Better Ways To Scan Relevant News?

The Challenge:

We are swamped with data everyday. Data from friends from social networking websites, data from emails, data from television media, different websites and then there are newspapers. The traditional Newspapers. How relevant do you find the news in the Newspapers to your everyday life is a challenge like it has always been. How can the same news stories add value to a large population? Highly improbable, I would think. Do you agree?

One Likely Solution:

As with so many other problem solving areas, it's Google to the rescue. Google News has better ways to scan through the news. I've been only able to leverage the tools provided by Google News last week. Here is my attempt at making the news around me more relevant. The steps:

1. List What Is Important For You:

Identify news items that are relevant to you. For example: We are presently growing our fragrance business, hence, news from Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies - our potential clients is very relevant from our perspective. More specifically, we are interested in market segments like incense, hand-wash, deodorants and fine fragrances to name a few.

2. Identify Keywords For Important Information:

Next step is to think of keywords for Google. Most times this step is a no-brainer. The keywords in my example are "incense", "hand-wash", "deodorants" and "fine fragrances". You can also add synonyms. For example: incense is commonly referred to by a local language name in a lot of articles. Hence, an additional keyword for incense would also be "agarbatti". This is one input in the interface provided by Google News Personalize option.

3. Identify The Geographical Relevance:

The next thing that you need to think about is the Geography. I did not put a Geographical filter to the news initially. I was swamped by news from the United States - which is not my focus presently. Google News provides an input in the interface for Geographical filter. Once I added India in this filter, I was reading news more relevant to me.

4. Set The Criteria In Google Account:

Once you have finalized your keywords and geographical relevance, you also have a choice of which language you would like to view the news in. Google offers a variety of languages to choose from. You can set your criteria and enjoy the news catering solely to your own requirements.

5. Scan The News And Follow Steps Iteratively Until The News Are Relevant:

Once you scan through the news on a day-to-day basis, you will be able to refine the news that are relevant to you and set your criteria accordingly. This will typically be an iterative process and is likely to change with time based on the information you receive.

6. Try It Out For Yourself:

If you have not tried it already, just click here to experience it yourself.

Alternative Solutions:

This is my experience with making news more personalized to my requirements. I would love to hear your views on how do you go about personalizing your daily news as it is delivered to you. Please provide your comments/ suggestions to make news more relevant and to add more value in your day-to-day life.

TiE Bizworld - Learning By Teaching.

TiE Bizworld has been a fact re-enforcing experience for me. Why fact re-enforcing? As a student, one of our best teachers always said - Life is a learning process. Albeit the teacher is assigned the task of teaching students, most often it is the Teacher who learns a lot from the students. These same thoughts come to my mind at the end of my first TiE Bizworld experience as a BizGuru.

I learnt the following three things the most from the students:

1. Sense of Fun.

All the while, the teams that did well had a sense of fun in their activities. They enjoyed what they were doing. This is so very important from the business perspective too. Very often teams that enjoy being with each other and have fun at the workplace excel the most. While this is common sense, we seem to get so involved in the everyday activities that we forget the fun aspect of what we do. My Saturdays at MCA enabled me to bring the fun back into our own office.

2. An Open mind and a clean slate.

Children had a very open mind and hence we saw some very original ideas. Teams of eight were involved in the business of making paper bags. The most creative teams were innovative in choosing smaller bag sizes from the material that was provided. Innovation was the result of keeping an open mind and a clean slate. Always helps if you step out of the business and look at it in an unbiased fashion.

3. Fearless approach.

Teams were not afraid to experiment and risk failure. This was the biggest takeaway and re-enforced the fact that a fearless approach and not giving up always helps.

To summarize, participating in TiE Bizworld as a BizGuru was very important for me as an entrepreneur. It emphasized the importance of having fun, having an open mind and adopting a fearless approach.