Mumbai: Inshorts, India’s highest rated news mobile application that offers latest news stories summarized in 60 words, has made its first move in the vernacular mobile market by launching a Hindi interface of the app. Based on the success of Hindi, Inshorts plans to expand in other regional languages including Marathi, Kannada and Tamil by mid 2016.
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 value offering would resonate with the 422 million Hindi speaking market.”
He further added “With more than 3 million downloads, currently our app gets most of its users from Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and Chennai. With the Hindi launch we hope to tap tier II cities such as Jaipur, Kanpur, Lucknow, Bhopal, Nagpur, Chandigarh, Ludhiana etc and aim to increase our reach by additional 5million users by April 2016.”
Inshorts is planning to recruit over 100 content writers for Hindi language by first quarter of 2016. The content of the Hindi app is going to be customized to suit the Hindi speaking audience and will be different from the English version. 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.
Inshorts recently announced ‘Insiders’—an exclusive community for the ‘power users’ of the application who will get a first-hand experience of all new features that Inshorts will develop in the future.
Previously known as News in Shorts, Inshorts has recently undergone a rebranding exercise and is transitioning from being a News app to becoming a Content Discovery platform.
Inshorts is India’s highest rated news app with about 3 million downloads on Android and iOS. The application was founded on 2013 by a team of 3 IITians – Azhar Iqubal, Anunay Arunav of IIT Delhi and Deepit Purkayastha of IIT Kharagpur, two of whom dropped out of college to build it.
Currently, 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 dollars from Tiger Global Venture.” In its new avatar, the application is transitioning from being a news aggregator to a content discovery platform, incorporating a broad spectrum of content forms like videos, infographics, podcasts, blogs and others.
