About inshorts

Mobile news platform inshorts condenses the latest national and international news into 60-word briefs in English and Hindi. With 10 million downloads so far, it’s expanding to cater to millions more on-the-go Indians reading news on mobile devices.

Industries: Media & Entertainment

Location: India

Across India, hundreds of millions of people turn to their smartphones for news that will enhance their lives and help them achieve their goals. According to Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: “The past few years have seen explosive growth in mobile internet access, and the rapid move to digital media will have profound implications for the practice of journalism, the business of news, media institutions, and thus by extension political and public life in India.” The Institute reports that Indians with internet access have risen from 100 million to 500 million in the past decade alone. The report identifies India’s news industry as “a mobile-first market,” with 66% of Indians citing smartphones as the device they most frequently use to access online news.

Seeing an opportunity to meet the growing need for news on the go, inshorts developed a mobile news platform for Indians on the move who want to stay informed but don’t have time to read long articles. The inshorts solution condenses news, from politics to cricket, into briefs of under 60 words and has been well received, with 10 million downloads since launching in 2013.

To keep the attention of its always-on news consumers and attract more users for continued growth, inshorts knows it must continuously evolve and improve its platform. The company turned to Google Cloud in 2016 in order to free its developers from time-consuming infrastructure maintenance tasks and enable them to focus on creating innovative applications instead. It was also looking for powerful yet cost-effective data and scaling tools to reach more remote corners of India and found this in Google Cloud.

“There’s a new wave of 300 to 400 million first time mobile users projected for India,” says Manish Bisht, Head of Technology at inshorts. “We want to capture those users, and Google Cloud is helping us succeed.”

Freeing up resources for new solutions

By migrating to Google Cloud, inshorts has been able to free up its development team to experiment with new ideas, without worrying about backend management or costs. The company worked with cloud consultancy Searce, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, to define the best solutions for achieving its goals. Searce partners with clients to help them scale their business by leveraging Cloud, AI/ML, and data analytics while reducing the operational IT infrastructure spend. Because it specializes in AI/ML, Anthos, and Cloud Search, inshorts chose it as the ideal partner for futurifying its business on Google Cloud. According to Manish, the Searce team was focused not only on helping inshorts to migrate and adopt a on-demand computing mindset, but helping it to decrease monthly costs as well. “There’s always a positive push from Searce, to help us move forward, and to really put our company’s priorities first,” he says.

Through the application development solutions of Firebase, for example, inshorts is able to test new features in a rapidly shifting market. The product’s ease-of-use and built-in data analytics mean that inshorts can now allocate its developer resources more efficiently across multiple projects, instead of needing an entire team to focus on one project. Product cycles are now just one week long, instead of one month, and each backend and frontend developer in the team of four is able to focus on a separate project, meaning that more work gets done in a shorter time.

Dataflow, which enables real-time data processing, has been a major factor in allowing inshorts to instantly recommend content to users. Previously, the company had managed its own instances, first manually recording what users were doing and later pushing out recommendations. That all changed with Dataflow. “Dataflow freed a lot of our development and instance management time, because we can process data in real time now,” says Manish. “And that means giving users what they want instantly.”

Perhaps one of the biggest time savings came from using Dataproc, which released the inshorts team from the task of managing clusters. “We simply moved to Dataproc, provisioned the machines, and let Google Cloud take over all the management for us,” says Manish. “This one change translated into labor savings of up to six hours a day.”

Where costs are concerned, inshorts is happy to report that Google Cloud has led to not just time savings, but monetary savings as well. The company had begun its cloud journey with a leading provider, but soon found that data analytics services were driving up costs. Meanwhile, the service required high levels of technical expertise to manage the growing infrastructure, which meant it needed to hire a DevOps expert. After switching to Google Cloud products such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Deployment Manager, and Cloud Build, inshorts has now reduced most of its DevOps burden.

“At the time, we were spending around USD100,000 per month in data analysis and data-related fields alone. We had to pursue a cost optimization drive,” recalls Manish. “We had no idea how much we would save just by migrating to Google Cloud. We brought down our costs for the entire infrastructure to around USD20,000 per month.”

The company now uses BigQuery with Looker Studio to analyze and predict its tech expenditure. With Looker Studio, it can easily visualize infrastructure costs and break them down by team, services, and project stakeholders.

