Perspective presentation

Final Presentation
Daniel Hartl, Kevin Probst, Oskar Hargedahl, Tim Ordenewitz

The fundament of the public sphere is cracking
People believe media is
complicated.
People increasingly view
traditional media as biased.
Media is experiencing
lowering trust-levels.

Young individuals are looking for alternatives
They want access to
alternative views.
They want easy, accessible
explanations.
They largely turn to social
media.

Daniel Hartl, Kevin Probst, Oskar Hargedahl, Tim Ordenewitz

Perspective.
Summarized articles
YoutubeReddit
Supportive content
Build your own opinion by looking at a topic from different perspectives!
Opposing content
Twitter
International
Background information

MVP: Implemented Value Proposition
Perspective 3
Your
opinion
Perspective 2
Perspective 1 Perspective 4
Perspective 5
Perspective 6

MVP: Implemented Value Proposition
Your
opinion

Our Value proposition
Broaden young citizens‘ horizon by
giving them access to easy
understandable news that can be
observed from different perspectives.

Project
Overview
Close up: Timeframe, Architecture and
internal Organization

- Introduction: Problem - Solution
- Value Proposition
Technological Concepts: Perspective
- Timeframe
- Internal Organization
Project Overview
- Sprint 1
- Sprint 2
- Midterm Presentation
- Sprint 3
- Sprint 4
Development Progress
Product Demo
- Limitations
- Future Steps
- Team
Conclusion

Our Team Structure
Scrum Master
Product Owner
The scrum master connects the product owner with the development team
Developer Developer Developer

Workflow with Product Owner
Scrum Master
● Continuous Communication over Slack
● Bi-weekly meetings to give updates and
talk about recent advancements &
challenges
● Expectation Management
Product Owner -
Christopher
Henkel
● Support in questions regarding
infrastructure & technical feasibility
● Time estimates
● No pressure and freedom to work
independent
Continuous communication between the involved parties supports project success

Product DemoLive Demonstration and Flow of Action

Development
Progress
Tasks, Challenges, Solutions and Key
Learnings from the sprints

Timeline Growing
12 Weeks
● Infrastructure
Setup
Sprint 1 Sprint 2 Sprint 3 Sprint 4Midterm
● Adding
perspectives
● Backend
communication
● Research
● Improve the
degree of
automatizati
on and
innovation
● Continue
work from
sprint 3
● Improve
design and
navigation
Each of the four sprints comprises a different focus for the project

Sprint 1
Scrum Master
Product Owner
As the scrum master, Tim takes the lead of coordinating the first sprint

Sprint 1: Tasks
The focus of sprint 1 was to set up the whole project as well as the infrastructure.
Define Architecture
Model
Deploy Architecture
Create the News
Dashboard
Get to know Tool Stack and
deploy if needed
Create User
Survey
Create News
Detail Page
#
Tasks Challenges LearningsImplementations

Sprint 1: Communication & Documentation
We use Atlassian JIRA for our SCRUM
Management, we created and managed
issues, sprints and requirements there.
We use Slack for all project related
communication and also for the
communication with our product owner.
We use Atlassian Confluence for all
documentation purposes, we collect
requirements, discuss them or visualize
our architecture.
Atlassian JIRA Atlassian Confluence Slack
The tools we use.

Sprint 1: Implementation of Development Tool Stack
The tools and frameworks we use.

Sprint 1: Implementation of Architecture
The Architecture of our App

Sprint 1: Implementation of Architecture
The Architecture of our App and how it developed.
Changes in the Architecture
● We added additional services
as Youtube and Reddit
● The backend now performs web
scraping and summary
generation when called from the
app
● The GDELT API is now the
source for alternative sources on
a given topic

Sprint 1: Implementation of News Dashboard
How we implemented our News Dashboard.
News Dashboard
● The News dashboard is the home of all our
current news
● We retrieve imageURL, headline and teaser
text from our CMS (Contentful)
● Each Article and Image is clickable and
navigates the user to a Detail Page of that
article
● We implemented this using Ionic Pages and
Angular2 and a HTML Template
● Furthermore we retrieve the source of the
article

Sprint 1: Implementation of the Detail Page
How we implemented our Detail Page
Detail Page
● Perspectives Detail Page consists of a title image, a
summary we created and further additional
Perspectives to broaden the user’s horizon on that
specific topic.
● The summary is made up of a scraped news article
we selected and then used for a summary generation
● The source article of the summary can also be
visited
● Further Perspectives are gathered from different API’s
and get presented to the users below the summary.

