For the purpose of this update, I am going to stay away from using any tech jargon. We have seen many product announcements marred with jargon that just makes it tedious to read and understand. Besides, it really isn’t that complicated. The best features are simplest to use and understand!

So what exactly is TOSS?

To put it succinctly, it is a way for you to send your friends and family a simple notification about the story you find interesting!

We are purposefully keeping the tech jargon (aka social layer, social curation yada yada) away from this as we feel these terms are vague and do not correctly depict what we exactly want to achieve with this.

Why did we release TOSS?

Our editorial team holds itself to strictest standards on what can be defined as news and what information should we pass on to our users and what is the best way to deliver that information. Owing to these standards we have said no to doing “Viral Content” innumerable times! However, of the stories that meet our standards, not all of them are created equal. Our editorial team objectively takes a judgement whether a story should be placed in the top stories feed and if it is worthy of a notification or not. As we slowly expand our scope of content and deliver relevant content to everyone in their personalized feed, we felt that there is a need for you to decide on what is important to you and your friends. Put it very simply, we want to pass the onus of deciding what’s important to YOU. (Note: Avoiding the word “curation”, in the spirit of staying away from the jargon)

Why Notifications?

We have had an amazing run with our notification and users loved them! It really was that simple! Besides, notifications are an extremely powerful medium for mobile companies and if done right, can yield amazing results. TOSS is our next step towards that.

How it works?

To send or receive a TOSS, you will have to register with your mobile number. Once you have registered, you can simply tap TOSS button to send a notification to all the contacts on your phone who have Inshorts app on their phone.

If you are not using inshorts download here for Android and iOS

At the very surface of concept of events, there are two kinds of them. There are events that happen frequently in our daily life and the ones that are not very common. In all those cases, some reports might catch our attention while the others may seem to be a usual deal for us. As the sheer volume of events and stories streaming all around us overwhelm us, we tend to look at it very simply. In order to decide what is worth covering, we just try to answer the question whether our target audience (18–32 years of age), even with little or no knowledge of current affairs, will be able to establish an instant connection with the news that we are considering.

So, what are the kinds of news with which people are able to establish an instant connection? To answer this question we put ourselves in our users’ shoes and divide stories in two buckets.

The ones that impact our lives

There are incidents which directly impact the lives of the people. Such incidents attract people’s attention very easily. For instance, the rise/slump in food or fuel prices directly affects us all. If there is a news about a central government scheme providing employment to the unemployed, then it will have a widespread appeal among the people. We consider such stuff worth publishing.

Apart from the incidents which directly affect people, there are happenings which indirectly impact them. Suppose there is a slowdown in international markets, which consequently affects the Indian market, it will attract people’s attention. These are the kind of incidents/events have an indirect impact on us. To be able to connect with them we need to understand the influence the event is going to have on us. So, are we all aware of the influence that all such occurrences are going to have on us? Again to answer this question we have to delve into a users’ mind. Putting ourselves into a user’s position, before selecting such news articles for publishing, we make sure that a common person (with little or no knowledge about the background of the news) is able to understand the effect the incident is going to have.

The ones that keep us updated

There are some incidents which may not have a very significant impact on the daily lives of readers but they add to their knowledge base. Being aware of such incidents makes one feel that he/she is informed about whatever is happening or is being talked about. We consider this our duty to make sure that a user is connected and in sync with the world.

Summarisation

The guiding principle of creating a short is to make the information most relevant and easily understandable. One of the ways we do this is to figure out facts that are most relevant and easy to remember and understand. We ensure that a person reading a short is able to talk about whatever he/she has read in the short, to any person, after going through the short once.

Once the facts are selected, we make sure that we do not include our own opinion but only facts. While covering statements of eminent personalities (which may be their opinion) we ensure that readers are clearly able to understand that it is their opinion, not ours.

Images also play an equally important role for us. Our editorial team selects images which are best suited for a short. Images which resonate the mood and content of the short are used.

The whole process, starting from content selection to the final editing to make the short ready for publishing, is what makes us provide our users with the right content, always.

We continue to ask ourselves the question of how can we keep more and more people informed and make their lives better. The first hurdle for achieving that was the barrier of language. India has world’s largest English speaking population but English is not the most pervasive language and thus we have set our sights on Hindi! Hindi is the first language for a large number of people. As more and more first-time internet users from all corners of India come online, we want to present them the best quality content in their language.

We will continue to maintain the same standards of story selection and presentation with Hindi. It won’t be merely a translation of English short but will be written from ground up by a dedicated Hindi content team and will be sourced from Hindi news portals.

If you are existing user, you can change your default language in settings tab. If you are not using our app, download our app here. We welcome your feedback on contact@inshorts.com

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

— Brian Chesky

Why do we do this?

To keep it simple! The traditional way of presenting news and content is boring. So what did we do? We summarised it to make it simple and easy to digest and today we serve more than 2 million users in India, saving them a great deal of time! What worked? We made it simple.

Similarly, we want to keep our work culture and space simple. We do not have cubicles or cabins for anyone. It’s an open sitting arrangement where various teams sit together to facilitate a free flow of ideas and anyone is approachable. What does that give us? Well, our finance lead (big shout out to @AdyScorpius) coming up with ideas for Product and Marketing teams to execute upon!

What do we do?

Eat

Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale. — Elsa Schiaparelli

We take care of the team by bringing-in delicious food prepared daily by a chef! With a pantry full of cereals, chips and fruits, we make sure that our team is well nourished. And frankly, who doesn’t like to change the world while having a scoop of ice-cream!

Play

We work together and we play together. Right from in-house pool table and an Xbox console to a host of activites that we do are aimed at people getting comfortable with each other! Every week we devote one hour to mingle, jest around and sometimes shake a leg together.

What’s more? We even celebrate birthdays and festivities together! Every member’s birthday calls for celebration with cake on plates (and faces)!

Travel

Team outings are passe! We believe in Team holidays! All of us took a trip down to the Andamans together. Talk about having fun!

How to be a part of this?

Okay so it’s time for a shameless plug! We are hiring across the board and if you think you can be part of this small dent in the universe where we change our users’ lives and delight them everyday, join us here!