Tagesschau news app from Appsfactory honoured at the 23rd Annual Webby Awards

The International Academy of the Digital Arts and Sciences presents the Webby Awards once a year for excellent achievement on the internet. In 2019, there were around 13000 entries from over 70 countries. The jury included the tagesschau news app created by Appsfactory in the official preselection for the “Apps, Mobile and Voice” section in the “News & Magazines” category. Only the best 20% of all submitted projects qualify for this distinction.

The international award recognizes websites, online films and videos in four main categories and over 100 subcategories. The New York Times calls the “Webbies” “The Internet’s Highest Honor”. The winners will be officially announced on 23 April and the awards ceremony will take place on 13 May 2019 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City.

The innovative tagesschau app is one of the most frequently downloaded German news apps and was strategically conceived, programmed and graphically implemented by Appsfactory in close cooperation with the ARD-Aktuell project team. Amongst the conceptual innovations of the tagesschau app, which has already won several awards, are full-screen videos of all top news stories in portrait format on the homepage, in line with the most common smartphone use. To format the 16:9 videos, Appsfactory developed PICTACROP, a highly automated video editing tool to complement the Sophora CMS from Hamburg-based Subshell, which is used in the production workflow by the editorial team at ARD-Aktuell. The tagesschau app also offers machine learning supported personalized message sorting, as well as a search function with chatbot interface.

Appsfactory proudly thanks the International Academy of the Digital Arts and Sciences for recognising their hard work!