Dublin-based social news sharing service NewsWhip has expanded its coverage to serve seven new language markets, including Spanish, French, Portuguese and Estonian.
NewsWhip, which operates out of DogPatch Labs in Dublin’s Docklands technology district, aggregates more than 200,000 pieces of news content every day.
The start-up launched at the end of 2010, with a public site NewsWhip showing the most shared and social stories across the web.
The following year, the company launched Spike – a tool that uses social data to give journalists and communicators insights into the stories that will become major hits across the web. Since then, users from around the world have been signing up to Spike, and helping build its global coverage.
“When new clients sign up, they often supply long lists of the publications they want to cover, often in a foreign language,” says CEO and co-founder Paul Quigley.
“They help us with translation, and the new sources all go into our database. We’re now at a point where we cover the content being produced in over a dozen countries and seven languages.”
Gone global
NewsWhip also has paying clients in more than a dozen countries accessing Spike.
“The great thing about providing a service that’s universal is that you start getting clients from everywhere. We have subscribers around the world now: across Europe, America, North and South, Asia, and Australia.
“There’s a universal interest in newsrooms, agencies and brands in the stories that matter to online audiences each day. Funny enough, we don’t currently have clients in Ireland. That’s typical of many Irish technology businesses today – you look at who you can sell to globally, not at whoever is down the road.”
On the engineering side, the company has ramped up in 2013, hiring engineers to help scale out its platform to draw in more content and get more detailed data, according to CTO and co-founder Andrew Mullaney.
“In the past couple of months, we’ve been getting minute-by-minute social data for over 200,000 new pieces of content every day – it’s a huge amount of material to rank and categorise.
“Our engineering team is continuously embracing new and highly scalable technologies, such as the Cassandra database system, to better store historical data, which we plan to mine for insights and make available to our clients,” Mullaney said.
Newsman image via Shutterstock
