Parsing of data and content summarisation has proven to be one of the biggest challenges of AI and machine learning.Īnother hurdle that faces a completely AI-driven news product is the possibility of consumers getting segregated into buckets, reading news that they are comfortable with, and not stepping out of their echo chambers. This is where artificial intelligence fit into our product experience,” – Deepit Purkayastha, co-founder, Inshorts “People, especially young adults, don’t have time, and have a sea of content to choose from. While Inshorts registers users across age groups, its most active users are in the 20-30 age bracket. The company was clear in its motive to not burden a consumer with information. These cards can be navigated by swiping and are editorially curated with AI-driven personalisation. InShorts’ form factor are single screen cards comprising a headline, an image and a crisp summary. Artificial intelligence and editorial collaboration Today, the first point of news access for 500 million Indians, with data costs as low as Rs 18.5 ($0.26) per GB, is the smartphone with inexpensive 4G internet. Their main source of content consumption was Facebook because the other sources were overwhelming to consume on the smartphone.” “Most of our peers were passive news readers because of unsuccessful form factors. This was our first hook,” Purkayastha said. “This resulted in costly video consumption, and a cluttered run-off-the-mill list of collated articles. Data was expensive, existing aggregators had not innovated on form factor, and smartphones were running on 2G connections. In 2013, when the company was launched, India had not yet witnessed the smartphone boom. In the past two years, the average digital consumption in India has seen 2X growth, as per a BCG-CII report. In 2019, adults spent an average of 1 hour 29 minutes per day on digital platforms, according to a research by eMarketer. India is the second largest global smartphone market, behind China and ahead of the United States. When Inshorts was launched 6 years ago, most media companies took print content and dumped it on a website, resulting in an overwhelming consumer experience,” Purkayastha said. “Once technology and form factor begin working harmoniously, only then can a publisher leverage that disruptive force. ML and AI are technology innovations that will not reap benefits until linked to a platform-appropriate form factor, enabled by said technology. Technology does not dictate form factorInshorts works on a combination of technology and form factor innovation. ![]() ![]() “Media houses must remember to use platform-specific form factors, which is what InShorts capitalised on,” he said. In addition to being a co-founder of Inshorts, Deepit Purkayastha is also Inshorts Chief Strategy Officer and oversees the business and strategic roadmap of the enterprise. The format and user interface that works for print media differs drastically from what works for digital, broadcast, social media or the radio. The biggest disruptions are form-factors such as email-newsletters, social media posts, news hour debates and the daily newspaper deck. Through the years, the digital space has been witness to an onslaught of tech-driven disruptions such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) driven feeds, wireless technology such as WiFi, 4G and 5G, radio waves and optic fibers, easily overwhelming the traditional news space.Ĭontrary to popular perception, technology has only enabled these disruptions in the media sector, and not caused them. Today, Inshorts is India’s highest-rated news application with more than 15 million downloads both on Android and IOS. The company became operationally profitable in November 2017, hitting a net revenue run rate of Rs 25 crore ($3.4 million), compared to Rs 3 crore ($0.4 million) in 2016. ![]() Four months later, it raised Rs 127 crore (about $17.5 million) in Series B led by Tiger Global. In 2015, Inshorts, which delivers snappy news summaries in 60 words, raised Rs 25 crore (approximately $3.4 million) in a Series A round from Tiger Global and Rebright Partners. The trio began its entrepreneurial journey with TLabs incubator in 2013, followed by a seed round from Times Internet and a group of angel investors including Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal. Deepit Purkayastha, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Inshorts, at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media India Conference in New Delhi.
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