Expertnews Pitch Seedcamp

expertnews.me follow experts you trust on topics you care

Team: expertnews has currently been completely bootstrapped by me.

Karsten Wysk (30) Track Record

MobileBits: Social Casual Games for iPhone

meinSport.de: VC funded amateur sports portal

Unihelp.de: Student Community in 1999

exDream: Games Company with > 20 employees

Accenture Strategy Consultant

Diplom Volkswirt (Economics)

Problem: find/follow the best news sources of the web with a limited time budget.

Web: relevant content scattered around different websites/blogs and hidden in a complex structure

RSS: nerdy: mostly copy + paste of RSS links, f eels static and not interactive/social compared to twitter

Twitter: interesting news/links „polluted“ by private talk, shortened links and title only bad preview of story

All current solutions: difficult to know, which are the best experts to follow for my topics

Solution: expertnews combines the best of the web, RSS, twitter and Qype/Yelp.

Have a newsportal-like preview of the stories and rich media content when clicking on the story

Web RSS Twitter Q ype/Yelp

e xpertnews also uses RSS as a data input source – used by all relevant news sources (in contrast to twitter)

Include your experts‘ tweets and your own timeline into the stream

UI: Personalize your stream by simply clicking on „follow“ or „unfollow“

Find and rate experts in the experts directory (wefollow)

Create bundles of experts for specific topics (google reader, friendfeed)

e xpertnews helps you to discover the best experts and gives you all of their news (rss-stories, tweets, ..) in one personalized stream

Let me see! Stories on the left Highlights on the right (as in Facebook) PROTOTYPE ONLY

Twitter and RSS in one stream! (“follow the expert, get all his outputs”) d irectly reply via twitter share via facebook/twitter

p eople write news – not publishing houses even your SPIEGEL experience could become more personal and social rate stories in different dimensions, aggregated story ratings result in experts‘ ratings

Technology: expertnews is a service to personalize and aggregate feeds. Data Input Output T witter API RSS parse websites (e.g. detect experts) personalize & aggregate in one stream expertnews.me Other output formats (RSS, Tweetdeck, twitter, ...) own expert DB

Marketing: expertnews will grow because people want to be experts for their topics.

No critical mass required – works from day one

Product Quality: people use it because it actually saves time and helps you discover great experts

Expert directory: experts want to be included, can use widgets for their own sites (ratings), and are informed via twitter if they are rated

Sharing: people use sharing features via twitter/facebook

SEO: we have all the experts, topic-expert-teams, ratings, news and tweets in our database

Business Model: expertnews is a platform for experts to interact with their audience.

Advertising: display or insert stories into stream (currently eCPM of > 1,50 EUR)

Premium Accounts: for experts and/or publishing houses/newspapers (monthly subscription)

Premium Feeds: premium news subscriptions from “Britney Spears” to “Gartner” (see Super Chirp)

Directory listings: yellow paper business model

Affiliate: Ticketing (e.g. Expert for „Hamburg Nightlife“ can earn money by sending people to certain clubs)

B2B: XING/LinkedIn could use expertnews.me

Summary: expertnews is the best way to follow experts you trust on topics you care.

Expertnews is a service and not a website – it can also be fully integrated into facebook, clients and other streams

Expertnews could be disruptive: it can potentially transfer the power from the publishing houses to the individual experts/authors/editors

It can encourage quality journalism by giving direct feedback to experts and by making the authors more visible

Currently hobby project besides other project (iPhone Games and meinSport.de) - I need a team, partners and a streamlined business model to really move on!