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.
