News is an evitable price of information, without which people will wander clueless and be unobservant of the happening around them. But who has the time to go through detailed analysis. Most news mediums publish lengthy descriptions of news and smartphone users do not have the time to go through everything and in details.
Founded by Iqubal Azhar and his two friends Deepit and Anunay, it has simultaneously made its way to the top 3 news apps on Google Play Store (News and Magazine section) with a 4.6 rating.
With 5 lakh downloads, it currently ranks second in the Apple iStore and Google Playstore. The credit goes to the young innovative minds of the team who left IITs and started this
“It is the simplicity of the app that worked very well for the app. We are not focussed in generating any revenue now. We are solely focussed in enhancing user experience,” said Azhar Iqubal, co-founder of NewsInShorts.
So what makes it better than the rest
“We have crossed half a million mark by the end of April. We plan to hit the million download mark sometime in June this year and at the rate at which we are going right now, it will surely happen,” he asserted.
What is the driving force behind such ambitious target?
Unlike others in the field, it is not an aggregator of news. It gives the headline and a 60 word summary. If one is interested he can read the detailed coverage of the story from any other news medium. The best part is by the summary, a person gets a fair idea of the news.
“We (the founders) were among the ones who did not consume news. Partly, because we did not have time and mostly as we were too lazy to read the whole news. So we missed out on a lot. We realised this is the condition of today’s youth. Hence we made this,” said Iqubal. NewsInShorts have in-house team that manually curates and summarizes the news in categories like national, commercial enterprise, sports, engineering science, and so along.
Besides, this first of its kind app makes browsing easier as one can easily flip between news, within few seconds.
Growth
Few interesting numbers to show their growth
· 500k downloads in Google appstore. · They have more than 100K daily unique users. · A daily user of the app consumes more than 90% of the articles published. At present they publish around 60 news items a day, and a user browse through more than 50 of them. · The top 10 articles daily have views of more than 100 thousand.
Challenges
NewsInShorts faces two main challenges in the market, one in terms of algorithm and other in terms of competitoin in the market. Iqubal do not see any strong competitor as such, right now, but in the long run they see
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Any technology is incomplete without updated algorithm. Updating algorithm according to users’ taste is a tedious brain cracking task but for these IITians it is a child’s play.
“In a day thousands news get updated. The challenge is to develop an algorithm so that user can filter out which 100 news they want to read out of those 200-300 news items that we suggest to them. If everything goes well, by the end of June the product embedded with this algorithm should be ready,” said Iqubal.
Future
They plan to launch it in multiple languages by this year end. And in three months they will launch in Hindi. Also, at present we have 60 news items a day but they plan to extend that to 100 news items per day, said Iqubal.
NewsInShorts in the news
The unconventional news curator NewsInShorts recently raised Rs 25 crore in Series A funding. The investment is led by
(image credits: NewsInShorts)