Sprint 1: Challenges - Solutions
Challenges we faced in Sprint 1 and how we overcame them.
Due to the different backgrounds of our
previous studies we had some
differences in experience. We started
with Workshops on best practices and
how to use tools and frameworks.
We had to come up with a technology stack
that fits the purpose of the product as well
as the experiences of the developers. We
chose to develop a Cross Platform App
using the Ionic Framework.
Since the LMU had no servers available
for us to deploy our communication tools
as well as our backend we had to come
up with a own solution. We chose
Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Different Levels of
Experience
No Infrastructure provided Agreeing on technology
stack

Sprint 1: Key Learnings
Coding Skills
● Ionic Framework
● Angular 2
● Git-SourceTree
Task Specific Skills
● Contentful CMS
Integration
● Object Modelling
Teamwork
● Setting up
Jira/Confluence
● Enterprise
Communication
Software
● Scrum Process
Getting to know the Framework and architecture setup as the greatest learnings of sprint 1

Sprint 2
Scrum Master
Product Owner
As the scrum master, Kevin takes the lead of coordinating the second sprint

Sprint 2: Tasks
Facebook Login
In-App-Browser
Build Express Server Backend
Research & Survey
Finalize Twitter
Implementation
Finalize wikipedia extract
implementation
The focus of sprint 2 aimed at enabling backend communication, adding perspectives and research

What do you like about
news apps?
Sprint 2: Implementation - Survey
n=54
What features improve a
news app further?
What do you dislike about
current news apps?
● Userfriendly UI
● Personalized content
● Internationality, variety of
news
● Up to date news
● Different content formats
● Being in a filter bubble of my
prefered news content
● Advertisements
● One-sided opinions
● Background information
● Short summaries with additional
sources
● Get in touch with other opinions
● Interactive features
● Video
Evaluating the online survey of 54 probands gave room for new ideas and confirmed existing route

Sprint 2: Implementation - Facebook Login
How we implemented the facebook login
Facebook login
● We use the native facebook login
● Connecting a Cordova plugin to the native Facebook
SDK
● When clicking the Facebook Login Button, users get
directed into the Facebook App if it’s installed on their
device.
● App checks for logged in user, if not logged in it
pushes the login page
● This feature was deactivated later since we didn’t
implement any functionalities that require a login
● But the Login can easily be reactivated for further
development

Sprint 2: Implementation - In-App-Browser
How we implemented the In-App-Browser
In-App Browser
● In order to provide a good User Experience and to
keep users within the App we decided to implement
an In-App browsing functionality.
● We use Cordova that wraps our HTML/JavaScript
app into a native container which can access the
device functions of iOS, Android and Windows
Phone.
● Cordova provides the best User Experience since it
uses the platform’s native browsing engine
● We also had to add a fallback to be able to develop
and test in a non-mobile browser

Sprint 2: Implementation - Wikipedia
How we implemented the wikipedia widget
Wikipedia Widget
● We use the Wikipedia Public API
● By using the Angular http module, we perform GET-
Requests to the API.
● We search Wikipedia for a specific search term
linked to the article and display the heading, an image
and a teaser text.
● If a user clicks on the text or image he is redirected
to the wikipedia page of the article.

Sprint 2: Implementation - Backend Server
How we enabled the backend server communication
Backend Server
● We used the express framework (node.js) to build our
basic backend server
● Within the express server, we implemented several
routes to provide different services
● summary generation is done on our server
● The summary generation only needs an URL as input,
the content is then scraped and summarized
automatically
● Our backend also handles the Twitter Feed within the
Detail Page

Sprint 2: Implementation - Twitter
How implemented the implemented the twitter widget
Twitter Service
● We display the 3 most popular tweets on the
given topic
● Therefore we call the Twitter API, authenticate
the app and then retrieve the tweets as a
response
● Users can view the tweets and all the
comments in the app when clicking on Visit
Tweet

Sprint 2: Challenges - Solutions
By introducing own proxy servers and putting in configuration effort all challenges were solved
We faced problems with Cross-Origin
Resource Sharing (CORS) while
developing the Wikipedia extension.
We introduced a proxy server handle the
requests.
Integrating Bitbucket Pipelines, Amazon
CodeDeploy, Amazon S3 and the
Amazon EC2 instance (our backend)
required a lot of configuration.
Twitter requires all app’s that seek to use
its API to be authenticated. Since there
is no Twitter framework to use with Ionic,
we decided to move it into our backend
and to provide our own ‘proxy’ service.
CORS Headers Twitter Authentication CI Build SetUp

