About eight months after announcing plans to launch a digital news business, Network18 founder Raghav Bahl’s digital news venture TheQuint.com has gone live. It is to be noted that Quintillion Media had started publishing stories on Facebook from January this year.
The mobile-focused digital platform currently offers stories across various categories like current affairs, politics, entertainment and technology among others with a mixture of both wire stories and stories created by an in-house editorial team.
Bahl along with journalist Ritu Kapur has, co-founded Quintillion Media. The company was registered in the San Francisco Bay Area on 23 August, last year.
Interestingly, the website is powered by Quintype, which is like wordpress. Quintype was founded by Raghav, Ritu and Amit Rathore who is the CEO and chief product officer. As per the website, the Quintype, offers a cloud-based solution for publishers to manage editorial assignments & collaborating editing, publish to various formats including mobile phones, tablets, desktop and develop apps for iOS & Android.
Other features include predictive analytics for scheduling articles, reader management, social media integration, content recommendation engine and an integrated ad engine among others.
Recent developments in the content businesses:
Earlier in last year, Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) had acquired control in Network18 Media & Investments Ltd, including its subsidiary TV18 Broadcast Ltd, for INR 4,000 Cr.
The Indian media industry has seen lot of exposure lately as several International publications have launched or in the process of launching a India focussed edition. This includes Mashable, Quartz, ZDNet and HuffingtonPost (in partnership with Times Internet) among others.
Recently, News Corp has also acquired online business news and information venture VCCircle. Also, Bangalore-based news platform, TheBetterIndia has announced an investment of INR 1 Cr from Intellecap Impact Investment Network. Earlier in February this year, NCR-based, news aggregator mobile app, News In Shorts had also raised INR 25 Cr. and Bangalore-based local language mobile app, Newshunt had raised INR 120 Cr. in Series C round of funding.
