Stitcher reads you headlines, we have invites

April 20, 2008 | MG Siegler | Comments |

After sitting at your desk all day, maybe the last thing you want to do is come home and sit at a computer to read your news. Or maybe you would just rather listen to it on your commute home via your iPhone. If that’s the case, Stitcher may be for you.

The personalized Internet radio service, which is currently in closed testing, allows you to listen to the latest news. Reading both the headlines and a brief summary of the main stories on a wide variety of sites, the service offers an alternative to those of us who may not like to individually read the thousands of stories that appear everyday.

Stitcher offers many topics including world news, sports, business, election coverage and of course tech news. VentureBeat Headlines is one of the options under the “Silicon Valley Professional” topic.

Stitcher excels is in both tone and inflection during playback. Whereas rivals such as PimpMyNews have computer voices read back the news and quite often misread words, Stitcher uses actual human readers and you can really tell the difference. It just so happens that the headline chosen to demo VentureBeat right now is one that I wrote, and I can vouch for it coming across exactly as I meant it to.

Stitcher also has a very nice and easy to use iPhone interface. Simply go to the main stitcher.com on the device and you’re directed to a site that allows you to listen to headlines in just a few clicks.

The San Fransisco-based Stitcher was started by Noah Shanok (orginally of StubHub), Mike Ghaffary (former VC at Summit Partners), and Peter DeVroede (ran digital media and development groups at Disney, Adobe, EA and Macromedia).

The company has given us 200 invites to give out to VentureBeat readers who want to try out the service. Simply click here to sign up.

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About the Author, MG Siegler

MG Siegler writes about technology trends and new media for VentureBeat, with a focus on mobile topics, social elements and key news stories. Before that, MG wrote about technology on his blog, ParisLemon. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan where he studied film. He's previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he did web development. He now lives in San Francisco.

  • Thanks for the invite. I just tried the service, and I'm loving it.

    I'm just wondering how quickly new headlines will be added, since this is recoded by humans. Most likely they're going to batch up?
  • Dan
    Thanks for the invite. Very interesting service. It sort of turns reading blogs into listening to NPR. To early to tell if I'll keep going back to it, though.
  • MG, I agree Stitcher sounds very good since they use actual humans to read blogs and aggregate other content read by humans.

    For PimpMyNews, we chose a technology solution vs. a manpowered solution to give users a scalable solution for a huge selection of audio content "on demand."

    PimpMyNews gives users access to over 700,000 "talking stories" across 59 categories from the web's top 1,000+ news & blog sites - with 5,000+ new stories every day. The moment a blog releases a new story, it's converted to near-human sounding audio on PimpMyNews.

    In my opinion, our applications are targeted to different audiences. The folks at Stitcher have done a good job and I wish them luck.

    John
    ------------
    Co-founder & CEO
    www.PimpMyNews.com
  • @george - yes, they are a few days behind now on headlines, but it is still a closed beta test so we'll cut them some slack.

    @dan - I got the NPR vibe as well. I could see myself using it quite a bit on my iPhone potentially.

    @John - thanks for the follow up, I understand there are pluses and minuses to both approaches. Perhaps George (comment above) should check you guys out, since you will undoubtedly be able to pump updates out quicker.