Flipboard users on the web and on Android devices no longer have to endure the tyranny of reading a digital magazine that was assembled by someone other than them.

Today the company is pushing out a digital magazine creation tool to its Android app and website. The tool, which first debuted on the iPad earlier this year, allows you to assemble news stories, photos, status updates, videos, and other media into a customized digital magazine based on a particular topic, current event, or theme. Basically, you can gut all the boring articles and pictures you don’t like from an existing digital magazine, rearrange content, or provide additional context from other sources. And unlike the iOS version of the app, Android users can do things like “flip” content into their custom mags from other Android applications like YouTube.

One magazine you can now customize into your own publication is the Financial Times, which is entirely available within Flipboard starting today. However, you’ll still need to be a paid subscriber to view FT content.

I never really thought of Flipboard becoming a service that lets people express their creativity, but that’s exactly what this new tool does. The magazine creation tool has also proved quite popular, with over 500,000 custom magazines created by its 56 million total readers.

The new custom magazine tool is available on Samsung Galaxy phones, Nexus tablets, and several other Android-based mobile devices. You can download the new Flipboard app for free on the Google Play store and Amazon Android App store today.

The digital news magazine app Pulse has always been good at making sense of the many information sources available online, but now it wants to cull the insanity of your social circle to find only the most popular articles and links.

Today the service is rolling out a new feature called Pulse Highlights that you use to create a tab of news based on what’s popular among those in your social circle. Basically, any news story that your friends have shared or saved excessively will pop up within the new Highlights tab, which you can access from the “save stories” tab in the left sidebar.

The new feature is basically an iteration of what the old version of Digg (pre-Betaworks) attempted (and failed) to do. You can also think of Pulse Highlight as a curator similar to Facebook, only showing you the news stories and shared links from within a feed based on your reading habits and interactions with the social network. However, Pulse may be able to put a fresh spin on things since its focused entirely on news stories rather than all social interactions.

“Is a story’s worth based on number of shares? We believe in quality over quantity: We don’t think an article needs 500-plus ‘likes’ to make it interesting, inspiring, or share-worthy,” said Pulse founder Akshay Kothari about the new feature. “Highlights is based on your personal network, so if a close friend or family member cares about a story, you’ll see it in your feed.”

Stories that appear in the Highlights tab show who initially shared the posts, and you can track conversations about them via push notifications. You can also add posts to the Highlights tab or share to your social networks.

The new features is available today via Android devices and should roll out to iOS devices in the near future.

News aggregation service Pulse is turning its attention to the mess of news that’s shared by friends across multiple social networks.

The service previously focused on creating mobile apps that pull in news from a variety of websites and arranging articles in an easily digestible user interface so you don’t miss anything. Last year the company rolled out a brand new web app that streamlines everything its users see on the iOS and Android versions. However, today’s update lets Pulse users pull in a feed of news from YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Flickr. (Sorry, Twitter fans.)

The move is interesting because it makes Pulse more of a direct competitor to Flipboard, a digital magazine app that has had this social functionality from the get go. However, Pulse founder Akshay Kothari told VentureBeat the new social feed was based on user data rather than a desire to stay competitive with rivals.

“When we looked at our own data from users, we saw that a lot of people were splitting up their time between all these different networks. And just like with multiple news websites, pulling content from all these services would provide the same benefits to people,” Kothari said, adding that Pulse’s user experience is much different from Flipboard’s.

You add a new feed for one of your social networks similarly to how you’d add new feed for a news source, RSS feed, or category. Once that’s done, it’ll appear on one of your custom Pulse news tabs.

Pulse is also rolling out an update to its video and photo viewers, which will now display information from whatever social network the media was pulled from below the photo/video (see image above). For example, your Instagram feed will show you not only a picture but also the user who sent it to you as well as any message/caption they included when it was initially sent.

San Francisco-based Alphonso Labs, which produces Pulse, has 20 employees and has previously raised over $10 million in funding to date.

With the sheer volume of new submissions hitting community news sharing site Reddit everyday, it’s hard to keep up with them if you don’t have lots of free time. This is especially true if you think Reddit’s front page looks like an overwhelming wall of blue text.

