Technology

Reddit is rolling out its &news& tab into beta, the company announced this week. The expansion follows on Redditinitial test of a news-related feature that began this May, when an alpha version shipped to some users of RedditiOS app. At the time, Reddit explained it wanted to give news its own dedicated home on its site in order to make it easier for those with a lot of subreddit subscriptions to find the news without having to hunt around.

To determine whatnewsworthy, Reddit says it first figured out which subreddits were engaging with news the most. It did this by looking at the most-clicked posts by domain in the subreddits. The company came up with a list of around 1,000 domains from media publishers focused on news.This list was used to help it surface those communities where news was regularly discussed.

To be clear, the domain list was only used to find the appropriate subreddits where news was often discussed & it doesn&t mean Reddit is limiting news stories it surfaces to those 1,000 domains.

In addition, Reddit has a few other requirements for the communities featured in the News tab. They must have active moderation, abide by Reddit&scontent policiesand itsguidelines for healthy communities,and the community has to require the post title accurately reflects the article title.

The communities included in the News section of Reddit discuss a variety of topics, across business, science, sports, gaming, entertainment, tech news, and more & popular categories across Reddit as a whole. The majority of the posts are link posts, with the exception of some sports news where video is allowed.

The News tab itself then organizes the posts by category, so users can filter the news for themselves. And users can further configure the tab to their own liking.

While Reddit users are often known to actually break news by (sometimes unwittingly) being the first to spot things, the News tab is focused on showcasing the work from news publications.

Itmore of a scannable list of top stories with an active comments section. Thatsomething that you don&t find on a number of news sites these day, as many have removed commenting. Meanwhile, a lot of discussion around the news takes place on social media, like Facebook and Twitter & but itnot necessarily centralized.

Given that the product is still in beta, Reddit is still listening to user feedback about the new feature.

As you&d expect, therea lot of it & from &this is a bad idea& to &can we see the list& to &this site is such a joke& to &this is actually controlling the bubble& to &this sounds like a sales pitch to someone who has never used Reddit& to this feels like another ‘Facebook& style change that nobody asked for& to completely unrelated complaints about other issues.

It could be that Reddit is hoping to attract some attention to its app in the wake of Facebook pulling Trending Topics & its news discovery feature & from its social network.

A larger audience of non-Reddit users may now be looking for another way to easily browse news on mobile & so Reddit thinks it may as well filter some of its existing content and pop it into a tab for easy access. But itnot likely that people will turn to Reddit for news, especially when there are formidable alternatives like Google News and Apple News.

The feature is in beta for the time being. The company has not said when itpublicly launching.

Fredrik Thomassen as a consultant used to have the resources to offload the annoying project tasks — like making PowerPoint presentations — but now that itgone, he and his team wanted to make that available for everyone.

Now the startup, called Konsus, wants to turn that around even faster. Konsus is a design marketplace where companies can quickly post design projects that they need for various parts of their jobs, like presentations, and designers can pick up those jobs and submit their work back — a task that could take up a lot of unnecessary time for an employee that might be better spent working on other parts of their job. Konsus said it is compressing that even further by now looking to provide a 12-hour turnaround for those companies.The company launched out of Y Combinator in 2016.

&[Employees]want to be valuable and spend time on core tasks,& Thomassen said. &The average knowledge worker, depending on various specifics, spends around 40 percent of that time on non-core tasks that should be outsourced. Thatthe 40 percent we&re going after, and people quite readily understand it. Some companies have in-house design agencies and so on, and they are 3 or 4 times as expensive as we are, and they typically want to work on these larger or more grand projects and don&t want to work on the small projects that range from 10 hours to 15 hours. Most of the projects we do are these small, nominal projects that people would have had to do themselves.&

Konsus hires account managers and project managers handling the relationships with the customers to ensure that they&re getting the quality they need when they are posting projects like PowerPoint presentations onto the site. ButThomassen also said there are plenty of examples of those firms finding designers and contractors that they&ve decided to bring on full-time, and hefine with the startup being seen as a springboard for contractors that want to polish their skills for working with western clients — and even end up with a full-time job after that. A lot of the designers are coming in from eastern Europe, southeast Asia and other parts of the world that aren&t necessarily on the radar of these western firms.

Like many other modern services and marketplaces, Konsus hopes to come in at the bottom of a company and work its way up. One person or a team from a larger corporation will discover it, start using it and then eventually the startup might track that firm down and start talking about a custom team and dedicated emails. Then the outsourcers working for that firm goes through a background check, signs confidentiality agreements and goes through training on corporate branding material. Konsus& revenue comes partly from subscriptions and people pre-paying to get a team, and the other half a pay-as-you-go model where firms get a rate and Konsus takes a commission.

&If you look at [big consulting firms], they have a similar solution as we have, and you can get support for all kinds of services — data entry, PowerPoint, various graphic design tasks — that make life much, much easier,&Thomassen said. &You go home from work and then you get it back in the morning, it becomes part of your workflow. Thatwhat we wanted to build for everyone else.Freelancers come to us from all corners of the world, they apply on our website, and we have our own recruiter work with them. We get around 5,000 to 10,000 people who apply, and we accept 10-20 depending on how many we need. The bar is extremely high.&

Of course, given that these are the kinds of tasks that firms might outsource without such a platform, Konsus has to potentially deal with larger consulting firms like Accenture, and there are plenty of startups looking to create an online labor marketplace that might not be targeting design just yet. But as those platforms start to put together a lot of potential customers, they&ll likely start asking for tools like Konsus — which means the company is going to have to figure out ways to outcompete early.

The company has raised $1.7 million from Sam Altman, the Slack Fund, Acequia Capital, Paul Buchheit, Geoff Ralston, John Collison and Liquid2 Ventures.

If you missed the deadline last week to apply for the renownedStartup Battlefieldat Disrupt SF, have no fear. There is still one more chance at being part of the action!

Out of all of the early-stage companies exhibiting atDisrupt, threeStartup Alley companies will have the opportunity to be selected as one of the &Wild Card& winners. You might be wondering, &what is Wild Card& Wild Card is a Startup Alleyexhibiting company that is selectedby our TechCrunch editorial team to participate in the celebratedStartup Battlefield competition. This year we&re selecting three, and if you are exhibiting in Startup Alley, you could be one of the lucky winners.

Last year at Disrupt NY 2017, RecordGram got a table inStartup Alley, where they ended up being selected as one of the Wild Card companies and ultimately went on towin the Startup Battlefield competition— and took home $50,000. Guess what This year, the grand prize of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF has been doubled to $100,000!

Plus, you&ll have all the benefits of being a Startup Alley exhibitor, including access to CrunchMatch, Disruptmatchmaking service between startups and investors. So far, the investors coming to Disrupt SFthis year have investment funds in excess of $4 billion, and we&re expecting more to sign up in the coming weeks. Also, over the course of the three-day conference, there will be curated tracks of content across four unique stages in 12 different verticals, plus tons of educational workshops and a plethora of networking opportunities.

So, if your company is pre-series A, Startup Alleyat Disrupt SF is the place for you. Secure your exhibitor packagehere before we sell out!