Move to another product, unfortunately, and suck it up: Most transitions are painful, will result in your feed organization disappearing or getting mangled, and will require work that you didn’t want to do.

However, here are some of the top alternative options to Google Reader:

1. Feedly: It’s a great, free, minimalistic RSS reader that lives right insider your favorite browser, with mobile apps. Bonus: The site is working on a Feedly clone of the Google API reader that should seamlessly transition Google Reader users over to Feedly.
2. NetVibes: Yes, it has an RSS reader, but it’s also a social media monitoring and analytics solution, so it may not be as clean as you might like. Free for basic personal use.
3. NewsBlur: Free accounts for up to 64 sites, paid for above. Web, iOS, and Android clients. Note that the site is getting absolutely slammed right now as the Google Reader announcement hits, so it may take a while to load for you.
   
   
4. RSSOwl: A desktop client for Windows, if that’s your thing. Free.
5. FeedDemon: Another desktop client which claims to be the “most popular RSS reader for Windows.” Also free.
6. Pulse: It’s a beautiful social magazine, but perhaps more work to create and maintain your lists of blogs and sites than Google Reader is. It’s free and available for iOS, Android, and the web.
   
   
7. Flipboard: It’s the original social magazine made from your Twitter feeds, Facebook friends, Flickr contacts, and, until this summer, your Google Reader feeds. It’s free, beautiful, but low informational density. It’s on iOS and Android only, with no web or desktop version.
8. NetNewsWire: Another desktop client, this one for Mac. Also has a iPad and iPhone version, and it syncs with Google Reader, so it may be able to get your Google Reader feeds. However, it doesn’t look like it is under active development based on the app’s website.
9. Liferea: One more desktop client, but for Linux. Free and open source, and it includes Google Reader sync while supporting Google Reader labels. Just hit 1.10 release candidate, and sure to get more popular now with Google Reader’s demise.
10. Rolio: Rolio is a river-of-news real-time feed of your RSS feeds, Twitter and Facebook connections on the web … and it supports importing of RSS feeds from Google Reader. Mobile apps for iOS and Android are coming soon.
11. River2: River2 is another river-of-news feed reader created by RSS co-inventor Dave Winer. It installs on your Mac or Windows PC, but it does require just a couple hacker credentials. Free.

None of these exactly fit the niche that Google Reader fills, but that is the pain of relying on a solution from a company that can withdraw the product at any given time.

One thing to keep in mind, as a software developer in my coworking space said today about the shutdown: ”I’m only going to use an open-source project for my RSS reader, because I want to have control over it and make sure it will continue to exist,” said Aras Balali. “It’s a bit of work, but it’s worth it.”

photo credit: mattgalligan via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After showing off the app in January, Inq Mobile’s beautiful new Material app for Android has finally launched in beta to take on fellow content discovery apps like Flipboard and Grokr.

Inq Mobile was once known as the manufacturer of the “Facebook phone” back in 2011. But in early 2012, Inq’s endeavors to build Android phones went bust. So it pivoted to apps.

As I wrote previously when Material debuted at CES 2013, the app recommends news based on what’s happening in your Facebook and Twitter feeds on a daily basis. And while your interests change every day depending on your activity, it can make those interests permanent. Material also “learns with you”: If you are reading a certain topic every day, it prioritizes that topic higher in your feed.

Outside of content discovery, the apps’s biggest asset is its colorful and intelligent design. Inq CEO and cofounder Ken Johnstone told me in January that he was previously the product and design director of Inq before he was elevated to CEO, so he highly values design. He said: “We want the design to be well done and the barrier to entry low. It makes the app very easy to get into.”

While Inq showed off the app at CES, it is now available to anyone who is fine using it in beta. Tom Mansbridge, the head of marketing at Inq Mobile, told VentureBeat via email that the app is launching in beta so it can test user behavior and make the experience smoother.

“The best possible feedback comes from real users, so we’ve launched on beta to get our customers involved as we evolve and finesse the product,” Mansbridge said. “We’re likely to be in beta for another few months and we’ll obviously be evolving with our audience during that period.”

It’s notable that Material is launching on Android first, as most apps launch on iOS first. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to push Material to new platforms in the near future.

“We have a huge amount of experience from developing Android phones, so it made sense to go with Android first,” Mansbridge said. “And with three out of every four global smartphone shipments on Android, we’re focusing where there is an indisputable consumer demand. Although the Android version is first we are developing an iOS, tablet, and web version which will all follow soon.”

You can take a closer look at Material in the screenshots below:

A year ago, the team at Inq made an extremely tough decision. After spending years working on mobile hardware, including a “Facebook phone” of sorts, it decided to focus exclusively on mobile software.

Inq is probably best known as the manufacturer of the so-called “Facebook phone” back in 2011, a smartphone that offered extensive Facebook social integration — and not officially branded by the social network giant. But in early 2012, Inq’s endeavors to build Android phones went completely bust.

Now, with its soon-to-launch social news app Material, Inq can finally show what it’s been working on all this time.

