What is NewsBytes?
NewsBytes is a no-frills, no settings news app which provides you all the noteworthy daily events along with their back-dated stories. You can be up-to-date in flat 7 minutes everyday. Started by IIT, IIM and Ivy League alumni, NewsBytes aims to reduce the information overload in your everyday news consumption. Our intelligent back-end engine and highly talented editorial team work in tandem to provide concise and contextual news.
NewsBytes, in essence, is our answer to the information overload over the web. I think our problem is the exact opposite of the problems of the previous generations. They didn’t have access to information, and we have access to almost infinite information. So, how do I make sense out of all that in the least possible time? That is what NewsBytes in its core does.
The intelligent back engine and the editorial team work in tandem to
- First, select and pick the noteworthy events of every day. Technically, the engine crawls across the web and give the important events to the editorial team. It is then their discretion to pick the most important ones.
- We, then, research and create contextual timelines – a collection of backdated events around them.
- Finally, they are presented in a pleasing way in the form of an Android App.
And, we do this every day.
Who are we?
I am one of the founders of NewsBytes. I am a graduate of IIT Roorkee and IIM Ahmedabad with ~2 years of experience working with an investment bank. I started NewsBytes along with 3 other co-founders – Romesh Khaddar, Shikha Chaudhry and Sripriya. Sripriya is my batch-mate from IIT Roorkee and IIM Ahmedabad. Romesh is an alumnus of IIT Guwahati and University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Shikha is my sister as well as my co-founder. She is an alumna of NIT Allahabad and Cornell University with 4+ years of experience working with start-ups.
What inspired us to launch NewsBytes?
Like most start-up stories, ours also started in an apartment – the quintessential garage of India. There are 4 of us who are managing to run the show here, the interesting part is that the degrees of separation between all of us is 1. We are a bunch of highly enthusiastic youngsters and have gotten together to solve the problem which we faced while growing up – the problem of information overload over web.
If we were foodies, we would have opened a restaurant. If we were into fashion, we would have worked to create the ultra modern fashion stores. Sadly, we are a group of impatient geeks and which is why we created the next generation, super fast news app – NewsBytes.
Though on a fundamental level all of us are quite similar, but the similarity ends just there. We live together in Gurgaon, work in that home cum office, have varied interests, aren’t greedy (for the most part), argue a lot but somehow, manage to converge after several shouting matches. Our neighbors think we are unemployed and the automatic GPS algorithms establish that we are a group of housewives! But so far the ride has been phenomenal. And, our inspiration to solve challenging problems while having fun is what binds us together.
What is our philosophy behind NewsBytes in one line?
Our philosophy here is “Think big, Act small, Scale fast”.
The goal for 2015 – We want to be present on the cellphone of *every* student of this country, by the end of 2015.
Check us out at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.elysiumlabs.newsbytes and let us know your thoughts. Your feedback would mean the world to us.