Coding Skills
● Proxies for ionic
● Node.js
● API call
● Twitter API
● AWS/ CI setup
Teamwork
● Focus more on
communications
● Keep fixed meetings
● Put more effort on
mutual updates
Familiarizing with widget APIs and improving internal communication as the greatest learnings of sprint 2

Midterm Presentation Feedback
Neglecting design and focus on automating technologies that serve our Value Proposition
● Changed the order of tasks in
the Product Backlog, so that
the Social Functionalities and
Design have less priority.
● Main focus of sprint 3 will be
on automating the summary
generation of articles
● Looking for solutions that
work around webscraping the
whole web and ease tone
detection
● Discussions about the real
Value Proposition
● Focus on GDELT
● Decided on features
● Outsourcing web
scraping and analyzing
articles of the whole web
● Focus on web scraping
and summary generation
● Focus: Either Web
Scraping or Tone
Detection
● More automation: Article
and summary generation
● Focus on backend rather
than on frontend
● Be clear on Value
Proposition
● Decide for features that
support your Value
Proposition
Main Feedback What did it trigger? Implementation

Sprint 3
Scrum Master
Product Owner
As the scrum master, Daniel takes the lead of coordinating the third sprint

Sprint 3: Tasks
The focus of sprint 3 was the automatization of our features
Implement summary
generation
Implement a web scraping
service
Implement a tone detection
service
Research: How to find
trending hashtags
Implement Reddit
Implement video content
#

Sprint 3: Implementation - Summary Generation
We use two Node Modules for the scraping and a Python library for the summary generation.
Summary Generation
● We use a Python library
called Sumy for the summary
generation and
a npm module called
PythonShell to be able to
call the Python Script from
our express server
● For the summary extraction
we decided to use Sumy’s
summarization method
Latent Semantic Analysis
Web Scraping
● We developed a web scraping
service that e.g. used two Node
Modules called Request and
Cheerio.
● Request is used to perform a web-
request to the given URL and to
return the whole html body of the
page
● The html body is then load into
cheerio which enables us to perform
jQuery-style queries on the html
body
● We then export the article body of
the page, remove all the
unnecessary <div> sections and
return only the written article on the
page.

Sprint 3: Implementation - GDELT Project
GDELT and Google BigQuery - Understanding the World
● Use of 2 methods:
○ Getting an article with a positive/negative tone
regarding one keyword-specified topic
○ Getting an article with an international, country
specific view on one topic
→ keywords, number of results, tones and source
country can be specified in the contentful server
● Matching Header and URL that gets delivered by an API
call, with Regular Expression
● Return and display of matched headers and URL in the
html template
Gdelt API query

Sprint 3: Implementation - GDELT Project
GDELT and Google BigQuery - Understanding the World
GDELT identifies a
multitude of factors, driving
our global society and
creates a free open platform
for computing the entire
world
GDELT includes several
measures of article tone:
● reporting scores of
positive and negative
word use
● polarity
● emotionalityThe GDELT Project
monitors news from all
over the world in more
than 100 languages
Topic
Tone Detection
range: -10 to 10
- 4 + 2 + 8
By means of the
GDELT Project we
are able to use an
API that allows us
easily to examine
a certain topic
from different
point of view, in
especially with a
different ‘tone’
about the topic

Sprint 3: Implementation - Reddit
We implement Reddit to supplement the background information from Wikipedia
Reddit Widget
● To implement the reddit service we used the Angular
http module to perform GET requests to the Reddit
API
● We use Regular Expressions to filter relevant
keywords from the summary for dynamic keyword
search in Reddit
● Displays two most relevant Reddit threads, with
number of upvotes and comments

Sprint 3: Challenges and solutions
Several challenges needed to be solved of which only the youtube widget couldn’t be fixed yet
We tried out different web scraping
frameworks, but decided to build our
own, because no other framework
worked for specific newspapers
The vague documentation of the API
resulted in a lots of trial and error until we
found the desired solution
We could not figure out how to manage,
that the YouTube player shows a
relevant video based on inputted
keywords
Web Scraping GDELTYoutube

Coding Skills
● Connecting Node.js
and Python for
summary
generation
● Reddit API usage
● Using GET request
against GDELT API
● YouTube API usage
● Try out different
web scraping
frameworks
● Build own web
scraping service
Teamwork
● Deal with conflicting
opinions
Task specific learnings stood out in sprint 3

Sprint 4
Scrum Master
Product Owner
As the scrum master, Oskar takes the lead of coordinating the fourth and last sprint

