With an excess of written content available on the internet in forms of blogs, articles, features, books, news, etc., most people have taken to a lot of reading online. Korean startup has developed this successful app – Liner, which helps online readers highlight interesting parts of content they can share, re-read or use it for other purposes.

Highlight favourite sentences, share and re-use

Liner is basically a ‘highlighter pen’ for the internet, helping users to add a highlight or memo on a web page. Liner’s main goal is to help users highlight their favourite sentences across Medium, Wikipedia, PDF files, etc., online. It is easy to use the free app that is compatible with all desktop browsers and available for Apple and Android phones.

The user can download the app and click the open liner and plus sign on top of URL. Once the URL loads, the user can see a yellow highlight button that indicates highlight mode is on. When highlight mode is on, any text selected is automatically highlighted.  Liner saves all the highlights made across mobile and desktop devices. All the highlights will appear when the user re-visits the page. The highlighted points can be shared instead of sharing the entire article. The user can also leave sentence-level feedback on web pages by leaving comments on the highlights itself.

While Liner enables user to highlight important sentences across the internet, it also has become a unique platform that can gather information on a large scale. Because of crowdsourcing highlights, the app can discover what content people are actually interested in. Google has limitations in knowing only what pages are preferred by users, but Liner can provide a deeper-level of data on what “sentences” interests the user. The Liner team is trying to build a ‘human filtered version of the internet’ and aims to build a content recommendation AI with this highlight big data for platforms such as IBM’s Watson.

Freemium App. with global outreach

Liner’s business model operates on a freemium basis, which means the basic app is on offer for free but for premium features like more colours, unlimited folders, advanced search, etc., there is a monthly charge of about $5/month. This business model can also accelerate our referral program and help our growth in a way. Liner wants to offer the Liner Pro (B2B) app to help people who do research as a job like doctors, lawyers, marketers and graduate students so they can manage online documents and recommend related information. Also, Liner is affecting education. A lot of students and teachers are using it.

The startup that was founded in 2012 has seen the usage of its app double each year.  Besides English, Liner also supports Korean and Japanese. 90% of the users are from outside Korea so the team confidently claim they are running a global startup.