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.”

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Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Consumer Goods Technology Magazine

Shifting work habits, more online shopping options, rising inflation, and stretched supply chains are just a few factors making it harder to discern what’s top-of-mind for shoppers today.

But we’re starting to get a clearer picture of what consumers say they value most right now. New Harris Poll research commissioned by Google Cloud reveals how U.S. shoppers are thinking about consumer goods brands in new ways—from apparel, electronics, and beauty products, to food and beverage.

While price unsurprisingly continues to be a major consideration in purchases, the average shopper is increasingly paying close attention to the values of consumer goods brands and how eco-friendly their products and practices are.

Shoppers want to buy from brands aligned with their values

COVID-19 drove people to reflect on their priorities, elevating concepts like community service, equity, and sustainability. A decade ago, most consumer goods companies would not have made these front-and-center, operational priorities. But today’s consumer not only wants savings and convenience, they also want that good feeling that comes from spending their money with a company that aligns with their values.

Our new research reveals that 82% of shoppers prefer a consumer brand’s values to align with their own, and they’ll vote with their wallet if they don’t feel a match. Three-quarters of shoppers reported parting ways with a brand over a conflict in values.

Even with their favorite consumer goods products, a majority of shoppers will not compromise on principles. If there’s a value mismatch, 39% of shoppers said they’d permanently boycott their favorite brand, and 24% would break ties at least temporarily. Most won’t be quiet about their concerns either: 28% of consumers that found their values at odds with a brand said they have shared their concerns with friends and family, and another 15% have shared their qualms on social media.

Consumer goods companies need to prioritize sustainability

A majority of today’s consumers (52%) are especially interested in supporting sustainable brands. They want to know how companies are managing their resources, specifically whether they are sourcing responsibly. These shoppers want to see meaningful, measurable efforts from CPG firms to save energy and reduce waste, like how Nuuly, URBN’s digital rental and resale business, has woven sustainability into its business operations, from its distribution centers to reusable packaging.

In fact, 66% of shoppers are now seeking out eco-friendly brands, with 55% saying they would pay more for more sustainable products. But these same shoppers are skeptical too: 72% think that companies and brands overstate their sustainability efforts. And they’re right to question brands’ practical application of their values. According to another Harris Poll survey recently commissioned by Google Cloud, 58% of executives polled across 16 countries admit that their organization has overstated its sustainability efforts.

Product availability is table stakes

A final point from the research: The global supply chain has stretched past its limits, and 60% of consumers are voicing some level of concern about it. At the end of the day, if a preferred brand isn’t actually on the shelves of a real or digital store, it doesn’t matter what the brand’s values or sustainability efforts are. A staggering 98% said they’d either buy from a different brand or search other stores or websites.

What’s a brand to do?

After more than 25 years working in the consumer goods industry in roles ranging from marketing and product development to business strategy and technology, at companies like Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly Clark, Carter’s, and now Google Cloud, I’ve seen successful brands do four things well when it comes to their values:

1. Don’t be generic.
   Your brand’s values need to be authentic, and they need to have teeth. But being too bold could run the risk of alienating some consumer segments. This is where technology can help. Personalizing your messages and outreach to specific shopper profiles is one way to ensure that your core values reach the right customers at the right time.
2. Make your values clear and consistent.
   When focusing on which values to highlight with your consumers and the world, make sure they make sense for your brand and that you’ll stick to them over time. For example, it’s painfully obvious when a brand is being opportunistic and inserting itself into conversations around values like sustainability or social justice, when it doesn’t have a history of voicing those values. The key to clear and consistent messaging of values is balancing authenticity with relatability and the appropriate amount of promotion.
3. Develop sustainability practices and communicate their impact to everyday people.
   How everyday people perceive a consumer goods brand’s sustainability initiatives is different from how an investor or general business audience does. Shoppers don’t read business sustainability plans or impact reports. To increase awareness of your brand’s sustainability efforts, consumers need to identify and interact with your brand and products directly. Some of my favorite examples are how I love that Google Maps gives me the choice of eco-friendly driving directions, and that I know I can buy low-waste, packaging-free cosmetics from a company like Lush.
4. Reward customer loyalty.
   Shoppers have more choices than ever before, and supply chain woes are testing preferences even further. But when someone chooses a specific brand because they feel aligned with their values or like their eco-friendly products, that shopper doesn’t always get recognized or thanked. Implementing a rewards program or following-up with customers after their purchases is one way you can make loyal shoppers feel appreciated while creating a lasting relationship that extends as long as possible.

