Scoopinion is a community-based news recommendation and sharing service that uses a bit of a different approach to deliver content to your doorstep. While sharing a news item on Facebook or Twitter may sound easy, Scoopinion actually makes the process fully automated.
The secret behind the service is a browser app that tracks your actions on whitelisted news sites. Scoopinion measures the time you spend reading an article and tracks the movement of your pointer during the read. The gathered data is used to automatically rate each news article and to calculate its overall popularity. Whatever you read is also automatically shared with your friends and further rated according to how your friends read it. A collective feed of all the rated news articles is presented on the Scoopinion website, but in order to take full advantage of the service, users are advised to install the browser app, which is currently available for Firefox and Chrome.
The service has already gained some recognition in Finland. Back in September, Scoopinion won the Uutisraivaaja Innovation Contest, a competition that seeks ideas for improving and renewing the distribution of information. The company pocketed 250 000 euros worth of prize money from the contest, a hefty sum for such a young startup. The funds will be used to further develop the service.
Going international seems like a no-brainer for Scoopinion and in many ways the service is already global. Once Scoopinion grows, there’s no telling how valuable the data collected by the service will be to advertisers, media companies and other interested parties. Currently Scoopinion reserves the right to send anonymous analytics data to third parties.
Scoopinion was launched in June 2011 by Johannes Koponen, Mikael Koponen, Mikko Koskinen, Juha Leppänen and Ville Sundberg. The startup is based in Helsinki, Finland.
