Business Post Startup of the day: Newswhip
Featured on businesspost.ie, 30th July 2013
Dublin-based company Newswhip has built a technology that tracks all the news shared on Facebook and Twitter each day, to find the fastest spreading, most shared and highest quality stories.
"Before mass communications, news travelled from person to person, it was essentially social news distribution. We are essentially returning to that model, we want to be the guys who measure all of that and provide the data." Paul Quigley, Co-founder [businesspost.ie]
NewsWhip's technology tracks all the news published by about 5,000 English-language sources, totalling somewhere around 60,000 news stories per day. The tool gathers social data for each story, such as the number of shares, likes, tweets and comments, at repeated intervals to show a live view of its popularity.
While the company publishes links to the fastest spreading stories on its website, NewsWhip is also developing some pro tools aimed at newsrooms. The first, called Spike, tracks early trending stories from all around the world so journalists can see how their own stories are spreading, and also check other sites, blogs, video and other sources for new trends and stories.
Currently the company is trialling the service with digital newsrooms including the BBC, CNN, and RTÉ. The company has also developed an engagement-enhancing product called the Social Amplifier, which displays a news company's most trending stories in real time.
The founders met on the Create program at IADT in 2010, later winning a place on the NDRC Launchpad accelerator programme in 2011. NewsWhip has since moved to DogPatch Labs in Dublin.