ZenNews app updates topical tagcloud every 3 seconds
ZenNews, a free iPhone app launched today by London-based startup Zensify, offers a different approach to news browsing from the usual reverse-chronological-order display of most news-reading tech.
These screenshots on the company’s website show ZenNews in action pretty well. The service creates a tagcloud of hot news topics, from which one can flick to stories from the top names in trusted news sources.
In May, we covered the launch of Zensify’s social network app, which pulls together a touchscreen tagcloud from the content in one’s social networks. It “visualizes your personal trending topics,” I wrote.
ZenNews apples Zensify’s technology to a different type of data: Zensify’s selected list of authoritative news sources, rather than a collection of friends and their status updates.
You have to test-drive ZenNews to appreciate it. It’s easy to swipe from the tagcloud to individual news sources’ coverage of a topic, or to see the tagcloud for al-Jazeera vs the tagcloud for USA Today. The tagcloud serves as a more graphical version of Twitter’s trending topics list.
Zensify’s servers do all the work crawling the news sites and creating the tagclouds, rather than trying to have the iPhone do the data-crunching. When the app is in the foreground and running, Zensify sends updated tagcloud info to the app every three seconds. This makes wonderful use of the unlimited data plans now sold with every iPhone.
The app’s utility comes from having both the high-concept tagcloud, and thorough lists of news stories waiting behind the clouds.
Zensify the company is a privately-funded firm in London. The company has one round of seed funding from Ipex Capital, of an undisclosed amount.
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About the Author, Paul Boutin
Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.
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