Sprint 4: Tasks
The main focus of Sprint 4 was to connect the dots and finalize the product
Debug features
UX
Design
Create presentations
Finalize video content
User testing
Finalize backend
Finalize Gdelt

Sprint 4: Implementation - User testing
50
n=6
Content
● More international news
● Video is more important than
Reddit
● Summary was too long
● Even more imaged based
● Summary was hard to read
(line height)
● Easier navigation (Navigation bar)
● Highlight “positive” and “negative”
more
● In-app browsing is good
UIUX
The last round of user feedback helped to get clear on final changes

Sprint 4: Implementation - Design walkthrough
51
General thoughts Detail view
Feedback from User testing and Product Owner triggered another Design walkthrough

Sprint 4: Implementation - Finalize GDELT
The gdelt international query delivers a new perspective from another country
GDELT API international
query
● Implemented a new method and query
to get an international news article
from GDELT
● Source country of the international
article is dynamic per article and can
be specified in the CMS
● Source language is specified in
english
● Again, the international article can be
visited using the in app browser

Sprint 4: Implementation - Finalize video content
How we implemented the youtube widget
Youtube Widget
● In order to provide more information on
a certain topic, we implemented the
youtube widget
● videos that explain the topic in more
depth or provide additional information
will be shown
● We use a static iFrame to insert the
youtube player template and change the
video-id dynamically per article

Sprint 4: Implementation - UX and Design
Integrating user feedback led to design adjustments and a user navigation tool
UX and UI Improvements
● Implemented Navigation icon in detail
page
● Easy navigation that scrolls you to the
desired widget
● We used an Ionic Fab to build the
navigation
● Directly from user feedback
● Furthermore, we changed the line height
and other typography issues to provide a
clean and easy to read user interface

Sprint 4: Challenges and solutions
Using Regular Expressions and installing missing dependencies could solve all issues of sprint 4
Missing dependencies on our AWS
backend server as well as conflicting
python versions required a lot of work
on the terminal.
Matched Header and URL in Response
Object using RegEx to be able to extract
the needed information for our widget.
Analyzed the summary for the most
important and most frequent keyword.
Then we used this keyword to build a
query to the Reddit API.
Deploy Summary-
Generation to Backend
Automated Keywords
Extract Information from
GDELT Response

Coding Skills
● First glimpse of
Regular
Expressions
● iOS and Android
Deployment of Ionic
Apps
● Do user testing
● Explored new
GDELT API
Teamwork
● Optimizing
documentation
workflow
Coding related learnings stood out in sprint 4

ConclusionMVP: where to go from here?

Limitations
Limitations we acknowledged and plans to overcome them
Status Quo of Summary Generation
requires further manual editing,
otherwise not compliant with
“Leistungsschutzrecht”.
Improve GDELT responses as
sometimes not the most
trustworthy sources are returned
as alternative perspectives.
NLP technology is constantly
refined and improved. If we are not
coming up ourselves with an
algorithm that reduces manual editing
effort, time will do the work.
GDELT’s documentation is really
vague. After devotion for a longer
period to the whole database and
query documentation, this issue
should be easily realizable.
The Reddit Service is taking the
most frequent word as a keyword
to search for posts. These can
differ from the actual topic of the
detail page.
Improve the algorithm so it matches
the keywords from the news header.

Timeline Growing
2017
The next steps we want to take
A way to personalize
content and also to
nudge people out of
their filter bubble
2017 2017 2017 2017
The GDELT foundation
just announced the
release of their new API
Doc 2.0 with new
possibilities. Google
BigQuery also opens
up new potentials for
using the database
Helps to understand
the topic and its
development in more
detail. Important for
building an opinion
Further
improvements on all
other features
Upload to Apple
TestFlight and do
user testing with a
huge user base
User Profile Exploit GDELT
potential
Storyline Apple Testflight Feature
Refinement

61
Free Version
User gets
● Summaries
● Different perspective features
We get money
through
● All basic features
● Can read any article he gets
directed to, without being
stopped by paywall
Premium Version
● Advertisement ● Monthly subscription fee
Business Model Structure
Perspective is built as a Freemium service

Now
First prototype
Q4 2017
Entry to German market
3% pay
for
online
news
14M
between
15 and 30
in
Germany
€8.99 /
Month 2019
International Expansion
Switzerland
Austria
Italy
€~4M /
Month
France
Nordics

Oskar
Hargedahl
Daniel
Hartl
Tim
Ordenewitz
Kevin
Probst

65
Free Version
User gets
● Summaries
● Different perspective features
We get money
through
● All basic features
● Can read any article he gets
directed to, without being
stopped by paywall
Premium Version
● Advertisement ● Monthly subscription fee
Business Model Structure
Perspective is built as a Freemium service