Reddzine, a free iPad app, could be a good solution for people who want to quickly scroll through the site’s front page or favorite subreddits (aka sub-category pages).

The app displays all the submissions, sorted by what’s hot, new, controversial, or top, within a 3- or 4-column design. For image-heavy subreddits like Aww, Pics, or Funny, the layout really shines as a way to quickly scroll through to find the good stuff. There is a “safe for work” mode that protects you from inappropriate submissions.

“Rather than staring at tiny thumbnails and constantly clicking through to view images and open links etc, I thought a more visual interface would be a nicer approach,” Reddzine developer Steve James told VentureBeat. He also noted that the app is likely to get compared with popular Reddit clients like Alien Blue.

“Alien Blue has its ‘Canvas; mode, and there are other apps such as Reddit Pics, but these apps only support browsing images in this way,” he said. “The idea for Reddzine was to support all types of content posted on Reddit (images, albums, videos, links and text), presenting them in a magazine-style interface, with large thumbnails and everything integrated into a single page app.”

Selecting a submission brings up a new window that zooms in on the content. Reddzine is integrated with Imgur, and photo gallery submissions are displayed accordingly. You can also access the comment section from this window, which allows you to vote, save, or share the story after logging into your account.

Yet, you can’t gain access to the comment unless you pay to the pro version of Reddzine, which is a $2.99 in-app purchase. Half of Reddit is reading and making comments, and without access to this functionality, the standard Reddzine app is very limited. There are a few things to note before upgrading to pro, too. First, you can’t get a custom “front page” that only includes submissions from the subreddits you’re subscribed to. You only have the option of choosing “All,” which is essentially what you’d see if you didn’t log in to Reddit’s website. The app also doesn’t have a landscape mode, which may bother some users who prefer the wider orientation when scrolling through news.

However, James tells me all of the aforementioned functionality requests are in the works. The 30-year-old England-based freelance developer is the sole creator of Reddzine, but fans of the app can look forward to new features like a landscape mode and Reddit user profile support in future updates.

For a closer look at the app, check out the gallery of screenshots below.

Digital magazine service Pulse released a new web app version of its popular mobile news reader today, which takes plenty of design cues from Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 software.

“Microsoft gave us some great feedback while building the Pulse web reader,” said Pulse founder Akshay Kothari in an interview with VentureBeat.

Pulse began teasing a big announcement about two weeks ago, which we speculated could have something to do with a new web-based reader or a Windows 8 application. In reality, we’re seeing both.

The web app functions the same as all of Pulse’s mobile app readers for iOS or Android. Users can create a custom feed to view up-to-date articles from a variety of publications organized into their own tabbed categories. It’s previously been available on iOS and Android, and its user interface is optimized to make consuming (and sharing) content from 15 news sites at the same time easy.

But unlike the mobile app versions, Pulse on the web gives stories from each publication their own tab and arranges stories as they’re published. The prominence of each story’s thumbnail/headline can appear larger, based on its popularity among other Pulse users. It truly looks like something you’d expect to find on the new Window 8 OS’ tiles user interface.

The web version is optimized for use on Windows 8 devices but will work on anything with a web browsers (Kindle Fire, iPad, Android, etc.). However, Kothari told me that users are still being directed to use the native iPad/iPhone/Android apps for the best experience on those devices.

Check out a YouTube video of the new web app in action using Internet Explorer 10 below, and let us know what you think in the comment section.

Digital magazine The Daily has laid off nearly a third of its staff to help the unprofitable publication save costs, parent company News Corp. announced today.

Since the launch of the The Daily in February 2011, people have wondered if an iPad-only publication could make enough money to be sustainable. It currently loses $30 million a year, and executives projected that it would take five years to break even. With News Corp. planning to split its publishing and entertainment businesses, that timeline doesn’t look so viable anymore.

In a press release, The Daily said it would cut 50 full-time employees, or 29 percent of its full-time staff. The sports section will be gutted and replaced with content from “partners” like Fox Sports. The opinion section will be cut entirely.

The publication also said it would move to a “portrait-only orientation,” which could help it save money on development. Videos will still be viewable in landscape mode.

