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.