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