Photo: The Daily

Zite is boosting the number of publishing partner sections available in its digital magazine mobile app after doubling the number of content impressions since first launching the program, the company told VentureBeat.

For those not familiar with it, Zite lets you build a custom digital magazine by pulling in shared links from bookmarking and social sites, such as Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious, and Read It Later. It then builds a personalized selection of articles based on activity from your social profiles. Unlike most of its competitors, Zite learns your reading habits by giving you voting buttons for each piece of content. The idea is to give you more of what you actually want to see without all the boring and/or uninteresting stuff.

The CNN-owned company launched a publishers program back in April that allowed nine publications to gain their own sections within the app. Publishers could include optional house advertisements within those sections as well as gain user engagement analytics about those sections, as VentureBeat previously reported. [Disclosure: VentureBeat was among the first crop of publishers to participate in the new Zite program.]

Today, Zite is adding a number of publishers to the program, including Chicago Tribune, Cult of Mac, Entrepreneur, Hearst Magazines Digital Media, International Business Times, Los Angeles Times, Macworld, PC World, and TechHive.

But readers also benefit from Zite’s publisher sections. No matter how good a news-reading aggregator is at curating articles, sometimes you just want to read content from a specific publication. The problem with this is that the various publications rarely have any consistency with its user interface, which can sometimes deter people from bothering to navigate to the publication on a mobile device. With Zite’s publisher sections, you can kind of do both. The company made it very clear to me that it can still push Zite users to a publisher’s original site.

“When we first started the publisher program, we were committed to maintaining momentum, which I think we’re able to do by offering a nice mix of web and other news media content through the Zite reader,” Zite VP of Business Development Martin Stoddart said in an interview with VentureBeat.

In addition to doubling content impressions, Zite also said the number of click-throughs for publisher section house ads (at the bottom of articles) are up to three percent higher.

Mobile news aggregation service Pulse is planning a major announcement in the near future, according to the startup’s homepage.

Pulse updated its homepage earlier today to tease the announcement. Initially, users are shown a short animation of Pulse’s launch on iOS in 2010, its entrance into the Android market a year later, and a question mark under 2012. Then, black and white photos of famous technology founders (young Bill Gates, young Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs working on a computer, etc.) begin scrolling in the background, and users are presented with an option to enter their email addresses to receive information about what Pulse is planning.

I contacted Pulse founder Akshay Kothari for more information, but he declined to share any specifics. “I can’t say much about this — except that something new and exciting is launching very soon,” he told me.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Pulse is a news-reading service that lets you view up-to-date articles from a variety of publications. It’s available on iOS and Android, and its user interface is optimized to make consuming (and sharing) content from 15 news sites at the same time easily digestible rather than chaotic. It competes with similar digital magazine services, like News360, Flipboard, Zite, Editions by AOL, and Google Currents. Pulse has over 13 million users, who read upwards of 200 million stories each month, as VentureBeat previously reported.

As for what Pulse is getting ready to launch, I have a few guesses. With the homepage mention of its presence on iOS and Android, it would make sense for Pulse to announce a new app for Windows Phone 8/Windows 8. But since Microsoft doesn’t have a very large slice of the mobile device market, this wouldn’t be a big deal for most people — and certainly wouldn’t answer for the photos of legendary Apple founders scrolling in the background.

There’s also the possibility that Pulse is getting ready to launch a web browser-based HTML5 version of its news-reader app, which would make it platform independent. Right now, Pulse only gives you the option of reading articles via desktop web browser when you bookmark them from its mobile apps. And while I use this feature often, I wouldn’t mind having full access to the news-reading app on my computer screen — especially for articles that only contain a clipping of the content and require clicking through to the publication’s website to read more.

San Francisco-based Alphonso Labs, which produces Pulse, has 20 employees and has previously raised over $10 million in funding to date.

Digital magazine service News360 launched a revamped version of its iPad app that offers a sleeker design, some refreshing user interface tweaks, and the possibility of stealing eyeballs away from its competitors.

