Featured Startup Pitch: Singapore-based SNATZ is a curated tech news delivery service for busy people

By Tomonori Takihi, SNATZ founder and CEO

Elevator Pitch: SNATZ is a fresh new way of delivering technology news. Users can sign up for free at www.snatz.com simply by connecting their social media accounts or uploading RSS subscription files. After that, they will start to receive technology news tailored to their interests.

Product/Service Description

Every hour, SNATZ presents its Top 12 in Current Technology News, based on real-time calculations. Personalized news is delivered every four hours. At the end of each day, the Top 12 News Articles of the Day are presented on the web or delivered directly to the user’s email. In this way, SNATZ eliminates the need to search through thousands of sources, simplifying news discovery for even the busiest of readers.

Founders’ Story

Our team came together by way of Singapore, Japan, Ukraine and the Philippines. We are a group of tech-savvy web workers who were unsatisfied with the existing newsreader options available to us. Traditional RSS newsreaders are often overwhelming. They don’t offer the level of customization useful to busy people who want to keep up with news but don’t have a lot of spare time. With the demise of Google Reader, we wanted to create something more than just another newsreader clone, something that delivered truly useful and emerging technology news from a wider variety of lesser-known sources. But we really emphasized the need to keep it personalized to individual interests.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

The majority of marketing activities for SNATZ are online. We like to stay in touch with our users through our blog and on Twitter and Facebook. Our users also like to share new and useful articles they find on SNATZ, generating a good amount of word-of-mouth buzz.

Market Opportunity

Who is SNATZ for? It’s for the IT journalist on a deadline, looking for sources that haven’t been over-reported dozens of times. It’s for the tech blogger in search of stories that haven’t been reposted by every other blog out there. It’s for any reader who wishes to stay updated on technology news, without having to sift through all the noise or open dozens of browser tabs.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

Without a doubt, it’s the powerful engine behind SNATZ that sets us apart. Our core technology truly is groundbreaking. Our formula of advanced algorithms, trend detection, and user data analysis is what allows us to break through the Filter Bubble, and deliver news that is meaningful to the user and not just considered ‘hot’ by others. Maybe more importantly, SNATZ delivers emerging news—items that are on the verge of becoming widely known. This is something no other news service is able to do. SNATZ’s magic number of only 12 news items is a unique feature, and one that works extremely well for our busy users, who don’t have time to read an overload of news online. By hand picking only the most useful news items, we’re able to filter out the unnecessary noise and eliminate redundant articles that plague other newsreaders. We simply present the reader with what is truly the best tech news of the moment.

Business Model

SNATZ is completely free, and always will be. In the future, we plan to release a subscription model with more advanced news analysis and tracking capabilities.

Current Needs

RSS has been part of peoples’ daily routines for a long time, and ever since the end of Google Reader there has been a lot of hype about switching to new RSS reader alternatives. We need to prove to people that there is an easier, more efficient approach to finding the news that they care about. It’s hard to break a person’s habits, but once they start reading articles that they never would have found without SNATZ, it will be hard for them not to become a fan.

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Website: www.snatz.com