How Azhar Iqbal Culminated in Launching ‘Inshorts’
By: Ashwathy Nair
Staying updated about the current occurrence in and around the world cannot be neglected but people find it tough to take time out of their busy schedule to sit back and read a newspaper or long news articles. Here is a blooming business ‘Inshorts’ that stood out of the line and started its journey from a Facebook page with a very basic idea of providing news in short with the minimum amount of 60 words that has now converted into one of India’s leading news app. The founders who decided to come up with the idea of curated news content to make it short and crisp are Azhar Iqbal, Anunay Arnav, and Deepit Purkayastha (IIT Delhi Alumni).
These three IITians brought back the spirit of news reading among the youths to stay updated about the things happening around various sectors. They came up with this idea to help the country grow into a more aware nation.
In this modern time, people often have no time to spend on news that is written in about 200-300 words, they prefer to read short and precise content that provides accurate facts. People living in the metropolitan city are always on the move and Inshorts gives them an experience of knowing everything that’s happening in and around the world without even getting into depth.
How it all started?
The creators of Inshorts realized that it is difficult to consume news with so much heavy content, so they decided to do something about it and came up with an idea to launch an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in the form of a Facebook page – ‘News in Shorts’ (1st April 2013) that provides only factual news in the ‘shorts’ format, which summarizes the news in just 60 words. The page soon becomes an instant hit and received market validation. They further planned to develop a mobile application in 2015 and was soon rebranded to ‘Inshorts’ that focused on content beyond the news. The app has an active user fall that is between 20 to 30 years and it went on to be the highest-rated news app on Google Play Store, making India read news like never before.
Features of Inshorts
Inshorts app introduced artificial intelligence-based news summarization, which is based on its Rapid60 algorithm that helps to automatically summarize a full-length article of about 200-300 words news article to 60 words news brief including headline and a card image. With the idea of artificial intelligence, the founders of Inshorts planned to scale up the number of articles that are published on the platform from 10,000 per month to 1 lakh per month. Along with this, the key features of Inshorts are as following:
- It introduced ‘SEARCH’, to help with easier access to information.
- ‘TOSS’, with the help of just a single tap, one can share the news.
- ‘News Reader’ is to read the summaries about all breaking news.
- ‘My Feed’ provides a feed of all the latest stories, videos and other contents that are personalized for the readers.
- ‘News Categories’ gives its readers a vast variety of contents.
- ‘Insights’ a special feature that provides a detailed vision of important events.
Inshorts is a perfect solution for your daily busy schedule. While travelling to your college/office, simply scroll through the 60 words phrase to get informed about every latest news.