Processing millions of images quickly, delivering news instantly

inshorts cites the move to GKE as one of its most important moves. “At one point, we were processing a quarter of a million images per day. Because images are uploaded by our users, traffic is unpredictable; planning the exact amount of compute needed in a given moment is almost impossible. Load balancing itself was no longer enough,” shares Manish. “Google Kubernetes Engine makes life easier for our developers, reducing the need for them to be ever present, and giving them a tool that’s easy to work with.”

The inshorts team moved to GKE primarily to gain this ease of use, where its team can now push a few configurations, then spin up clusters, tell them how to handle the load and what kind of machines to provision, and manage resources effectively. The team has reduced its dependency on DevOps since there’s no need for developers to worry about what size of machines they need for their applications. “The size of machine needed depends on the specific job, and with Google Kubernetes Engine it’s very easy to accommodate a whole range of jobs. We simply optimize our resources, scaling up or down as needed,” says Manish.

As inshorts’ platform becomes more feature-rich and sophisticated, it is taking advantage of the global network of Google Cloud. With its data center in the United States, the platform had begun to experience latency of about 600ms, too great a lag in an age of instant news. Because Google Cloud has regional data centers around the world, inshorts was able to simply move its data center closer to home, bringing down average latency to 100 ms. “We achieved significant app performance improvements thanks to being able to migrate our data center,” says Manish. “The loading was faster; everything was faster.”

Mapping the future with localized news

Being able to develop features even faster is enabling inshorts to pursue its goal of expanding into every corner of India. To capture the wave of new mobile consumers, inshorts realizes that it needs to start by finding out exactly where they are. Using Google Maps Platform, the company has launched a location-based social video app called Public, which offers news that’s highly localized to specific Indian communities and relevant to what they want to read.

As a developing nation, India’s mapping landscape is constantly changing. There were 722 administrative regions when inshorts began its work, but by 2018, 10 new districts had been added to this number. Because Public serves rural and suburban audiences, it’s crucial that it can stay on top of these rapid and sometimes confusing changes. According to Manish, Google Maps Platform not only offers granular geo-location through the Geolocation API but adapts to mapping changes in near real time. It’s a capability that inshorts is harnessing to make the Public app into its next success. “The app is experiencing tremendous growth in the tier two and three cities,” shares Manish, “In the short span of six months, it has already become the category’s number-one ranked app on the Google Play store.”

Tell us your challenge. We’re here to help.

Access to the cloud has advanced the distribution and consumption of financial information on a global scale. In parallel, the global financial data landscape has been transformed by an influx of alternative data sources, including social media, meteorological data, satellite imagery, and other data. Exchanges and market data providers now find they need to include these new datasets to enrich their products and compete, which has meant they now must consider cloud-based models to keep up with the demands of their customers who expect easy, quick, flexible and cost-efficient ways to consume market data.

To address these needs, today we’re announcing the general availability of Datashare for financial services, a new Google Cloud solution that brings together the entire capital markets ecosystem—data publishers, and data consumers—to exchange market data securely and easily.

Datashare helps organize third-party financial information, making it accessible and useful to market data publishers and data consumers. We open-sourced the entire Datashare solution so market data publishers can now onboard their licensed datasets to Google Cloud securely, quickly and easily, while data consumers can consume that data as a service in tools of their preference, such as BigQuery.

Three ways to distribute and consume your data

Batch data delivery

Datashare provides a batch data delivery mechanism for data publishers to deliver their reference data, historical tick data, alternative market data sources and more via BigQuery, reducing the administrative burden on data consumers to extract insights from data. 

Real-time data streaming delivery

By using this event-based data delivery channel for rapidly changing instrument prices, tick data, orders, news and others via Pub/Sub, data consumers can reliably process individual messages or rewind to a point in time to replay a prior market scenario and test model changes.

Monetizing licensed datasets

Market data publishers can onboard their licensed datasets to Google Cloud and make them available via a one-stop-shop on Google Cloud Marketplace, enabling a new sales channel to expand market reach.

Reference architecture

Check out the diagram below to see how you can share your batch and real-time data directly to your Google Cloud customers with BigQuery and Pub/Sub.

As you can see in the above reference architecture, both publishers and consumers can derive several benefits from the solution:

Benefits for data publishers

• You no longer have to maintain your own delivery and licensing infrastructure.
• You can easily package and deliver granular data products and experiments with SQL.
• You can have a solution that scales with your business as data volumes and number of customers grow.

