Newstribute - Distribute news physically through a corporate game

Framework

A person who has read an excerpt of news happens to be a person with knowledge on that piece of news, who can share it with others. It is a common scenario in families that someone reads a news article from a news paper and proactively narrates about that piece of information to other family members. It makes it more credible and interesting to hear or read about a selected news excerpt from a credible source or at least from a person in front, physically. Newstribute revolves around this context of spreading the “read news excerpt” with other people digitally, with a mobile phone as a primary media.

Keywords

• Sharing the news I read today
• GPS enabled phones
• Distributors, Receivers
• Virtual News Corporation
• Editors, Senior editors, regional managers, CEOs

Concept

Newstribute enables people to distribute the digital news they have read to other people who are in their vicinity, through a smart phone. It can be explained as users who choose to be news distributers, put the news in their distribution bag(their smart phones), and go around and hangout with their friends and also deliver news to them. As a use case, it can be imagined as your friend just approaching you, who has a cell phone in his pocket, and you suddenly get a notification on your cell phone showing the news article read by your friend. The media here is a phone application on a GPS enabled cell phone which is mandatorily required by your friend to report to the service about the location he is in. The receiver may or may not have a GPS enabled phone and can receive the news articles from people who visit him.

Newstribute rewards people who distribute news, through a corporate game. The corporate game is a virtual news corporate company where the users become virtual staff of the game. The different staff positions in the corporate game are the news distributors, editors, senior editors, regional managers, State/Country CEO and global CEO.

One of the examples which could be stated with a model of this type is the Foursquare service. Foursquare also uses location based model and gives badges to people like a game, when they visit the places listed in the service. With the Foursquare success in the market with over 7 million users, it leads to an interesting observation and leads a pathway to other services following a similar model.

Different Technology elements in the system

Newstribute website, Newstribute mobile application, A Browser plug-in and a database containing list of standard news websites.

System flow

Detailed description of the system

As a start of the usability flow, user can select the text and image from a news website such as cnn.com and can post it to the distribution bag through the browser plug-in. This distribution bag acts like an outbox stack which are the news-excerpts-to-be-delivered to the other users. This stack can be viewed in the newstribute website.

The newstribute website has two primary sections namely: news received and news distribution. News received section shows a list of received news excerpts so far by the user. The “news distribution” contains the distribution bag which is the to-be-delivered stack of news excerpt, of the day. Also, it contains the history of the previously distributed news excerpt to other users.

A user by selecting and sending an excerpt of article through the browser plug-in to the distribution bag becomes a distributer. By turning on his mobile application of newstribute and setting the Distribution mode as ON, he will be able to transfer all his excerpts to the other receivers when he physically goes in proximity to them. The receivers can be of two types: Source location receivers and dynamic location receivers. Source location receiving of news happens when a distributor enters a location which happens to be a source location of the place where a receiver has registered to the service. This doesn’t require GPS for the receiver because the database would be containing the details of the place from where the receiver registered himself. However, dynamic location receiving requires GPS which enables receivers to receive news article from proximity of distributor’s phone.

The users become virtual staff of a corporate game which rewards different users based on their contributions. The distributors are the lowest level position in the virtual corporate news company. The receivers who receive the news excerpts from the distributors can up vote or down vote the news excerpts posted by distributors. After an acquisition of certain points, distributors get promoted to editors. Similarly, different positions rise up to CEO as shown below.

Editor can control the content of distributor, which gives him points and gets him promoted to senior editor. This makes sure that the distributors who post the excerpts do not post a piece of information which is incomprehensible or irrelevant. Also, the browser plug-in enables the posting only of a list of standard news websites in the database which also helps in ruling out the irrelevant news. The control rights and responsibility increase up in the ladder. Also, The positions are also location specific. As an example, an editor near Duomo area in Milano would most likely have control over distributors near his area. Regional director could be a director controlling all senior editors in Milan, etc. The bosses can see the tasks of the people who report to them and assign points which act as criteria for promotions.

Future considerations

As future work this concept has the potential of introducing real world scenarios such as distributors being able to establish kiosks, regional directors and senior editors act like bosses who have the assessment or the appraisal day to assess promotions, etc.

