Participate in our user tests to see more smiles like these
From an idea to a concept
What we’re doing with huome.net is a news arena that’s both always personalized and has all the news that are essential for the user’s private and professional life. In addition, we want to make this as convenient as possible so that you don’t have to think about what to share and what not. What we’ve figured so far, is that big things can come from small changes in how people behave in the internet.
Our aim is to provide curated newsflows. You don’t actually have to do anything but read news as you would do otherwise to provide content for your friends! The friends would then be able to see what his/her friends are reading from whitelisted newssites. Of course, you would have an opt-out button for too sensitive stories! We started from wanting to create a social cache to realizing that users want something more specific: a service that instantly makes itself meaningful by improving one’s everyday life.
Issues in development
As we’re building a news service that essentially counts on following other people, it’s imperative for us to have a critical mass that makes it interesting. To achieve a tipping point is one of the main issues in launching a successful service. This is particularly difficult when launching from a small cultural sphere such as Finland.
By acknowledging this, we have a better chance of finding a solution. Our aim is to concentrate on providing value for many small social bubbles instead of a single big one. This makes it possible for us to provide for groups of circa 20 people, something that is easier to reach than one giant user pool. Plus, I for one know that I have a handful of people whose news-knowledge I’d love to share.
An interdisciplinary journey
The main challenge in any new web service is to build a platform that’s both usable and efficient. The technical work will prove to be the core of our project and we have two excellent programmers for that. In addition, we have people from social sciences. To combine these two fields both of the sides have to be open and willing to learn new things. The work we’re going to do with huome.net this summer focuses on building a working alpha, but we’re also planning to apply e.g. anthropological and sociological methods in order to have a solid market analysis and ways to promote our service.
Our goal: to get over the fence
When one reads about entrepreneurship and innovating new services, every piece of advice always boils down to having the right team. When reading about Uutisraivaaja, we instantly acknowledged that we have a team that can compete, so we took the challenge. This is going to be the best possible test for us, but to succeed one must accept a risk of failure as well. Our goal is get as much done for August as possible, starting from the launch of our website today. What we can promise is that this will not come down to a lack of enthusiasm from our part.
The aim of Uutisraivaaja is to improve ways of distributing information. We cannot think of anything that we could be more proud of than being a part of Uutisraivaaja with all the other incredible finalists.
We’re very excited about huome.net! To have an opportunity to build a service which can potentially improve the way of reading news and, thus, understanding the world makes all the difference for us. However, it is ever more apparent that this is going to be a learning process and we invite readers to join us in our common adventure. Follow us on twitter @huomenet and please visit huome.net!