Benefits for data consumers

• Your data is ready for analysis and machine learning (ML)— you no longer have to maintain extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load files and transform data.
• You can avoid the expense and burden of maintaining multiple copies of large data files.
• You can be more targeted with consumption of data using BigQuery queries, improving performance, and compliance, and reducing cost.

Accessing the datasets

Google Cloud has been working with multiple industry firms on innovating in the market data space. By using Datashare for publishing, data publishers can make their entire datasets available on Google Cloud. Early adopters of Datashare include firms such as OneTick and Accern. OneTick’s datasets include reference and historical futures data (that can be accessed in our console with your login). Accern’s datasets include alternative data such as market sentiment and credit analysis data (that can be accessed in our console with your login).

To make it more helpful, we partnered with Accern to create a hypothetical scenario to describe the data acquisition and analytics process step-by-step.

Accern use case 

As a sustainability analyst, you require an economic, social and governance (ESG) dataset to determine which sector is the most widely covered ESG sector by analysts, and to also identify the sector with the lowest ESG sentiment score. Now, you can discover and acquire an ESG dataset in Google Cloud.

Step 1. Navigate to the Financial Services solutions page in the Google Cloud console:

Step 2. Click a dataset, for example Accern AI-Generated ESG Insights, then review the overview details, plans and pricing, documentation and support information. To view the available pricing tiers, click ‘View All Plans’. Once you’ve decided on a tier that you would like to subscribe to, click ‘Select’, choose a billing account and review and accept the terms of service to complete the subscription. Once the steps are complete, click ‘Subscribe’ at the bottom. An overlay window will appear, click ‘Register with Accern’ to activate and complete the subscription.

Step 3. Once activation is complete, you’ll be directed to the Datashare ‘My Products’ screen. Voila! You are now subscribed to Accern’s ESG Scores dataset and can access it in your Google Cloud instance using BigQuery. To access the data, click the hour glass icon on the corresponding ‘My Products’ record that you just purchased. An overlay will present you with the details on the dataset and/or table. Click the ‘Navigate to Table’ button to navigate through to the BigQuery console.

Step 4. Now that you have access and are in the BigQuery console, it’s time to generate data insights.

^{For this example, we’ve eliminated the company identifying information that is included as part of the subscription and aggregated company ESG in a view where each row represents a day, an industry sector, a specific identified ‘ESG Issues’ (event_group and event) and the respective ‘ESG Sentiment’ per issue.}

For example, row 1 indicates that within the ‘Healthcare’ sector, there was a ‘Social – Civil Society’ issue identified and it had a negative ESG sentiment score of -15.35.

Step 5. Generate a report by exporting it to Data Studio to build visualizations and conduct additional analysis on the ESG data.

Select ‘Export’ and ‘Explore with Data Studio’.

Step 6. Build a simple/basic report.

Now that the ESG data appears in Data Studio, you can start by building a simple chart to help you understand which industry sectors have the highest volume of discussions around ESG and the overall ESG Sentiment per industry sector.

To build the chart:

• Select the chart type ‘Table’.

• Include Entity_Sector as your dimension to aggregate results by ‘Industry Sector.’
• Include Signal_ID as a measure to count the number of ESG passages identified per ‘Industry Sector.’
• Include AVG(Event_Sentiment) as a measure to display the overall ESG Sentiment per ‘Industry Sector’ across ESG Issues.

You can see sectors that are  most discussed when it comes to ESG related topics and their corresponding ‘ESG Sentiment’ scores.

Step 7. Build your final report in Data Studio.

As a next step you can further drill into the data to understand ESG data specific to each ‘Industry Sector’ and identify positive and negative ESG practices. 

Accern has built a more complex sample dashboard and made it available publicly here. You can interact with this report and play around with the data. The dashboard can help to identify material ESG insights for each sector to inform your investment and risk processes. If you have additional questions, you can reach out to Accern directly.

Discovering, accessing and analyzing licensed datasets is quick and easy. Stay tuned for more updates on new licensed datasets.

Publishing your data via Datashare

If you are a publisher of market data, alternative, or exotic data, you can use Datashare to get it published on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Start by joining the Partner Advantage program by registering for the Partner Advantage Portal and applying for the Partner Advantage Build Model engagement. Visit our getting started guide for information to get started on publishing licensed datasets in the Marketplace. Stay tuned for a future blog post about using Datashare to publish datasets in the Marketplace.

More solutions for capital markets

Check out other Google Cloud solutions for capital markets.

Editor’s note: Meet Gareth Walkom, an entrepreneur dedicated to helping others with speech disorders.

