Think of real time newsfeeds, updates at the touch on your fingertips, well exactly that’s what a bunch of news freaks are doing at Contex8.
Bored of lengthy articles in fast paced life, these engineers have collaborated to build a cool, simplified solution limiting news into image plus text embedded in a #trend format.
“The first demo to the friend of ours raised the question, “Kind of like Twitter? followed up by Google now?” And I replied may be a sandwich of both,” says Roy Riddhinil, the co-founder of Contex8.
Compare to the ever growing digital media start-ups in the news/publishing market Contex8 has undertaken a niche in maintaining a unique trend discovery platform. But to a surprise, within a very short span of its inception the start-up has been selected by the Hay Group for its Next Big 100 acceleration program for the session 2015-16.
Roy and his team at Contex8 are simplifying the news-search and analyzing hand picking news break across categories, thereby saving the precious time of the readers.
I happened to know Roy for a long time. Many times we have talked over chats on Facebook about his idea and how the team is trying to disrupt the digital content niche with a great passion. Finally I ended on taking an interview with him.
So Roy, how did all this started. How you guys came up with Contex8?
We, as a team first collaborated on a campus newsfeed project, 80% of our team belongs to engineering background. We were fascinated by media-tech start-ups over the span of mid-2014. Further discussions followed by growing market, a constant need for Contex8 was felt by the founding members me and Saikat Bhunia.
I know you and Saikat, what about the others? How many members do you have at Contex8?
Currently we are a 6 member team where Analytics and Review section is spearheaded by Saikat and Gitarth (both news-freaks). The content team comprises Abhinav, Pulkit (both simplified content ninjas) and Marketing & Corporate relations headed by Akash and me. We have also rolled out an internship drive already. The core values of the founding team at Contex8 remains, disrupting the media space providing a simplified alternative.
As a bunch of engineers how you guys start your typical day at Contex8?
Every day at Contex8 is no less than a hackathon. Initially the day begins around 3am in the morning with the review by analytics team. Cup of tea is followed by 8am site update by content team. Throughout the day, we keep an eye on happening across the categories in our domain. And that’s not all, mostly four days a week we cover live blogs of common interest currently the on-going ISL, IND v/s SA (Freedom Series) etc. For the last three months this has been our schedule except for lazy weekends and festive occasions that have marked our holiday calendar.
What’s the reach & impact of Contex8 so far?
Working 24X7 in shifts, from our makeshift office in our 2BHK, we have maintained a consistent growth curve thereby constantly increasing hits and unique visitors. During the ISL coverage on the live section we are having around 16000 hits per day on average. For, we believe that news sharing at the user end should be simplified. Therefore we have maintained human touch to our entire platform thereby customising to the happening, trends, moods around our end users. We aim to double our growth with the addition of enhanced SEO reviews within a few months maintaining an increased audience reach.
What’s the Hay Group Next Big 100 programme?
Good news dawned early upon the Contex8 team as within a month of our beta site launch Contex8 was selected among the Next Big 100 companies by Hay Group for the session 2015-2016.
This programme helps the startups to turn into the Next Big 100 Companies of India. The participants will have access to Hay group experts, who will advise and support them on all their ‘talent challenges’.
After the selection we have been under closed mentoring by our panel of mentors and a few other hyper local city based newsfeed apps. As we move closer towards 2016 we aim to scale-up in operations and tie-up as a featured news aggregator across platforms.
Before wrapping up this interview, how would you pitch Contex8 to our readers?
Contex8 is not just about news; it’s for the love of news. A crazy bunch of aspiring editors, designers, techies collaborating for a common cause: A diversified news-discovery platform. Innovative by approach, simplified in content we are working on a host of features that we will enhance your news reading experience. As a growing start-up in this domain we are aspiring to reach-out to your mobile screens, thereby interact with you, and most importantly keep you updated. Contex8 wants to be your sole news companion, from trends to headlines followed up by full stories, we have got you covered.
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