Legal Aspects
Current state of the law surrounding aggregation of news is reviewed in a
white paper by the Citizen Media Law Project
‘Leistungsschutzgesetz’ in Germany:
● allows an adoption of headlines provided the source and link presented
→ By just extracting the facts and rearranging them in our own language
no copyrights are infringed

Proof of concept
Summary principle for news is highly successful
● Summly had 200k downloads in 3 months
● Omni has about 2,5m visits/month)
Data suggests that the smartphone will become the defining
device for digital news with a big impact on consumption,
formats, and business models.
Blendle already managed to establish collaborations with news
outlets in order to skip payment walls

The Idea of Perspective: Target Group
Although we’re not specifically targeting
people that like to read very opinionated
news, we give them an incentive through
convenience.
Therefore Perspective’s main target group
consists of:
● Young people, who are still in the phase of
building their opinion about the world.
● Everyone who is dissatisfied with the
current media coverage and
its`bottlenecks
Perspective’s goal is to give young people easy access to news and support them building their own
opinion by providing multiple Perspectives

WTP for online news
% willing to pay for subscriptions:
Rest of Europe:
“Access news from
smartphone or tablet”
Top reasons to pay:
“Consume news from a
range of sources”
3%
5%
Individuals that are paying for
video content are more likely
to pay for news
Demographics and trends:
Young people are already more
willing to pay and the trend is
growing
Paying for quality news in an era of
biased politics
Germany:

GDELT and Google BigQuery
GDELT identifies a
multitude of factors, driving
our global society and
creates a free open platform
for computing the entire
world
GDELT includes several
measures of article tone:
● reporting scores of
positive and negative
word use
● polarity
● emotionalityThe GDELT Project
monitors news from all
over the world in more
than 100 languages
Topic
Tone Detection
range: -10 to 10
- 4 + 2 + 8
By means of the
GDELT Project we
are able to use an
API that allows us
easily to examine
a certain topic
from different
point of view, in
especially with a
different ‘tone’
about the topic

GDELT tone detection
71
The standard GDELT Tone score is a rough approximation of the "positive"/"negative" sentiment of document that
is reasonably robust across the languages that GDELT monitors.
To explore more complex emotional landscapes you can chose from the entire library of thousands of emotions
assessed by the 24 tonal packages used by GDELT GCAM
Find an emotional dimension of interest from the GCAM Master Codebook
● In order to use LIWC's "Anxiety" score (variable "c5.33") --> specify "GCAMVAR=c5.33"
● To use RID's "EMOTIONS/AGGRESSION" score (variable "c8.2"), specify
"GCAMVAR=c8.2"
Example

Sources
Population statistics:
http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=RPOP#
Percentage of individuals paying for news:
Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017. Oxford University: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Legality of summary generation:
Isbell, K. (2010, September 13). What’s the law around aggregating news online? A Harvard law report on the risks and the best practices.
Retrieved February 28, 2017, from http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/09/whats-the-law-aroundaggregating-news-online-a-harvard-law-report-on-
the-risks-and-the-bestpractices/

Now
First prototype
Q4 2017
Entry to German market
3% pay
for
online
news
14M
between
15 and 30
in
Germany
€8.99 /
Month 2019
International Expansion
Switzerland
Austria
Italy
€4M /
Month
France
Nordics

MMT Team
Oskar
Hargedahl
B.Sc. Finance & Computer
Science
Uppsala University
Technology Management
CDTM
Tim
Ordenewitz
B.Sc. Media Informatics
LMU Munich
Daniel
Hartl
B.Sc. Business
Administration & Minor in
Psychology
LMU Munich
Kevin
Probst
B.Sc. Business
Administration
LMU Munich
Technology Management
CDTM

Technologies we use
Perspective consists of three core pillars.
We use Natural Language Processing
to generate summaries from articles we
scraped. Therefore we developed our own
webservice that provides the app with a
summary.
We present several additional
perspectives to the user. Wikipedia,
Twitter, Reddit, Youtube and links to
articles with different view on the same
topic are available.
We developed a Cross Platform App
using the Ionic Framework. Ionic enables
us to develop the app using JavaScript
style languages but deploy the app as
native iOS, Android and Windows
Phone App.
Summary Generation Cross Platform App Perspectives

Technologies and Applications for Media
Develop a working
technological prototype
Scope of 12 weeks
4 sprints with fixed
product owner
Perspective

Perspective presentation

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