Turning life experience into innovation

Did you know that 3% of Americans have a speech disorder, while 1% of the world’s population have a stutter? Just getting what they need in everyday interactions can be stressful, which intensifies when the stakes are raised during job interviews, presentations, public speaking, and other activities. As a result, some people with speech disorders may avoid conversations and relationships, and risk being denied jobs because of a difference in how they speak.

As a person who stutters, I know firsthand the ableism that people with a speech disorder can encounter in wanting to use their voice in a judgemental world: the frustration of sometimes not being able to say exactly what you want to say and therefore speaking less in speaking situations. And the educational and career opportunities are lost when doors remain closed to us, especially when employers advertise their jobs as requiring someone who speaks the language ‘fluently’.

While researchers still don’t definitively know what causes stuttering, emerging technologies are giving us new and promising pathways for improving the quality of life of people with speech disorders. 

That’s why after years of researching and testing potential therapeutic uses of virtual reality, and with the support of the Google for Startups Cloud Program, I founded withVR on International Stuttering Awareness Day (October 22) in 2020. The mission of withVR is to prepare people with speech disorders for real-life speaking situations by utilizing the power of virtual reality. 

Working through it

One of the difficulties in adapting to any disability is the opportunity to work through it in a safe and nonjudgmental environment. withVR provides a virtual space for individuals, in collaboration with their speech therapists, to practice real-world speaking scenarios in safe, controlled environments. 

Imagine being able to raise your hand in class and give your opinion without hesitation, ordering the meal you want rather than something that’s easier to say, or sit across the table from an avatar of an employer and explain why you are the right person for your dream job. Then further customize the speaking situation and its surroundings to challenge yourself and be ready for anything. That’s what withVR offers individuals and their speech therapists.

Making VR come to life

To bring the withVR vision to life, we are developing applications using the Unity game engine on Google Cloud with integrated Firebase services including authentication, web hosting, storage, and database. It’s a powerful combination that’s enabled us to build industrial-strength applications that we’ve rapidly deployed on a global basis. Today we are already collaborating with 80+ labs, clinics, and hospitals in more than 20 different countries worldwide.

These organizations help us to test and refine a virtual reality application to support people in achieving their speech goals and build comfort through immersive VR experiences using easily available viewers like Google Cardboard. 

The application works in conjunction with a web app through which speech therapists configure customized VR scenarios for their patients to use. As no real-life speaking situation is ever exactly the same, customization of VR scenarios is vital. They can construct different scenes, create and script avatars, and through the Google Text-to-Speech API can even choose from hundreds of different voices in a variety of languages. This gives them the flexibility to create many unique speaking situations for their clients no matter where they are in the world.

Progress from the practice sessions is presented through a dashboard that provides therapists with a tool to monitor their clients’ progress and provide feedback and encouragement.

No shortage of support

My founder’s journey has been supported by many passionate people. The Google for Startups Cloud Program has been instrumental in helping us come so far in the first year, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. There are many capabilities in Firebase and Google Cloud that we have yet to explore, and through the startup program I now have a Google Mentor who can help guide that exploration. 

We also joined the 2Gether-International (2GI) Tech Cohort, which is supported by Google for Startups and is built for and run by entrepreneurs with disabilities. At the end of the 10-week cohort, we finished with a pitch competition, where I was one of six selected founders to pitch in just three minutes. I was very fortunate to win the Best Overall Pitch Award, gaining 10,000 USD in seed funding. This award not only highlights the potential of withVR, but also showcases that anyone can pitch their idea in a short amount of time no matter their difference. 

Working with 2GI also gave me the opportunity to collaborate and learn from other founders who have disabilities. It’s a safe space where I don’t have to explain my everyday challenges and can focus on the all-important task of advancing the vision of withVR, while seeing how others use technology in their domain. 

Building on a strong foundation

I’m amazed to look back and see what we’ve accomplished in just one year and humbled by the thousands of lives we’ve touched. Every day we receive valuable real-life feedback from people in the field—both clinicians and those with speech differences who benefit from VR therapy. That knowledge tells us that we are heading in the right direction and opening our eyes to new possibilities for where to take withVR. And inspiring us to keep moving ahead.

If you’d like to participate in testing or if you are speech therapist or researcher, please feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to show you how you can contribute to a world where anyone with a speech disorder can truly use their voice in any situation. If you’d like to take part, contact us at hello@withvr.app.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.