With SAP Sapphire kicking off today in Orlando, we’re looking forward to seeing our customers and discussing how they can make core processes more efficient and improve how they serve their customers.

One thing is certain to be top of mind – the global supply chain challenges facing the world today. It’s affecting every business across every industry, from common household items that once filled store shelves and are now on backorder, to essential goods and services like food and medical treatments, which are at risk. Even cloud-native companies are making changes to ensure they have the insights, equipment, and other assets they need to continue serving customers.

We are proud to work with SAP on many initiatives that are driving results for our customers and helping them run more intelligent and sustainable companies. I’d like to highlight three of these important initiatives and how they are helping address global supply chain challenges.

Enabling more efficient migrations of critical workloads

We know a key barrier to entry in the cloud is the ability to easily migrate from on-premises environments. Our cloud provides a safe path to help companies including Johnson Controls, PayPal, and Kaeser Compressor to digitize and solve large, complex business problems, reduce costs, scale without cycles of investment, and gain access to key services and capabilities that can unlock value and enable growth.

Singapore-based shipping company Ocean Network Express (ONE) has become more agile by running their mission-critical SAP workloads on Google Cloud and using our data analytics to improve operational efficiency and make faster decisions. They have gone from an on-premises data warehouse solution that would take a full day loading data from SAP S/4HANA, to using our BigQuery solution that delivers business insights in minutes.

Since The Home Depot moved its critical SAP workloads to Google Cloud, the company has been able to shorten the time it takes to prepare a supply chain use case from 8 hours to 5 minutes by using BigQuery to analyze large volumes of internal and external data. This helps improve forecast accuracy and more effectively replenish inventory by being able to create a new plan when circumstances change unexpectedly with demand or a supplier.

Accelerating cloud benefits through RISE and LiveMigration

At Google Cloud, we have dedicated programs to help migrate SAP and other mission-critical workloads to our cloud with our Cloud Acceleration Program for SAP.

For SAP customers moving to Google Cloud, we provide LiveMigration to provide superior uptime and business continuity. LiveMigration eliminates downtime required for planned infrastructure maintenance. This means that your SAP system continues running even when Google Cloud is performing planned infrastructure maintenance upgrades thus ensuring superior business continuity for your mission critical workloads.

We are also proud to be a strategic partner with the RISE with SAP program, which helps accelerate cloud migration for SAP’s global customer base while minimizing risks along the migration journey. This program provides solutions and expertise from SAP and technology ecosystem partners to help companies transform through process consulting, workload migration services, cloud infrastructure, and ongoing training and support. To secure your mission critical workloads, SAP and Google Cloud can provide a 99.9% uptime SLA as part of the RISE with SAP program.

Many large manufacturers have taken advantage of RISE with SAP to forge a secure, proven path to our cloud, including Energizer Holdings Inc., a leading manufacturer and distributor of primary batteries, portable lights, and auto care products. Energizer has turned to RISE with SAP on Google Cloud to power its move to SAP S/4HANA. The company wants to automate essential business processes, improve customer service, and boost innovation. It had been using a private cloud solution but needed to gain flexibility while better containing costs.

“SAP S/4HANA for central finance will help us automate essential business processes, improve customer service, and fuel innovation that grows our company’s leadership position globally. We selected RISE with SAP to begin our journey to SAP S/4HANA and maintain the freedom and flexibility to move at our own pace,” said Energizer Chief Information Officer Dan McCarthy.

Another example is global automotive distributor Inchcape, which moved its mission-critical sales, marketing, finance, and operations systems and data to Google Cloud. With its diverse data sets now in a single, secure cloud platform, Inchcape is applying Google Cloud AI and ML capabilities to manage and analyze its data, automate operations, and ultimately transform the car ownership experience for millions.

“Google Cloud’s close relationship with SAP and its strong technical expertise in this space were a big pull for us,” said Mark Dearnley, Chief Digital Officer at Inchcape. “Ultimately, we wanted a headache-free RISE with SAP implementation and to unlock value for auto makers and consumers in all our regions, while continuing to have the choice and flexibility to modernize our 150-year old business in a way that works for us.”