News360 lets its users chose from a vast array of news topics to follow and aggregates favorable content based on user behavior through the app itself as well as social-networking activity. It’s already facing heavy competition from several digital news-magazine tablet readers, including Flipboard, Pulse, Google Current, and Editions by AOL. But News360′s most direct competitor is probably Zite, where users can vote on content and improve its news discovery the more you use the service.

The new version allows you to pull in trends/topics of news from your Twitter hashtags, Facebook likes, and Google+ profile listing. You can also search for custom topics like in previous versions and have everything displayed in a central home screen view. One pleasant addition to the main news view is the capability to treat news items like rectangular cubes, which you can flick up or down. Flicking the article cube reveals a longer version of the text that you can scroll through, and flicking it again shows a menu for bookmarking, voting on the article, and sharing the article through a number of social networks.

You can also select the individual article cube, which makes it take up the entire screen. The article text and images are displayed in a News360 reader, with a small portion of the article’s original website shown below. I wasn’t able to view more than the small portion of the website without first clicking through to the in-app web browser. I’m guessing this is a bug. If you don’t like the article’s source, News360 provides you will several other alternative news outlets that covered the same story. This is certainly useful for finding the best version of an article, but honestly, I’m not sure how often average, passive news readers will really use this.

You can download the updated News360 iPad app today for free via iTunes. Check out the demo video below for a closer look at the app’s updated look and feel.

It’s no secret that digital magazines are gaining a foothold among consumers, and thanks to some new consumer data released today digital magazine storefront Zinio we have a small window into how people are consuming these digital publications.

The company says it’s put over 120 million digital magazine issues in the hands of consumers in the last year, which I’m assuming includes both paid and free promotional magazines. Of the people who subscribe to magazines through Zinio, 85 percent had never subscribed to the print version, according to the company. Also, nearly everyone actually reads their digital magazines month-to-month, which is probably a much higher number than print. (I have old issues of Wired stacked up somewhere still sealed in plastic packaging. So, Zinio’s return rate is pretty good — assuming the company is only counting when people finish the magazine cover-to-cover.)

Zinio’s move was done to promote its subscriber rewards program, but I suspect the information might also have something to with rumors that the company is putting itself up for sale. Fortune reported earlier this week that the San Francisco-based company hired investment bank Montgomery & Co. to manage a potential sale worth $50 – $100 million. And with Apple’s Newsstand showing strong growth as well as Google Play now offering digital magazines for purchase, Zinio putting itself up for sale might be a smart move.

While we don’t have an official confirmation about a potential sale, we do have Zinio’s digital magazine consumer data infographic, which we’ve embedded below: (Click image to enlarge)

Some of the most popular U.S. magazines are dialing down their efforts to publish content through Flipboard, reports Ad Age.

Flipboard is an ultra popular digital magazine app available on iOS and Android devices that places a publication’s content into a user friendly layout that’s optimized for touch screens. Some publications, like Wired and The New Yorker, were even selling advertising and collecting revenue through the rich Flipboard feeds.

But as of next month, both publications have decided to start offering Flipboard users a smaller excerpt of each article found within the stream. Anyone who wants to read the full article must click through to the publication’s website, which can be done without having to navigate away from the app (via built-in web browser).

“Our intention is to adapt our model to allow Flipboard users to know what content at Wired is out there,” Wired VP and Publisher Howard Mittman told Ad Age. “It will have a headline and a sentence leading to a URL. If digital consumers want to interact with Wired, they can do so at Wired.com and not through an intermediary.”

This is probably a good idea for the traditional print publications, who are just now starting to take ownership over the digital space in terms of both building readership and generating revenue. It probably makes more sense to push readers to the website to see advertising that’s already there, rather than sell ads within another platform.

Flipboard also recently made headlines by bringing in full content from the New York Times, including articles behind the paywall. That means, you can gain access to full content on Flipboard — and use the app’s effortless and pretty reading experience — but only if you’re a NYT subscriber. I’m curious as to whether other publications rooted in print will eventually follow suit, perhaps not with a paywall model,  but certainly with the option to view entire articles on Flipboard (and other platforms) when you have a subscription.

Let us know in the comments if you’ll be annoyed about not having the full articles show up in your Flipboard stream.

