NewsUp news trivia game launches public beta on Facebook

NewsUp, for the time being, is postponing the launch of its news trivia game on mobile devices.
The startup’s public beta of its trivia game launched today on Facebook instead, after a month-long private beta “with a group of about 30 people, including gamers, news junkies and a few people who don’t usually play [Facebook] games,” said cofounder Andrew Schuster in an e-mail.
Check the game here.

NewsUp, a 2012 graduate of AccelerateBaltimore, had originally planned on developing its news-based trivia game in mobile app form, but chose “to launch for Facebook first to solidify the game play and grow our audience,” Schuster said.
As Technically Baltimore previously reported, NewsUp launched its trivia feature this past September, a few months after presenting at AccelerateBaltimore Demo Day last July, and had plans for a mobile app through which users would receive points for picking the correct answers to a variety of news quizzes.
“After we finished our mobile prototype, it became clear that products going ‘mobile first’ were becoming increasingly more difficult to market and grow because of a flooded app market and high user acquisition costs,” said Schuster. “We’re utilizing the web first to make sure that when we release for mobile, it’s because our audience is already active and wants to carry us around in their pocket.”
In the Facebook version of NewsUp’s trivia game, users pick from a variety of quizzes, based on politics, entertainment, sports and technology.

• Players are presented four possible answers to five different questions.
• Players earn points by choosing correct answers in the fastest time possible against an opponent. “Power ups” are also available, including a clock freeze, a 50/50 that removes two wrong answers and hints.
• Each quiz is worth 100 points, and despite answering all five questions correctly in the politics quiz — something we’re telling you because we’re insecure about our physical height — Technically Baltimore received a score of just 66 points because we didn’t answer questions quickly enough.

The NewsUp team is six people strong, and aside from $25,000 in seed funding from AccelerateBaltimore, the startup has been bootstrapped.
“We have exciting plans in our roadmap,” said Schuster. “But right now we’re extremely focused on making the world’s best news trivia game.”