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Inshorts, a mobile app that offers the latest news stories summarised in 60 words, has forayed into the vernacular mobile market with the launch of a Hindi interface of the app.
The content of the Hindi app will be customised to suit the Hindi speaking audience and will be different from the English version. Plans are on to recruit over 100 content writers for Hindi by the first quarter of 2016. After evaluating the success of the Hindi interface, Inshorts plans to offer other regional languages, including Marathi, Kannada, and Tamil next year.
Commenting on the launch, Azhar Iqubal, CEO and co-founder, Inshorts, said: “The vernacular space on mobile is very exciting and with the launch of Inshorts Hindi, we are making our first move in this market. Inshorts is designed to make it convenient for the youth to catch up on important news items of the day and we are confident that our offering would resonate with the 422-million Hindi-speaking market.”
He said with 3 million downloads on Android and iOS, Inshorts gets most of its users from Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, and Chennai. With the Hindi launch he hopes to tap tier-II cities such as Jaipur, Kanpur, Lucknow, Bhopal, Nagpur, Chandigarh, and Ludhiana and aims to increase its reach by an additional 5 million users by April 2016.
Inshorts is also looking at launching an intuitive content recommendation engine designed to intelligently curate significant and relevant news based on audience interests and behaviours, trending topics, and real-time article performance. It recently announced ‘Insiders’ — an exclusive community for 'power users' of the application, who will get a first-hand experience of all new features that Inshorts will develop in the future.
Founded in 2013 by a team of three IITians – Azhar Iqubal, Anunay Arunav, and Deepit Purkayastha, the app serves more than half a billion page views every month. Formerly called News in Shorts, the company rebranded itself as ‘Inshorts’ and recently raised a Series B round of $20-million from Tiger Global. In its new avatar, the app is transitioning from being a news aggregator to a content discovery platform, incorporating a broad spectrum of content forms such as videos, infographics, podcasts, blogs, and others.
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