New Delhi: UCWeb, a part of Alibaba Mobile Business Group, has launched the UC News app. Developed exclusively for India, the app aggregates trending content across all popular categories including news, cricket, technology, entertainment, lifestyle and health.
Available for both Android and iOS, the app, as the company describes, keeps a track of what all is trending on social networks including Twitter and Facebook before pushing stories to the user's feed.
UCWeb may have come up with a standalone news app now, but it has been providing news stories via its browser for quite some time now. We asked Kenny Ye, general manager, UCWeb, Alibaba Mobile Business Group, to explain as to how the content in the UC News app is different from the one being served via the browser.
Emphasising on what makes the content on two platforms different, Kenny said, "The content integrated into their browser is not organised and is manually done. But in the UC News app, we are utilising the big data technology that can take care of the personalised recommendations, which, I think, leads to organised content."
While, with the UC News app, UCWeb may have an edge over its existing content integrated into the browser, it is yet to be seen as to how the company competes against other content aggregators.
Kenny believes that the company has two strengths that can make the UC News app stand out in the market. One, the company has a huge user base for the UC browser, which gives access to the UC News app right from the browser - without actually having to download the News app. As the company claims, US browser, currently, has 80 million monthly active users in India.
Secondly, Kenny says, what would give the UC News app an edge over its rivals is the strong tech support from its parent company Alibaba.
The company, currently, has no plans to monetise the service, and instead, aims to focus more on content and pull in more users. Nevertheless, the company has a few business models in mind that it will be working on with some of the content providers in few months from now.
Shedding light on how the business model with content providers will be, Kenny said, "There are two measures. First is the capability of content providers to monetise their content. We are open to have them leverage our platform to monetise content. Second, we can also build our capapbility to do the monetisation," adding, "So, in this way, we can share the revenue".
The app, currently, is available in two languages in English and Hindi. UCWeb has plans to introduce content in other Indian languages as well.
Besides the UC News app, UCWeb also introduced the revamped UC browser that also includes UC Cricket, an in-app cricket content hub.
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