Taazza newsroom

Sincere apologies for the lack of communication at our end. We dug ourselves into a cave and didnt wanna get out till we got something out to folks outside the core team.

After months of hard work and sweat, we shipped our alpha product to select friends & family. It is not fully baked and hence it the alpha tag.  As someone said “Shipping is a feature”. So we have shipped it with minimal features that we would like to iterate on. The results so far have been promising. We wanted to keep you update to let you know that work on the product is going full speed.

To Friends & family who have stood by us during these difficult months, a heart felt “thank you“.

P.S: We are looking for senior associates/team leads to help us take us to the next level.

We have been rapidly signing up beta users. If you have ever written about taazza or mentioned it in your blog, you should have received a beta id from us. If we missed any of you please feel free to email beta [ @ ] taazza [ dot ] com and we will have one sent your way.

If you are stopping by at this blog and want access to Taazza please leave a message and we will try and get one to you soon.

Psst … a little birdie tells me that there are exciting goodies for you Taazza newbies out there… More to come in next day or two.

Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: beta

We were at proto.in over the weekend. It was a great attempt at bringing together the most promising entrepreneurs, ideas, VCs and tech enthusiasts under one roof. The venue was an auditorium at IIT Madras nestled amidst greenery and nature. There were over 300 in the auditorium and a dozen VCs and angel investors.

We talked about Taazza, the genesis, the vision and features. (More about us here) We received great interest from those who participated and the press. The press was particularly interested since we are about “news”. We had many one-on-one sessions to demo in detail with many who spend time offline.

Taaza’s unique offerings

• Integrates traditional news stories with social content to provide rich context.
• Applies cutting edge Semantic web technologies to news.
• Extracts entities of interest from news stories to provide context.
• Powered by algorithms that automate news delivery.

Taazza’s features

• Taazza news is auto generated for the user!
• Editions – National and Metro editions.
• View news for places, people or topics that interest you
• You can choose the time window for the news (say last 4 hours)
• Different news reading modes like Headlines, Newsriver & News maps.
• Get the news context from Photos, Videos, Blogs & Bookmarks. Integration with popular services (Flickr, Youtube, delicious, Technorati, Upcoming and Eventful)
• Mobile edition
• RSS & Microformats support

And yes, we are open for a limited / closed beta. Check out our web site for more details.

And thanks for all your interest, encouragement and support.

Technorati Tags: taazza, proto.in, news, india, beta

I had the pleasure of demo’ing Taazza at Barcamp Chennai. An enthusiastic crowd. More details to come ..Meanwhile here are some pictures

Here are some reviews
Boot hack says Taazza’s Fresh, different and impressive

Vijay Anand says
Taazza’s ready to flip

Vinu says There is space for Taazza & MyToday.com

More reviews here

Keep those reviews coming .. An iPod is in the offing ..

Stop by at barCamp to play around with Taazza

I will upload the presentation soon

Amit Ranjan's exclaims Taazza softlaunch rocks BarCampChennai
Aadel wonders if Taazza be the next big thing in news aggregation

Ranjith wonders Will Taazza change his news reading habbits?
Zoho likes Taazza integration
Rajesh Segu Fresh' NEWS your way 

Some exciting stuff … Keep them coming …

Get those reviews in .. while its still on …

Check out the presentation video

Welcome to Taazza! More info on the way soon. A landing page has just been created. Check it out at http://www.taazza.com Sign up for updates! Lots of info coming your way!

Taazza in hindi means “Fresh”. The Vision of Taazza is enable you the user with news that is pertinent to you.

So what is wrong with the existing sites you ask?

Are ya seriously asking this question. Well, lets entertain it nonetheless. Most of these sites have been having a free ride for a while, case in point Samachar

India made easy it claims! One can close a zillion popups and go on a easter egg hunt before one discovers news items. Same is true for other sites like Times Of India, Rediff, etc. They are all good content providers but extremely bad content enablers.

Innovation is non existent! They do a bad job adopting technologies, case in point RSS. Its taken more than a few years for these sites to adopt it. Its time for a fresh breeze!

Fair enough, what about the google’s and microsoft’s of the world, for instance google.news?

Good point. If you are comfortable just subscribing to RSS feeds from google news you should stick to them. Indians like us are opinionated, love to critic and enjoying voice their opinion.

So how are ya different?

We at Taazza believe that we can push the boundries of innovation with new technologies like tagging, mapping, memetracking and digg. There is significant gap between technology enablers and content providers within this space and we are working on exploiting the same to enable you the user.

Sounds like fun, When will I bet able to get my hands on this stuff?

We are working extremely hard to get the technology out to you. At the moment we are targeting Spring 2006.

Is there any way I get can previews of whats to come?

Please subscribe to this blog and sign up for updates. We hope to send out invites to a select few and solicit feedback.

We are very excited to launch soon! Stay tuned. Meanwhile please feel free to leave your comments!