A new intelligence layer for all SAP Google Cloud customers

When moving mission-critical workloads to the cloud, companies not only need to migrate safely, they also need to quickly realize value, which we enable with Google Cloud Cortex Framework — a layer of intelligence that integrates with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Google Cloud Cortex Framework provides reference architectures, deployment accelerators, and integration services for analytics scenarios.

Like many large e-commerce companies, Mercado Libre experienced skyrocketing transactions that more than doubled in 2020 as people sheltered at home during the pandemic, and they are anticipating more growth. The Google Cloud Cortex Framework is enabling Mercado Libre to respond, run more efficiently, and make faster, data-driven decisions.

Continued partnership to support organizations around the world

Our longstanding partnership with SAP continues to yield exciting innovations for our customers, and we’re honored to work with them to help customers address the ongoing impact of global supply chain challenges. We’re looking forward to sharing new insights and innovations at SAP Sapphire this week, and to listening and learning from you about your plans and challenges, and how we can best support your transformation to the cloud.

Businesses that operate in complex cloud environments, large fleets, or sophisticated security operations all require visibility into their cloud assets in order to keep their teams nimble and their data secure. Cloud Asset Inventory (CAI) helps these teams understand their Google Cloud  and Anthos environments by providing complete visibility, real-time monitoring, and powerful asset analysis capabilities. Today, Cloud Asset Inventory gets four new capabilities that help you understand your environment more clearly and easily than ever before.

New user interface eases asset and insight discovery 

Cloud Asset Inventory console preview is now publicly available for GCP and Anthos customers. This preview provides insights into your cloud footprint, history and details of resource usage with powerful filtering and search capabilities. For example, you can view your global distribution of resources and policies, how your GCE VM footprint has been changing over time, as well as full metadata and change history for all your assets. The CAI console can be filtered at the organization, folder, or project-level, so each user can view the resources they have permissions for down to project level granularity.

Asset discovery and Datadog integration

A new asset list service in CAI provides quick and comprehensive asset discovery, including asset history, without needing to export the data to a storage destination. Datadog, a leading multi-cloud monitoring and security service provider, relies on deep integration with CAI for service and asset discovery. Datadog has been piloting and taking full advantage of the newly released asset list service. Datadog Product Manager, Steve Harrington, commented: 

“Google’s new Cloud Asset Inventory API provides us with an immensely valuable, single source of truth for determining the resources present in a given GCP environment. Along with its rich metadata, this enables us to enhance multiple aspects of our integration with GCP, including streamlined metric collection and ingestion of custom labels. We plan to continue building around Cloud Asset Inventory in the future to improve existing features, and are envisioning ways it could help us provide entirely new insights to our customers.”

Answer “who can access what resources?”

Determining authoritative answers to security-related questions like “Who can read data from my storage bucket that contains PII?” or “Does a terminated employee still have any remaining access to my system?” can be difficult and time consuming. This is why access management and identity certification is one of the top security priorities for enterprises running workloads in the cloud. To help alleviate this challenge, the new Policy Analyzer capability in CAI thoroughly analyzes the relationship between IAM policies and resources. The analysis includes powerful and efficient group expansion, service account impersonation, conditional access analysis, resource expansion, and more. You can even export the results to a BigQuery table or Cloud Storage bucket for further analysis and record keeping. CAI’s enhanced UI makes it even easier for you to build your own flexible queries and quickly get to a comprehensive answer.

Create asset posture visibility 

Cloud Asset Inventory now provides seven types of Asset Insights through the Active Assist platform. These new asset insights help proactively detect anomalies within your organization’s IAM policies, which may be opportunities to improve your security posture. The insights can be aggregated at the Organization, Folder or Project level. 

The seven new Asset Insights include: 

• External members in IAM policies. 
• External users that impersonate your service accounts.
• External members as policy editors.
• External users who can view cloud storage buckets.
• Terminated users/groups that are still in IAM policies
• IAM policies containing all users or all authenticated users.
• Projects with only terminated users as owners.

As a Google Cloud customer you can get started and use all the recently released capabilities and features immediately; check out our documentation to see how. We’d love to hear your feedback; email us with any questions or concerns!