“I don’t think that the news is good or bad,” Kwabena “Koby” Okrah told Consumers’ Research. “But I think that we truly have a selfish need to narrow the news down to what we care about.”
This perspective is the core driver behind “Koby” Okrah’s up-and-coming news aggregator app, Shelly News.
The concept began in 2014 as a platform that would advise people about energy efficiency, born out of Okrah’s computer and electrical engineering background. It evolved as he saw a need for people to quickly get the news that mattered to them the most.
To Okrah, Shelly News’s strength lies not just in its ability to quickly notify users of breaking news but also in telling users the exact location of where the event occurred and giving each news story a positive or negative sentiment score.
Moreover, the app takes news consumption a step further and notifies users of where events occur in their network.
“It takes your phonebook, your LinkedIn, your Facebook, or your Instagram network and then narrows the news down to the events that are happening within 60 miles of those people, whether they’re your friends or your follow-up contacts,” Okrah said.
Shelly News addresses content overload by directly telling news consumers what a headline entails, he added. “In today’s world, where you watch CNN, Fox, MSNBC, you just name it, and you’re just overloaded with all different things in all different directions.”
It’s an evolution in information exchange that, for Okrah, has been a long time coming. He hails from Ghana, where he would write letters back and forth to family in the United States, a process that would take weeks or months.
For businesses and governments, the app presents a way for leaders to mitigate risk through the app’s feature of automating news that caters to geographic environments. Okrah cited the cold weather crisis in Texas last month as an opportunity where Shelly News could have made a difference.
“The leaders in Texas could use Shelly to see the news occurring around them to make better planning decisions quickly. It saves them time.” The risk mitigation notion holds true as the fight against COVID-19 continues.
For regular consumers of news, it allows people to be more empathetic and attuned to the events occurring around their friends or family.
“If you have family in New York and there is a delay on the Tappan Zee Bridge, you don’t really care about what’s happening in Nebraska or in Idaho,” he said.
The Shelly News platform also caters to users’ interests.
“If you’re into stocks or have knowledge around stocks, imagine that you have a system that’s telling you the mention of ‘Company Y’ every time or there’s good news or bad news about it,” Okrah said.
Shelly runs with a community-based approach in mind so that all users of the platform play a role in ensuring news delivery is timely and accurate. Okrah compared it to Waze, the popular community-based GPS app.
“Users can always add information to help people make more intelligent decisions and weigh more accuracy. You have the chance to correct the news event location and also correct negative or positive sentiment based on what you read. You can also flag the news as inaccurate or fake so that over time we can remove all sources that are not proper,” he said.
Holding an MBA from Columbia and systems engineering and electric engineering degrees from the University of Maryland and Morgan State University, Okrah previously combined his business and technical skills managing a $2.5 billion unit inside Sodexo, the Paris-based food services and facilities management conglomerate, before global economic conditions led to his job being eliminated. He has spent the past year committing extra time to Shelly News.
For now, Okrah is continuing Shelly’s robust crowdfunding phase, where he has emphasized the role of social equity in shaping what users want to see on the Shelly app.
“I’m not funded by the right-wing or left-wing media or a politician’s agenda. It’s funded by you and me,” he said.
