| Newsplay Update #1 | 8th of March, 2021
Let me first begin with a story about my father. In 1999, he was unemployed, recently married, and was expecting a son. While he confidently tells me, he was completely in control, I deep down know that he most certainly wasn’t. To make ends meet, he applied for a casual job at this recently established news channel station in Mumbai; desperate times call for desperate measures. Thankfully, a couple of days before I was born, he got his official job offer.
We lived several hours away from Mumbai so for the next 15 years, my father would spend over 12,000 hours catching thousands of trains and walking hundreds of kilometres to reach his workplace. Because of this he missed out on spending time with his young family.
To make up for it, my father would do something amazing… which to me is the true origin story of Newsplay.
Every night, at around 2135 hrs, he would ring up my mother on the landline and ask me to switch on his news channel. What he would then do seemingly by magic, was appear right behind the anchor, blurred by the studio set — but visible. He would then stand, sway and talk to me about my day.. Can you imagine!!?? He used to fucking zoom with me before the internet was even mainstream in India. I would find this so insanely cool that even before he would ring, I would try to search for him on the screen like he was Wally. Hence, from the tiny age of three, I was already obsessed with the news.
19 soul-searching years later, amidst the covid-19 pandemic, I finally reached a point where I decided I wanted to build something cool just like him.
What is Newsplay? 📰
Newsplay is a news streaming service that utilises the technology of an artificially intelligent, animatronic newscaster to deliver you hyper-personalized news in over 16 different languages.
When you start watching, you will be able to see a digital newscaster who delivers you news that caters to what you specifically care about*.
You love Arsenal FC (urgh) and cryptocurrency news? You got it.
You want to know what is up with your favourite actor and local district at the same time? Coming right up.
You want it in Hindi!? बस क्या गांडू?
All the news you ever wanted to know, and genuinely cared about will be on your screens, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
For the journalists on and beyond planet earth, this platform will be game-changing. Broadcasting news has never been easier at Newsplay. All a journalist has to do is copy his/her/their article and share it to the Newsplay portal. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. It is then our job to take care of the rest. In return for those articles, we intend to establish a business model where we will allocate a significant percentage of our revenue back to the journalists who have devoted their lives to the field.
What’s next mate? 🤷
As long as our users support us, building Newsplay will be a never-ending process. It is not about maintenance per se but about the limits you can push with this technology.
For now, we are focused on building Newsplay to be as concrete and scalable as it can be. This involves testing anything and everything from the content itself to the scalability of the platform. Over the next few months we will be focused on testing:
i. What do users love and hate about the platform?
ii. Solving the uncanny valley hypothesis.
iii. Safety and Community Guidelines.
iv. Improving Scalability.
vi. Building a sexy as UI/Portal for our beautiful journalists.
v. Expanding our news content from cryptocurrency news in English to more.
Newsplay is being built for you, and only you. We will never be able to accomplish anything without our community, so please feel free to reach out to us at info@newsplay.live for a small chat or about a feedback you have.
If you’re not on Newsplay yet, sign up on www.newplay.live to witness it firsthand. We are updating Newsplay whenever we can to provide our users with an unmatchable, seamless experience.
Lastly, I would like to leave you with a couple of words that have kept me inspired throughout this journey.
“If it is really revolutionary, really different… It is going to look crazy. The problem is that crazy also looks crazy.” — Adam Seltzer, Chief Engineer for NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (Beyond Mars, Earth)
Until next time,
Mikhail Edwin
PS: Special thanks and love to my friends at Incubate and my team who helped me build this. I would have never, even in a zillion years reached here without you pals. Onwards and Upwards. Oorah!
*As of today, Newsplay is only broadcasting cryptocurrency news in English.
