Dur­ing Bar­Camp, I talked to Arun Ram for a while. Along with his brother Arjun, he is work­ing on an ‘inno­v­a­tive’ news aggre­ga­tor called Taazza.com.

Taazza as you all know means fresh, but there is an extra ‘z’ here, so don’t leave that out or you might land up with some­thing else altogether!

The broth­ers have been work­ing on the appli­ca­tion for a while and are look­ing at giv­ing it some kind of a defined route map now as it’s near­ing its com­ple­tion. The feed­back so far has been encour­ag­ing, says Arun. They have been get­ting a lot of feed­back and the chal­lenge is to incor­po­rate the rel­e­vant feed­back into the system.

Before I go onto the tool, what is it that we want from a news aggre­ga­tor? Some of the fea­tures that come to mind:
1) Search facil­ity
2) Abil­ity to get to the news quickly
3) Get alter­na­tive / many dif­fer­ent views to the news story (com­ple­mented by blogs, Wikipedia)
4) Clean, easy-to-use and inter­ac­tive inter­face (that does not scare of an ordi­nary layperson)

So how is Taazza dif­fer­ent from yet another news aggre­ga­tor you might ask?

Well, many things as Arjun Ram points out in his pre­sen­ta­tion and demonstration.

From the brief view I got of the sys­tem, the inter­face itself is extremely clean and pleas­ing to the eyes. Hav­ing said that, I would def­i­nitely look for a lit­tle more colour to the site though. The unclut­tered design is a wel­come change from the usual inter­faces offered by many other news aggre­ga­tors like Samachar.com, for example.

Some cool fea­tures — Inte­gra­tion with Wikipedia and Google Maps!

While the news will be pulled from main­stream news sites online (Yahoo! Google etc.), what’s inter­est­ing is the inte­gra­tion with Wikipedia and Google Maps. So when you are look­ing for a news item, not only are you directed to related sto­ries on the Wiki inter­face, but you can also zoom in on the geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion of the news through Google Maps. These def­i­nitely are ‘inno­v­a­tive’ addi­tions to the aggregator.

This is actu­ally quite awe­some and I must say that it looks really impres­sive. From my stand­point, I’d be even more excited if they can get blogs incor­po­rated into the sys­tem. How­ever, what they will have to look at (as a par­tic­i­pant also pointed out) is not let it get too noisy as the blog world is large and diverse with many opin­ions and views float­ing around.

A sys­tem like Digg.com, where only the pop­u­lar opin­ions / blogs come to the fore­front or bub­bles up is a fea­ture that can be incor­po­rated to ensure the cream rises to the top.

The local flavour

The side panel of the aggre­ga­tor allows you to view news within a cer­tain spec­i­fied time­frame and allows you to scan through the recent and up-to-date stories.

On the user front, I would def­i­nitely look for­ward to this kind of an inter­face, espe­cially because it gives me new of a local flavour and addi­tion­ally incor­po­rates a well-rounded view of that par­tic­u­lar topic.

When is it coming?

While ser­vices like Newhound from Rediff.com have exper­i­mented with news aggre­ga­tion, what Taazza is try­ing to do is way beyond. Right now, what Rediff.com does is serves you links. Taazza is try­ing to break these lim­ited bound­aries and is work­ing on an idea that promises to be inter­est­ing and use­ful. And it def­i­nitely will, if they can launch it soon! It could be a few weeks away, says Arun.

While the broth­ers admit that the busi­ness model has not emerged as yet, this could be some­thing that will emerge from the launch. Busi­ness impli­ca­tions will def­i­nitely be a fac­tor at some point of time. The broth­ers have been work­ing on the strength of their pas­sions and I hope that Taazza breaks new ground in India in the online world. Best of luck to Arjun and Arun in their ven­ture! I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing it.

So get ready for Taazza, folks! Com­ing soon to a desk­top near you!!