KICKSTARTER

Funded! This project was successfully funded on January 16, 2011.

Play
00:00
00:00

Newsgrape - the super simple, high-speed, quality-assuring, multilingual, text-sharing news-community.

HELLO - THIS IS WHAT WE'RE ABOUT

We are a team of young developers / students / programmers trying to successfully launch a web project we have already committed a year's worth of work to.

ELEVATOR SPEECH

For all the web-users, who waste too much time sifting through articles, lost between millions of different web pages, Newsgrape is a milestone in blogging and online-journalism and sets new standards in reach, revenue-possibilities, reading-experience, multilingualism, news-distribution and quality-assurance. Unlike link-directories, aggregators and feed-readers, Newsgrape operates on a user-friendly, clear and easy to use interface that combines all available features with new innovations and creates a superior news community. If you have a couple of minutes left, check out this 7 min Presentation of Newsgrape! VISION An intelligent, open minded and free thinking society. MISSION Make knowledge and opinion, separated, both online and offline, globally available. VALUES Everyone has the right for a personal opinion. We offer an opportunity to build one.

SUMMARY

Newsgrape is a free text-community for the sharing of articles, which it links to each other. Writers can create Magazines to publish articles collaboratively in a group of people. With the E-Go , Reader have numerous ways to filter through interesting articles from the database to organize them in subscription groups or store them in libraries. It also caters for bi- or multilingual users, as it allows for multiple languages on one interface, simultaneously. Two main innovations are the Newsrank algorithm, which evaluates the quality of each article based on reader behavior, and the Fastnews, which we believe could distribute short news more efficiently than, for example, Facebook or Twitter. Newsgrape offers up to 75% from the advertising revenue generated by articles to the authors, and aims to become the best income source for successful bloggers. Other features are: Awards, which can be granted in regular intervals by magazines and writers, a smart commenting system, where the comments change according to user evaluation, and a messaging system, which, next to normal user to user messaging and contact between writers and their subscribers, also provides a board for magazine internal communication. All of this, with modern privacy-settings , to give complete control over personal data, to be deleted with the click of a button.

WHERE WE ARE SO FAR

Fingers superglued to keyboards and over 5.500 hours of work between over three dozen people worldwide have gone towards the development of Newsgrape Alpha 1.0. Our engine is written in 'Python', based on the framework 'Django' and currently consists of over 11,000 lines of code. If you want to know how the whole thing looks like, check out this Interactive Guided Screen Capture!YOUR PART IN THIS 

So, why don't we just go online you ask? Unfortunately not everything can be fueled by dedication and passion to the point of completion. So now we are at the stage where we need a little capital to continue developing further and invest into capable servers. We're asking you to parent our project - it is with your help that Newsgrape will be on its feet, learning to walk. We hope to appeal to your interest so it doesn't come to the point of having to throw ourselves into the shark tank of Venture Capitalist investors who focus on profit, as opposed to the platform and the users.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN WITH YOUR MONEY 

With $12,000 we can launch Newsgrape this winter. Yes - this winter! As your money would allow us to have this site up and running in Europe and the States faster than you can say Newsgrape.OUR PROMISE Newsgrape Pre Beta 1.0 online this winter, with the interface in English and German and dozens of other languages to read and write (or publish photo-spreads etc). To see our full mission statement click here!

LINKS

The Project Page

The Features

FOLLOW NEWSGRAPE ON

Facebook

Twitter

FAQ

Have a question? If the info above doesn't help, you can ask the project creator directly.

Ask a question
140
Backers
$16,055
pledged of $12,500 goal
0
seconds to go
Felix_leo_2_mittel.klein.medium

See full bio

  • Pledge $5 or more
    You selected

    41 backers

    Be among the very first users of Newsgrape with one of the exclusive "Pre-Beta Access Keys". All Kickstarter pledgers who sign up to collaborate on this program will get an opportunity to directly help and influence the development!

  • Pledge $10 or more
    You selected

    32 backers

    Invite a friend of yours to the restricted PreBeta phase with all the Pre-Beta access privileges! You can already start your own magazine together and leave your marks, before anyone else does.

  • Pledge $25 or more
    You selected

    18 backers

    Get your group in: Invite up to 3 friends for the restricted PreBeta phase! Now you can team up and really get things going!


  • Pledge $50 or more
    You selected

    9 backers

    You will also receive a personal letter from one of the founders to express our gratitude, some cool goodies to spread the word and personal mail support if you need help with Newsgrape.

  • Pledge $100 or more
    You selected

    21 backers

    Additionally, have a little icon displayed on your Newsgrape profile, so everyone will remember your help! Plus, we will list your name on our credits and official Kickstarter Club contributors page. Apart from that, if you support our project - the least thing we can do is to support yours. You will receive a voucher worth your pledge to advertise on Newsgrape! (as soon as our Advertising System is up and running..)

  • Pledge $250 or more
    You selected

    3 backers

    Get all the above privileges and some of our awesome and supernerdy Newsgrape t-shirts to spread the word! (The voucher is still worth your pledge - yeah!)


  • Pledge $500 or more
    You selected

    2 backers

    All of the above, and some really cool sweaters to keep you graped up in cold Seattle winter nights, as well as one of our famous Viennese Sachertorte and other nice stuff! (The voucher is still worth your pledge..)


  • Pledge $750 or more
    You selected

    0 backers

    Additionally, we will dedicate one day of our developers diary to you (published on Kickstarter) and invite you to a Q/A session. (The voucher is still worth your pledge..)

  • Pledge $1,000 or more
    You selected

    2 backers

    All of the above and you will be listed as an Executive Contributor with your picture, a one-sentence bio, and a link to anything you like. Plus, a really large poster of Newsgrape, signed by the whole team! (The voucher is still worth your pledge..)

  • Pledge $1,500 or more
    You selected

    4 backers Limited (46 left of 50)

    All of the above and a very secret password that allows you to open up a direct line with the Newsgrape headquarter in Vienna. This means you will get web cam access to our office, to watch our programmers whenever they brood about complicated software.. (just like Discovery Channel, just a little more animallike) (And, of course, the voucher is still worth your pledge)

Funding period

- (46 days)