Fast-Food News for Today’s Professionals: Newsle “Consumerizes” Big Data
Newsle, an ambitious San Fransico-based startup that specializes in news aggregation, just raised $1.65 million from American City Business Journals, a subsidiary of Advance Publications. Maveron, DFJ, Transmedia Capital and angel investors Launny Steffens and Rockwell Schnabel also participated in the round.
Whitney Shaw, the president of the American City Business Journal, is joining Newsle’s board of directors alongside its co-founders and Ken Lerer, a managing director at Lerer Ventures who is best known for his role in the establishment of the Huffington Post. Newsle will use the capital to grow its headcount to 10. The seven developers it hopes to hire by the end of this year will focus on fleshing out its flagship platform, a networking service that tracks your Facebook and LinkedIn contacts and tells you when they make it into a news item.
Newsle uses advanced persona identification, “proprietary disambiguation algorithms” and other Big Data technologies to confirm the identities of the individuals behind the names that make it through its system. The company says that it analyzes 100,000 news sources and over one million articles per day, and claims that it tracks over 50,000 million individuals. Email open rates average above 35 percent and exceed 70 percent “on a good day,” according to the company, reportedly retaining 96 percent of its users on a year-over-year basis.
Giving consumers the news they want
Newsle is capitalizing on a social trend that’s irreversibly wedged its way into the professional world, and gaining speed. What this really boils down to is developing creative ways to make data more consumable. There’s Big Data out there. We get it. So make it smarter and more efficient. Now we can afford to be choosy, and that’s something startups like Newsle are willing to bet on.
“The key to making data useful in professional or enterprise tools is building a simple but highly-relevant core experience as well as including select power features,” says Axel Hansen, Newsle co-founder. “We’ve focused on delivering incredibly relevant content with almost no set-up. We built a sophisticated relevance layer that measures how interesting articles are and how much you care about individual relationships so that once you connect to Facebook or LinkedIn, we can immediately show you a newsfeed that only has the most important news for you.”
That’s one fancy way of presenting the bounty of analytics in today’s hyper-fast, hyper-scaled world. We’re sparking an industry hinged on its deep understanding of you as an individual, as you relate to the rest of the population. Conceptually it sounds simple, but the task is made all the more testing by the expectations of the professional user.
“Outside of that core experience, some users need access to power features, and it can be challenging to integrate that advanced functionality without compromising the intuitive core experience,” Hanson goes on.
“We try to keep advanced features out of the main feed, but always within two clicks. For example, we integrated an often-requested feature – the ability to organize people into lists, and track news about the entire list – into the profile interface that users can reach by clicking on a photo. Power users who need the feature discover it easily from the core feed, and it doesn’t clutter the experience of everyone else.”
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