Instant messaging app Hike Messenger has started aggregating Hindi news stories and will be rolling out the feature for other regional languages as well. The messenger had launched the News feature last month where it would aggregate stories from leading English dailies. Hike claims that its English News feature is getting 1.5 million daily users who view about 100 million stories per week. The Hindi News will have content available in ‘bite’ size feeds across sports, entertainment, politics, technology and many more categories. The News feature gives users bite sized updates in 100 words and has three options: Category, Full story and a forward button. Clicking on full story opens the news website’s story within the Hike app (similar to what Facebook and Twitter does). Clicking on category pops up a menu which displays tags like top stories, India, world, sports, technology, business, lifestyle etc. On selecting the category, users are shown news from that topic’s tag. Users can keep on reading and up-swiping the read stories. In January, the company claimed to have crossed 35 million registered users worldwide, out of which over 50% active were every month. Around 90% of its users were from India and below the age of 25 years. File transfers, group chat and sticker suggestions Hike has been busy trying to "localize" the application to the Indian context and has launched a number of features which include sticker suggestions from a catalog of over 5,000 stickers, group chat for up to 500 people, including the ability to set…
