2. Executive Summary
Many frequent travellers are becoming more and more interested in knowing more about their new
destinations by reading local news of that place. However, not an app in the marketplace has met this
growing need.
News Explorer is an app that helps frequent business and leisure travellers keep informed of news based
on their geographical locations. Every time when the user get to a new place, he/she can open this app,
and it will provide 20 latest local news of the user’s current location.
In brief, frequent travellers can explore more about their new destinations with our app, News Explorer.
If launched successfully, News Explorer will bring huge benefits to frequent travellers by keeping them
informed of news everywhere under fingertips. It has great potential to get popular among the target
audience and also create considerate revenues.
This report will introduce News Explorer’s development team, the problem that the app attempts to solve,
the detailed descriptions of the app’s target audience, the app’s solution to the problem, market analysis,
how the app is going to make revenues, the app message we are delivering and the whole media plan for
launching the app.
3. Meet The Team
Tim Gilman
Tim is a senior at Mizzou
graduating in May 2015
with a degree in Computer
Science.
For this project Tim worked
on the location aspect of
the app to get a user's lo-
cation and getting the xml
url's based on location and
radius. After graduation
Tim is moving to St. Louis
to start a job at ATT.
Thomas Williams
Thomas’ main role was to
establish an outside API
for News Explorer. His
main field of expertise is
Web Development and
Javascript. This was his
first project working with
iOS development, but
he is passionate about
expanding his skill set to
include this trending area.
He is a senior at Mizzou
graduating with a Bachelor
of Science in Computer
Science minoring in Math
and Engineer.
Evan Gibler
Evan coordinated with Tim
on building the app itself.
They worked together on
the core functionality of
the app which included
parsing the data sent from
Thomas' API and display-
ing the data accordingly
and enabling the user
to view individual news
articles from the multitude
of sources sent by the API.
Additionally, Evan worked
on changing the user's
location manually.
Siqi Lin
Siqi is the UI designer
and promtional manager
of News Explorer. She
came up with the app idea
through her research and
work alongside with the
three developers to launch
the app.
She studies stratcgidc
communication at Missouri
School of Journalism and
is going to be a honored
graduate this May.
4. Problem Statement
There is a lack of local news for frequent travellers’ news consumption. They travel a lot across the country
but they can’t find an app that can help them know more news of their new destinations. This problem is
growing and requires more attentions to tailor the target users’ specific needs.
According to my earlier research, many frequent business and leisure travellers are interested in reading news
about their new destinations, but they won’t bother spending time finding the news themselves unless there is
a convenient tool, like an app that they can easily access to read the local news of their new destination.
Target Audience
The primary target audience are frequent business travellers. They are the group who will be interested
in keeping themselves updated of the latest news. Many of them read international and national news
through mobile apps on a daily basis. Whenever they take a business trip to a new place, they will be
highly interested in exploring the local news there that might help them understand the place better, and
thus get the business done more smoothly.
The secondary target audience are frequent leisure travellers. They are not the primary target because
their travel purposes are for vacation and for fun. They are not that concerned about reading news of their
new destination as those professional business travellers. However, they are still a potential market that
the app will be targeting at, because once the app become popular among the primary target, the sec-
ondary target are very likely to follow the trend and use this app too.
7. Iterations of Ideation
Location Relocate
News
Photo Heandline
News
Photo Heandline
headline
Author
Time Mark
News article
with photos
Share
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Cancel
News
Photo Heandline
Record Board
Read More
Place __articles
Date
Place __articles
Date
Place __articles
Date
You have been to
__ places and marked
__ news articles
Most recent 20 news
tap the place
List of news photo and
headlines of the articles
that have been marked
News
Photo Heandline
News
Photo Heandline
News
Photo Heandline
tap headline
tap
headline
Share
headline
Author
Time Unmark
News article
with photos
GeoNews
Refresh
8.
9.
10. Market Analysis
How are potential users solving the problem now?
Potential users (frequent travellers) are digging into social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to find out
news of their new destinations. They will search hash tag about their new destinations, but the results are various
ranging from food to movies, and very likely not the information they are looking for.
What other similar apps will News Explorer compete against and how is your solution different?
Plenty of news apps are competing with News Explorer to get the users’ attentions. Examples are like Yahoo
News Digest, CNN’s mobile app news etc. However, almost all of these apps provide international and nation-
al news, or local news of only one place. Our app is very specific targeted and will tailor to frequent travellers’
unique need of reading news based on their geographical locations. Our app will provide a wide range of news
feeds from various cities, which differentiates it from others apps in the market and create a strong competitive
advantage.
SWOT Analysis
Strength:
Not an app has provided frequent travellers news feeds based on their ever changing geographical locations.
This app has a great competitive advantage and unique selling point of providing rich news sources from a whole
bunch of cities precisely according to the user’s current location.
Opportunities:
This app has good potential to attract frequent travellers to download it and become loyal users of it because of
its specialty and professionalism.
Weakness:
It is difficult to execute the app’s design idea since it aims to provide different local news feeds across the U.S.
The developers have not found a way to get a perfect API that can implement the app’s goal, so they have to
choose to build a Missouri database first to demonstrate the app. Meanwhile, some of the functionnalities of the
app have not been executed yet since the developers came across some coding difficulties.
11. Threats:
Users may not choose this app at the first place since there are lots of other excellent news app out there.
Some users might just go to social media to find out more about their new destinations or ask their friends about it
instead of reading news.
Some users might just care about international and national news and have no interest in reading local news.
Revenue
The app’s initial goal is to grab target users’ attentions and gain popularity among them. Once the app gets pop-
ular, we can cooperate with the local travel agencies to place some promotional ads about travelling in the app to
earn profits for the maintenance of the app.
Product messaging
News Explorer helps you explore your new destination by providing 20 local news feeds at a time. Every time
when you get to a new place, you can explore your new destination by reading the latest news that just hap-
pened in that place with News Explorer. News Explorer will keep you remarkably informed of local news based
on your geographical locations by providing rich and athentic news feeds, which are selected from all the major
area news organizations in the U.S exculsively for you.
12. Media plan
We will promote this app to potential users by placing outdoor ads on freeway and billboard ads in the
airports, which are designed as followed:
13.
14. Product Roadmap (the future)
Hopefully, the app will be able to present news photos on its main view. The relocate function will have a
search bar incorporated and the share function will be implemented too. The app only has several sample
Missouri cities for now. Ideally, the app will be developed further to provide news feeds of all the major
cities of the U.S. in the subsequent versions, and then finally will be able to provide news feeds of every
city in the U.S., no matter big or small, for the users.
Appendix
I had several interviews with potential users about their needs for news app. The following are the inter-
view insights, many of them are quotes from the potential users.
Lack of local news, what’s happening in my place/community
The order of the news, “I would like to see the info I’m interested in comes first.”
CNN, too long, few image.
“I’ll leave if they began not covering the stories I’m interested in.”
Senior, not that into mobile app, he said he like reading newspaper, and also google alert, that will send
him the info about a topic he is interested in everyday.
“App flash back, force quit, advertisement makes me quit.”
Get the same news from different media, waste of time.
Eager to read some different angles.
Want to read more background, related details hard to get, “link me to more related stories”.
“I enjoy video news”.
He will be frustrated when he can’t copy and paste something, find difficulty sharing, and when the text is
oddly placed.
Ads in bad spot, no user interactions.
