Shafqat Islam launched Newscred just last month and says it's the next generation of web news sites. Co-founder Iraj Islam is in Stockholm and the development team is i Bangalore - but with Shafqat in Geneva the site is truly international.
The team is in the process of securing funding and has ambitious plans to reach one million unique users by August next year. He explains how.
NewsCred chief executive Shafqat Islam
• Explain your business to my Mum.
"NewsCred is a digital newspaper where you can read credible news from hundreds of high-quality newspapers and blogs. Instead of reading each newspaper individually, you can read them all in one place on our website. You and the rest of the NewsCred community can then vote on the credibility of news articles, journalists and news sources."
• How does that work?
"Readers can voice their opinion about the quality of news, and it's not only easy to find and read news, but you can rate the news and the people writing the news. NewsCred's algorithms analyse this data, and unlike other social news sites, NewsCred uses the data to present the news based on quality - not popularity."
• How do you make money?
"Through advertising currently, but will also be expanding our business model. Some options include offering premium subscriptions, selling analytics data, and/or building APIs for other developers to use in their commercial ventures."
• What's your background?
"Iraj is a true serial entrepreneur, having founded multiple consumer web companies in Sweden. I came via a more mainstream route, having worked as a vice president at Merrill Lynch Technology for six years, in New York and Geneva. Despite our varied backgrounds, we're both avid news readers and are passionate about new media and the changing face of journalism."
• How many users do you have now, and what's your target within 12 months?
"We literally just launched, but we already have thousands of users a day. Our goal in 12 months is to have over a million unique visitors per month."
• How are personalisation and recommendation part of your business?
"Personalisation is huge part of our value proposition, and we allow news readers to personalise their digital newspaper by simply clicking on the logos of their favorite, trusted sources. We've made it extremely simple because we want filtering and customisation to be a breeze, and we really want to introduce the power of RSS to the mainstream. You can even personalise each category (world, US, UK, business, tech etc) individually. We're also planning on using the voting and personalisation data we collect to build a powerful recommendation engine so that we can automatically serve you more relevant news based on your personal tastes and reading history."
• Name your closest competitors.
"We're really targeting the mainstream news audience, so our big competitors are obviously Yahoo News and Google News. They have a big head start given their dominant brands, but we feel like we can compete by being more innovative, agile and clearly the sense of community helps as well. NewsTrust, a non-profit organisation is in a similar space to ours, and we share many of the same goals and visions."
• What's your biggest challenge?
"Clearly we need to build a critical mass of users to draw meaningful conclusions with our data. That will help convince some of the skeptics who believe regular readers like you and me cannot determine quality. We think being a news readers is qualification enough to voice your opinion, and we're excited about proving that with our analytics data."
• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
"I don't think so. I think it's become easier and cheaper than ever to start and grow a web-based company, which is fantastic. With lower barriers to entry, you'll certainly see startups that might not be sustainable, but the community and markets will determine that. You clearly won't see a 'pets.com' paying millions of dollars for a 30 second Superbowl ad anymore. Come to think of it, you won't see a 'pets.com' in general, so that's reassuring."
• Which tech businesses or web thinkers are the ones to watch?
"Iraj is a big fan of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web and doing a lot of work in semantic technology now. We both love what Sergey and Larry have done with Google, and would also encourage all startups to read what the guys at 37Signals have to say. Iraj also has to give kudos to his Swedish counterpart, Niklas Zennstrom. Also, Jeff Bezos. We could go on..."
• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
"We want to help millions of news readers find the highest quality news online. I really believe that access to credible and accurate news is a cornerstone of democracy and I want NewsCred to be the tool that news readers use to find that news."
• Do we need another news site?
• Are these recommendation sites a good thing for mainstream sites?
• And shouldn't the major sites be developing these kind of tools themselves?
