Way2 forays into short news service

With SMSes going to become obsolete, Way2SMS, which offers free text messaging service, on Wednesday announced that it has rebranded itself as Way2 and forayed into short news service space.

Hyderabad-based Way2Online, a consumer Internet and mobile services company which owns the brand, has rolled out the short news service in eight Indian languages besides English.

Way2Online founder and chief executive officer Raju Vanapala told reporters that the new service will bring to its subscribers short summarised nuggets of news in English, Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati and Kannada in a magazine-style format in 400 characters.

While continuing the existing free SMS offering, the company forayed into news space to leverage on its strong user base of 45 million, including six lakh daily users.

Raju said with this they have forayed into an untapped segment, which want to consume news in local languages. He pointed out that the local language user base had increased by 47 percent in June 2015 as compared to June 2014.

Raju, who invested $2 million in building the new app, said it already crossed five million downloads.

He said this offer useful and timesaving experience of news reading to the subscribers anywhere and anytime.

"The idea is to enable the reader to assimilate all the major occurrences across the world without having to spend too much time poring over lengthy articles. However, in case the reader wants to read further, there is the option of going to the original site for exploring the news in greater detail," he said.