Interview: Amra Tareen of allvoices

By Kamla Bhatt                                        Muslim India

Amra Tareen heads Allvoices, a San Francisco-based citizen media startup. After months of being their beta version, AllVoices released its brand new website a few days ago. Allvoices raised $4.5 million in venture capital funding last year.

Prior to founding Allvoices, Amra was with Sevin Rosen, a venture capital firm and before that she worked with various telecom companies in Silicon Valley.

KB: What does Allvoices do?

AT: Allvoices is a citizen media Web site that is the first to weave together traditional and new media sources to create a forum for sharing news, videos, images and blogs. We aggregate, contextualize and categorize a broad base of breaking stories and individual perspectives through unedited points of view. Using a set of proprietary algorithms, Allvoices has created a technology platform that utilizes more than 3,500 mainstream feeds and online sources of news to provide relevancy and context for user generated news.

KB: How did you come up with the idea for Allvoices?

AT: Allvoices spawned from a trip I took last year to Pakistan where I witnessed the devastation of the 2005 earthquake. I felt her own pictures and experiences were not enough to make a difference back home and decided to create a platform where individuals, no matter where they were in the world, could report on what they know and see first hand, and share their experiences via photos, video and stories. Having lived in three different countries (Pakistan, Australia and America), I used my personal experiences and education to start Allvoices with the idea that in order to solve the world’s problems, we need to appreciate different perspectives.

KB: How are you leveraging technology to gather and distribute news?

AT: With a unique set of algorithms, Allvoices has created a technology platform that searches more than 3,500 mainstream and online sources of news to provide relevancy and context for user generated news. Story rank on the home page is determined by the number and diversity of other sources citing the particular news item and the number of community comments generated by the story.

KB: Right now your service is offered in English. Do you plan to expand that to include different languages like Urdu, Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic or Persian?

AT: Yes, the Allvoices content will soon be available in a number of languages.

KB: You mentioned that there will be no human intervention in the collating and distributing of news. Do you think that could change?

AT: No. One of the core concepts in creating Allvoices was for it to remain unedited by humans and we intend to uphold that mission.

KB: What business will Allvoices disrupt?

AT: Like any social media or online news source, Allvoices will have an effect on the traditional media industry such as newspapers, broadcast, etc. However, our goal is not to continue the diminishment of these industries, but to build them out and merge traditional with digital. We want to revolutionize the media industry by bringing everyone together to share content, create discussion and fill the gaps in global and local news.

KB: How are you different from other players like Associated Content, NowPublic, GlobalVoices or other mainstream media that have citizen news embedded in their programs?

AT: Allvoices distinguishes itself as an unedited forum that offers multiple individual perspectives on a local and global news event. For example, GlobalVoices is a blogger platform for bloggers that get paid to report and all submitted material is summarized and edited by a team of regional editors. Allvoices, on the other hand, provides an unedited platform for anyone wishing to report a story and we validate user generated contributions with professional media sources to create context and relevance. Professional news sources package a story well, but Allvoices gives readers access to broader individual perspectives. Allvoices is revolutionizing media by bringing together traditional and new media. It offers unedited news and community perspective validated through multiple professional news sources and no other Web site is doing that right now.

KB: Which country do you think is able to harness the power of citizen media? I am thinking UK since the news media out there seems to be doing a great job of including citizen media.

AT: Agreed that the UK will be able to harness the power of citizen media, but even more so in countries where there is no freedom of expression. In these countries, there are many people who want to get their voices out, but they have no platform for this. There is a strong need for citizen media, and we have seen that getting voices out into the public can change the course of a country.

KB: You mentioned at the core of Allvoices is this notion of fostering Democracy and ironically you also got the idea when you were in Pakistan about a year ago. How do you think Allvoices will work towards fostering Democracy in Pakistan or other states that do not have a democratic form of government?

AT: We are providing a global platform where everyone has the right to be heard. Making the flow of information easier and showing people’s real emotions can really help to connect the world and have a huge effect on democracy.

KB: How are you prepared to handle a situation where a particular government may block Allvoices during a time of crisis? In the past there have been instances where governments have blocked certain online sites within their country?

AT: When there is a will, there is a way. If people want change badly enough, they will find out a way to make it happen. We witnessed this in Pakistan, where people went around the system and found ways to get content out of the country by passing it to friends and family and having them upload, etc… The government can block the Internet, but again, when there is a will, there is a way and people will find those ways to get their compelling content out to the rest of the world.

KB: What is your revenue model?

AT: At this time, we are operating under venture funding that we received last year from VantagePoint Venture Partners. However, like most Web sites, we plan to move toward an ad-supported model in the near future.

KB: What features or developments can we expect to see from AllVoices for 2008?

AT: If you want to light up the world, you can only do that if you have global reach through phones. Allvoices is the only company that has the infrastructure to report from anywhere in the world, because of its mobile capabilities.

Source: Kamla Bhatt Blog