Author: Sydney Reade
Despite being bright and talented college students here at Cornell, we don’t always have time to keep up with current events. Very often, we get news through social media hashtags and television news sound bites. We rarely, if ever, have time to read a full news article. Xiao Xu ’15 is looking to change that.
Slope Media | Photographer: Mariel Terr
Xu, a Computer Science major, observed friends who had trouble finding time to stay on top of world news. Xu began to envision what people like he and his friends would want in their ideal news source – all the news that’s fit to print aggregated and summarized in one location. Thus, Bit of News was born.
“Bit of News is a daily newsletter that summarizes the news for you, sort of like a daily brief like the one that the president gets, except instead of top secret stuff, you get the most important world news,” Xu explains.
Bit of News started as an email service targeted at Generation Y college students whom Xu perceived to be most in need of neatly packaged and delivered news. The greatest surprise for Xu, however, has been the acquisition of now almost 20,000 subscribers, some of whom are bankers and businessmen. “I wasn’t really targeting this demographic, but they love it.”
Screen shot of a Bit of News email
With the emphasis in digital news delivery shifting to mobile devices, Xu also created the free to download Bit of News app. The app is slick and gives a great user experience, making the news comes to life in a rich, interactive medium. Xu said the design was inspired by decks of cards, like the ones he used to collect as a kid. Users can now swipe through top news stories, bookmark articles to read later, explore in-depth coverage from select sites, and keep track of their reading stats.
Screen shot of Bit of News app
It feels natural for a computer science major to create his own startup, what with all the classes, professors, and resources that surround Cornellians. “It was actually really easy to get started,” Xu says. “I think if anything, the [Cornell] course load slowed me down.”
One thing Xu thinks Cornell does well, though, is provide an entrepreneurship program. The program gives four to five credit hours of free time to students like Xu to work on their startup ideas, which require a lot of time and energy.
And Xu certainly needs energy. Even with only four others on his team – Jess Coleman ’16, Virginia Girard ’17, Janna Yu ‘18, and Brooke Wingo ‘17 – Xu is less involved in the daily minutia of creating the final product for Bit of News, and more involved behind the scenes. A typical day for Xu includes four to six hours spent developing the app and working on marketing.
Coleman, Girard, and Yu, however, will start at 8 p.m. collaborating on a Google Doc (coded to format information into the Bit of News email template) that Xu created. The Doc is where they summarize articles that are trending and popular on Facebook, according to an algorithm they check religiously. Once the four news stories and three or so “good reads” are summarized and formatted, they render the information into HTML format optimized for email. The writers then copy the HTML format into MailChimp, a service that allows Xu to mass email a clean-cut newsletter. Sometimes, the team will stay up as late as 1 a.m. waiting for updates on a story. “There is a downside,” Xu says, “which is that if the news happens between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m., it doesn’t really get caught.” So far, their content has been anything but yesterday’s news.
Ideally, the Bit of News team would like to see their subscriber base grow by appealing to more than just college students. They’re toying with the idea of having a greater presence through the app and sending weekly, instead of daily, emails.
But beyond Bit of News, Xu is always thinking of new things to create – some days it’s campaign websites for student government candidates, and other days it’s spin offs on popular games, such as Flappy Skorton, which Slope previously highlighted. Right now, he’s working on a redesign of the website for the College of Human Ecology’s design department.
When asked what activity he would add to the 161 list, Xu said, “Walking in the snow and falling on your [butt]. It’s definitely happened to me.” But Xu has done anything but fall. He is already being solicited for advice by people doing startups.
“Put aside your ego,” Xu advises. “I started cold emailing people just asking them to sign up…I felt stupid, I hate spamming people. But, your only focus [when you’re starting out] should be do[ing] whatever you need to do to get new users.” So that’s the news, brought to you by Xiao Xu. Now you have time to actually read it.
I really lke what you are doing older brother!