Most people who see a $1.65 billion exit of their company would be content to retire from the business world, but that’s rarely the case in the tech industry, as YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley demonstrates.

Hurley is scheduled to launch a new service called Zeen next week that creates digital magazines and publications, according to TheNextWeb. He made the announcement at the Le Web 2012 London event today, but remained mum on details of the new service.

What we do know is that Zeen will launch under Hurley and fellow YouTube co-founder Steve Chen’s company AVOS. Hurley’s plans for Zeen were first unearthed by Fusible back in April after the site discovered that the YouTube founder had purchased the Zeen.com domain.

Visiting the site today also doesn’t provide much additional information. Visitors are met with a Zeen splash page and are asked to pre-register for the service to secure their preferred user name. Presumably, the service will notify you when it does launch, which according to Hurley, will be very soon.

It’s hard to say whether Zeen will have much impact on the world of digital magazines, which is quickly becoming a crowded space. It’s likely to face competition from the likes of Flipbook, Pulse, Google Currents, Editions by AOL, and CNN-owned Zite.

It’s also worth noting that Hurley’s last venture didn’t exactly have smooth sailing, either. AVOS purchased iconic bookmarking site Delicious just over a year ago and unveiled a relaunched version back in September that wasn’t well received by long-time users. That said, it’s usually difficult to reinvent a social network/sharing site once it’s past its prime. (Digg, Myspace, Newsvine, and many others can attest to this.)

With Zeen, Hurley and crew are starting something fresh. And with mobile consumption of media only increasing, there’s still plenty of room for innovation when it comes to digital magazines.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Popular digital magazine app Flipboard is getting some attention from Google in the form of Google+ API support, the company announced today at the Le Web 2012 conference in London.

The support will give Flipboard users access to content streams from the search giant’s social network. The stream will give you access to things like Google+ updates/posts, photos, videos, and other data without having to visit the social network directly. Google+ is hardly the only social network to integrate with the digital magazine — support for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and others is already available. The news of the Google+ stream does comes as a bit of a surprise, though, because Google has its own — albeit less popular — digital magazine app, Google Currents.

We don’t have an exact date for when the new Google+ streaming in Flipboard will go live, nor do we know exactly when Google will begin offering a Google+ API for other developers and programs to start using. However, Google VP of product management, Bradley Horowitz, who spoke about the new Flipboard integration at Le Web, did talk a bit about why we don’t have an API yet. He said Google doesn’t yet have good “noise” filtering controls when it comes to Google+, and the company wants to make sure it has built something that won’t cause developers to go back and rework their own creations to preserve the user experience, according to Robert Scoble.

Via TheNextWeb

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Pulse, a customized news aggregation service for mobile devices, is adding support for video content, the company announced today.

Most video aggregation/curation services I’ve experienced are either really good at collecting content that can be viewed elsewhere, or they are awesome at playing videos from multiple services, but not at collecting it automatically. The Pulse team seems to understand the necessity to have both of these components, even if you can’t get every video source on the Internet immediately.

That said, Pulse is launching its new video functionality with 30 premium quality media partners, such as The Daily Beast, Motor Trend, Fox Sports, ESPN, Allrecipes, IGN Entertainment, The White House, FORA.tv. Pulse also features “channels” for TV programs, like Meet The Press, Nightly News, and The TODAY Show. Basically, its treating each video “channel” much like it would a regular news feed, that pulls in a headline and a photo as each video post gets published.

I’d love to have Pulse branch out to other TV shows, which I often enjoy watching about a third of but never bother with each clip. For instance, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report would make good candidates for a “video” page within my Pulse account.

Pulse competes with digital magazine-style services like Flipboard, Zite, Editions by AOL, and Google Currents. Pulse, which first launched in 2010, is available on a variety of platforms, including iPhone, iPad, Android devices, Kindle Fire, and Nook. The startup has over 13 million users who read upwards of 200 million stories each month, as VentureBeat previously reported. If it can translate this kind of activity to its new video channels, Pulse may end up redefining what it means to be a digital magazine.

Palo Alto-based Alphonso Labs, which produces Pulse, has 20 employees and has previously raised over of $10 million in funding to date.