hi Asha,
Great to hear from you!
We joined an accelerator program in Hyderabad. It’s been a month. Since then we have been more into ‘customer validated’ approach to problem solving.
Fancy lingo apart, we are in the process of re-thinking what we are doing and if it really adds value to people.
But we really appreciate your reply. I was pleasantly surprised. 🙂
Cheers,
Harsha