Still studying computer science at UC Berkley in California, Andrey Lukatsky is one half of the Macrospecs duo - and they have designs on your mobile phone.
Self-funded and supporting a team of just two - with co-founder Alex Lukatsky - Macrospecs is based in San Jose and is setting out on a mission to put relevant, targeted and social news on your mobile phone. It's all the mobile news that's fit for your phone, with an added touch of Diggishness.
Andrey tells us more.
Andrey Lukatsky, co-founder and architect of Macrospecs
• Explain your business to my Mum.
"We've created a website for mobile phones that display the most popular news headlines, as determined by fellow readers. Headlines come from the mobile versions of Reuters, CNN, New York Times, etc."
• How does that work?
"Users vote for the news articles they find interesting. Once a headline gets a certain amount of votes, it's displayed on the front page. So when you visit NewsNomad, you'll see the most popular and interesting stories of the day."
• How do you make money?
"We include a few advertisements on NewsNomad which allows us to provide this service free of charge, while continually improving the user experience."
• What's your background?
"Alex has PHD in mathematics and has worked as a principle engineer and architect in various companies, including Polycom, Lucent, and Motorola. I'm a full-time UC Berkeley student pursuing a degree in computer science."
• How many users do you have now, and what's your target within 12 months?
"Since our beta launch a few days ago, we've had over 7,000 people visit our website, and cast a total of 500 votes. As with any internet service, we hope to exponentially increase this number in the coming months. One of the advantages of catering to a mobile audience is the fact that our advertising medium isn't limited to the web. Because people carry their phones with them everywhere they go, advertising in the real world - on trains, billboards, etc - becomes a viable option."
• How are personalisation and recommendation part of your business?
"Recommendation is a core part of our service. Users recommend stories to one another by voting on them. Future plans for NewsNomad include a recommendation engine, as well."
• Name your closest competitors.
"As of now, NewsNomad is the first and only social news service geared entirely toward mobile devices. Our closest competitors are the huge socials news sites of the internet - Digg, Reddit, etc. However, despite the fact that these giants have created mobile versions of their sites, almost all of their headlines come from websites that mobile browsers can't view. So you can visit Digg from your mobile phone, but you can't read the majority of the stories."
• What's your biggest challenge?
"Continuing my college education, despite enormous business opportunity."
• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
"I think we're at the start of a new mobile dot com bubble. As data plans become cheaper and networks become faster, more and more people are taking advantage of the mobile web - and 405 million used it in 2007."
• Which tech businesses or web thinkers are the ones to watch?
"Apple and its iPhone. As the iPhone sells more data plans, it will be interesting to see what kind of impact this will have on the mobile web."
• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
"Hopefully in the hands of millions of users."
• What will it take to bring these kind of news services to the mainstream?
• What are the issues for advertising around mobile content?
• And do we really need more advanced features like recommendation on our mobiles - or is that better left to the desktop?