Mojo second week summary

Another hectic week with my travel schedule and two refreshing lectures alongside. Christian Heilmann from Mozilla presented his lecture, giving me a page full of web links' resources to be bookmarked in my Delicious account. The emphasis on openness of web, using standardized open models to develop apps to achieve bigger reach was the highlight of Chris's lecture. He quoted few rich web apps' examples which run on browsers instead of being traditional local apps. Few features of Google plus website, Angry Birds game which runs on browsers, rich communication platform such as Facebook instead of traditional emails have evidently proven the abilities of web browsers. This tends to make the web an "information superhighway". This evolution makes different app developers to consider the web-browser way and evade all OS dependent issues and headaches they often encounter with native apps.

I liked the discussions related to HTML5 in the lecture. Some of the resources and repositories mentioned by Chris are quite helpful indeed for me to start developing my project using HTML5 and CSS3. Today's browsers’ which support HTML5 are also equipped with very powerful features such as detecting users' location, advanced graphic accelerators, etc which empowers the app developers further by many folds. These ideas have definitely influenced me strongly to consider HTML5 and take advantage of these powerful set of features for my project.

The next lecture from John Resig, the creator of Jquery further lured me to consider Jquery in my next app. I have always been a YUI guy so far and have used Jquery in my previous apps for very small purposes. John mentioned many points related to building community while creating an open standard or open source library, and also the importance of the support the creator of the software needs to give to his users. I have always wondered how few open source software creators always answer to my questions whether I post my problem in Stackoverflow, or Quora or IRC or other mailing lists. I could see that John meant that the creator of the open source software needs to be a watchdog and should keep helping people who bring up their issues in many different websites or communication medias. He also mentioned to “Treat every user as a potential future contributor”, which I feel is imperative to make the software reach widely and to make the users happy and eventually spread it or contribute to it by themselves. Sometimes, the lazy me could come out of myself, and I would definitely have to make sure that I follow up with my users diligently despite of all my reasons. In the past I have been part of software development which failed as a catch 22 situation case, primarily because of not having a strong community around it. This time, to remind myself these points consistently, lemme grab some post-its.

Mojo first week summary

My take away this week from Aza Raskin's lecture, primarily, was the importance of Prototyping. It reminded me the days when I used to create experience prototypes while studying interaction design in my school. The start of the lecture with the quote "To design is to inspire participation" gave few funny comical examples such as a student demonstrating his Dad's tits and asking his friends to "feel free" to touch them. During my school, there were instances where I had to stand behind my early stage design of my audio based product installation and make weird sounds by myself, to fake as if the product was making those sounds. This not only forced me to refine my design with more relevant auditive messages to the user, but also helped me to change the model of the interaction triggers of my product.

Another important point I could grasp from Aza Raskin's lecture was the importance of quick iterations and also improvements in every iterations. He gave some examples of a wooden block being a prototype for wii controller. At first sight one might think that a piece of wood wouldn't suffice as a prototype for a wii controller. However, to understand quickly, how someone would hold a wii controller, how would they rotate it, how would they interact with its face, etc, a wooden block could clearly give an idea at the initial stage of the product. So, to sum up, I can start with a piece of wood, and in the next step to understand more, I can stick color papers all around and try to fake it more close to the wii controller, and eventually create the right wii controller.

It was interesting to learn about "Tabcandy", something which I wasn't familiar with. Another approach I had seen sometime back was something called "TabViz"(http://vimeo.com/5257754) was created during one of the design contests hosted by Mozilla. I’d love to see what solves my problem of navigation with my 50 tabs open at any point of time in my browser.

My initial thoughts with an idea related to leveraging News distributions could be validated by creating such prototypes. Requesting some of my friends to use my product and faking the experience they could get from it, could help me refine my concept. Also, I am pretty curious about the feedback they would give, which could potentially help me add/remove the features I envisioning currently.

Burt Herman's lecture emphasized about building a start up, creating a team, community, and few other processes one would go through while building a startup. I think I understand what he means by saying "marrying your partner", "flexible, be ready to throw away to make the product better". I liked the examples he showed about how storify started and later changed for the good from the user feedback. I would like to highlight to myself for my project, about keeping things simple at the start. Also to concentrate on creating core product experience and later understand how the product needs to evolve from the users-- the early adopters.