I'd like to thank Shafqat Islam, CEO of NewsCred, for the interview.
What is NewsCred?
NewsCred is a digital newspaper that will give you only the most credible news from your favorite news sources.
When was NewsCred founded?
The idea for NewsCred originated during many late-night, coffee-fueled debates over the future of newspapers and traditional media between the two founders during the summer of 2006 in Geneva, Switzerland. Over a year later, we did not see any real movement or innovation to improve the media landscape, and we felt it was our time to start what we refer to as the 'Social Media Revolution.'
What is the Social Media Revolution?
The Social Media Revolution is what NewsCred is all about. We feel passionate about using the power of the web to restore credibility in news media. With all the news sources, mashups, blogs and aggregators available today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discriminate between real vetted news and biased, unfactual or untenable news. NewsCred will harness the power of our community and the social web to allow the discerning news consumer to focus only on credible news content while filtering out the noise. At the same time, NewsCred is a tool that will make the news experience more relevant to our personal tastes. To us, this is a revolutionary new way of accessing high quality, credible news content.
What exactly can NewsCred do?
Think of NewsCred as a customizable digital newspaper, where you can easily filter and access your preferred news sources, whether it's mainstream media or news content from established blogs. What sets NewsCred apart is our NewsCred Ranking technology, which ensures that only the most credible, factual and relevant news is presented, as voted by the NewsCred community.
How is this different from Digg?
We love Digg and other social ranking sites, but NewsCred is completely different. We are using technology and the ratings from our user community to select the most credible articles. NewsCred selects quality, while Digg presents popularity. This is a fundamental difference in our approach, and we feel this difference is what will change the way we access news content forever.
We're taking content from traditional, mainstream new sources, combining them with established blogs, and selecting only the highest quality articles that are relevant to you. We're throwing in some real innovation to make the selection and filtering process the easiest you'll see on the web, and fun too.
What is the NewsCred Rank?
By leveraging the votes of the NewsCred community, we rank every single piece of news, every journalist and every news source. By empirically measuring credibility on these three levels, we ensure that we can present only the highest quality news articles. Finally, this data will allow us to discuss, track and publish the relative credibility of all our sources and journalists.
Sounds serious...
Restoring media credibility may sound like a very bold goal. However, we firmly believe that trust and credibility in media are cornerstones of a democratic society. This project is a lot bigger than the founders, or our team, or our company. We are trying to change the way millions of users access the news and obtain information about the world they live in. Of course, we want reading and discussing the news to be an enjoyable experience as well.
When do you launch?
NewsCred will launch it's Private Alpha to a limited number of invited users very early next year (2008).
Where can we learn more?
You can join the Social Media Revolution at NewsCred.com. Alternatively, you can watch the story unfold on our blog at blog.NewsCred.com or at EuropeanStartups.com.
Who's Behind NewsCred?
NewsCred was co-founded by Iraj Islam and I (Shafqat Islam) in summer 2007.
Both of us are avid news readers and are passionate about new media and the changing face of journalism.
NewsCred Ltd. is incorporated in the UK, but we are a truly global company. We have an office in Geneva, Switzerland, where our business development function resides. We also have an office in Bangladesh, where Iraj manages our development team.
NewsCred will give all EuropeanStartups.com readers invites for alpha when they get closer to the launch date.
