Newscred challenges news selection of Google and Yahoo

Written on 26th August 2008                                                                                                              1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.

This time we’re interviewing Shafqat from NewsCred. He works from Geneva, Switzerland. Together with his Sweden-based business partner Iraj, he founded a digital newspaper that aggregates hundreds of news sources. The Newscred community votes on the crediblity of articles, authors and news sources. Iraj and Shafqat then apply their CredRank algorithms to ensure you only get the highest quality news from desired news sources. The quality is even higher than that from Google News or Yahoo News, the Swiss/Swedish company claims. I guess you can never aim high enough.

How did you come up with the idea of NewsCred?

“The idea for NewsCred originated during many late-night, coffee-fueled debates over the future of newspapers and traditional media between my cofounder (Iraj) and myself. It was the summer of 2007, and we spent a lot of time in cafes and bars on the banks of Lake Geneva brainstorming our crazy ideas. It was clear to us that the media industry was broken, and it seemed like the entire news space was one of the few traditions that wasn’t yet disrupted by the latest web technologies. On top of that, every single person we spoke to told us that they were getting fed up of news that was biased or inaccurate or just not transparent. It seemed like a big enough problem to tackle, so we decided to give it a go!” (more…)

five questions for start-ups, Google Docs, google news, index ventures, Lake Geneva, lastfm, Silicon Valley, skype, Start-ups, yahoo

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