Inspiration

We were inspired by how modern users consume information through short-form platforms like TikTok, while news consumption remains slow, fragmented, and overwhelming. We wanted to rethink news as a fast, engaging, and intelligent feed that fits modern attention patterns without sacrificing credibility.

What it does

Nowtius is an AI-powered, TikTok-style news platform that transforms trusted news sources into a personalized short-form feed. It aggregates articles from RSS feeds, uses AI to optimize and cluster related stories, and presents them in a swipeable interface. Users can also explore short videos from reputable sources and get contextual explanations of complex topics.

How we built it

We built Nowtius using a pipeline that ingests news from RSS feeds of trusted publishers. The content is processed and structured before being passed into an AI layer for optimization, and personalization. We used embeddings to group related articles into unified stories and a recommendation system to rank content based on user interaction. The frontend is a mobile-first, swipe-based interface inspired by TikTok.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was reliably aggregating and cleaning data from multiple RSS sources with different formats and structures. Another challenge was ensuring AI-generated text remained accurate, concise, and consistent across different types of news. We also had to balance performance with real-time feed generation and personalization.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully built an end-to-end system that combines real-time news ingestion, AI optimization, and personalization into a smooth mobile experience, all within a 46-hour hackathon. We’re especially proud of creating a feed that feels fast, intuitive, and meaningfully different from traditional news apps.

What we learned

We learned how powerful AI can be when applied not just to content generation, but to content structuring and consumption design. We also gained experience working with embeddings for clustering, designing recommendation logic under time constraints, and optimizing user experience for short-form interaction patterns.

What's next for Nowtius

Next, we want to improve personalization depth, add real-time trending detection, and enhance source credibility scoring. We also plan to expand the video integration layer and introduce conversational AI, allowing users to ask questions about any story directly within the feed.