“We’ve finished up with hardware a year ago, and we’ve been working our app engine since then,” Inq CEO and cofounder Ken Johnstone said last night at a CES 2013 event.

The 45-employee Inq team has been working hard on a “topic extraction engine” that powers Material’s backend, which will eventually power other Inq apps. Like Flipboard, the relatively new Grokr, and other social news apps, Inq’s Material recommends news using what’s happening in your Facebook and Twitter feeds on a daily basis. And while your “interests” change every day depending on your activity, it has an option to can make interests permanent.

Material also “learns with you”: If you are reading a certain topic every day, it prioritizes that topic higher in your feed. Say you follow a sports team on Facebook or Twitter; Material knows to give you important updates about that team. But when the offseason hits and news is sparse, Material won’t give you updates unless big news surfaces about your team.

I looked at Material last night, and it appears quite polished. My favorite aspect of the app was the design, which bursts with color and beautiful photos. Johnstone, who was previously the product and design director of Inq before he was elevated to CEO, said his career background contributed to the decision to make design a priority.

“We liken this to the publishing world,” Johnstone said. “Focusing on design is so important for magazines, for example. We want the design to be well done and the barrier to entry low. It makes the app very easy to get into.”

Material will launch in the next few weeks on Android, and be available on iOS in a few months, according to Johnstone. We will take a closer look at the app once it becomes available to consumers.

Inq is a subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa and was founded in 2008.

Check out more photos of Material below.

[UPDATED December 12, 4:47 PST to reflect the fact that Google updated the Android version of its app but not yet the iOS version]

Google announced a major update to Google Currents, its Flipboard/Pulse competitor, today.

Currents is essentially a mobile magazine-in-app-form for smartphones and tablets, with publications such as the LA Times, Forbes, and The Guardian providing content that Currents displays in a simple, elegant interface — similar to what Flipboard and Pulse to for your RSS feeds, social accounts, and more.

One of the new Currents features is better categories that allow you to view stories across multiple publications in a single group, such as sports or entertainment. The feature also helps viewers quickly see the top story from each news source.

Other updates include the ability to view only breaking stories, which Google says uses some of the company’s search technology to find the most recent information that’s customized to your country and language. (Sorting by region would be nice too: the U.S. and other countries are big, after all). Currents also now allows users to see the top headlines from each publication on a single screen.

Just like Flipboard and Pulse, users can share content on social networks from within the Currents app. Unsurprisingly, Google+ and Gmail are the preferred sharing methods although with an extra tap you can share to Twitter, Facebook, and a variety of other networks and apps. The app is simply gorgeous, with a simple, very visual interface.

Google says millions of users have downloaded and installed the app, and over 700 publications have create a specific edition for Currents, in addition to tens of thousands of user-made mix-and-match editions.

It all began at Stanford University when grad students (Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta) set their sights on improving the news-reading experience.

After interviewing hundreds of people about their digital media consumption, Kothari and Gupta built a quick and dirty iPhone app, launched it in a few months, and succeeded in catching the attention of investors and the press. With a small infusion of funds, the founders rented space in a converted garage in Silicon Valley.

They recently relocated to a fancy office in San Francisco, but have remained loyal to Eric Ries’ “lean startup” ethos: rapid product cycles, emphasis on customer feedback, and scientific experimentation.

As a result, they have vast stores of data about how people read the news. Today, the company announced that users have read four billion stories on one of the mobile or tablet apps since the 2010 launch.

With readers consuming an average of ten million stories a day, the founders see an opportunity to help publishers and derive relevant insights from the data. I caught up with Kothari for a chat about the host of new features, the company’s stellar growth, and where Pulse fits into the rapidly-evolving digital media landscape.

VentureBeat: Four billion stories! That’s insane growth in just two years. 
Akshay Kothari: It’s a bit surreal. I still remember the first day we launched the app, when we were still in school (graduate students at Stanford). 123 people bought the app on the first day, and around 1,000 stories were read. Today, we see 40,000 new users join the service, and 10 million stories read every single day, and that’s growing really fast.

VentureBeat: Readers are voraciously consuming news — and yet publishers are still in trouble. Why the disconnect?
Kothari: Well, not all publishers are “in trouble”.  Many established publishers that have been willing to experiment with new distribution and monetization models have been successful. Publishers who are struggling are those that don’t see the writing on the wall with declining print circulation and cheap web banner CPM rates. A lot of publishers haven’t figured out how to adapt to a digital, increasingly mobile world.

VentureBeat: Tell me a little bit about Pulse Insights, launching today. Where did the idea come from?
Kothari: Over the last two and a half years, we have witnessed a pretty interesting shift in how people consume news. Gone are the days when we would only read the morning newspaper or watch the evening news. Today, people check news every few hours. They are always connected. In the last year, wes started to convert this data into information. Every time we launch a new feature, we can look at data to figure out how we did. Every time a new publisher joins us, they get a dashboard of all their activity. Slowly, but steadily, we learned more and more about our users. With Pulse insights, we are sharing this with the world, hoping that this project will benefit the entire ecosystem of news publishing.

VentureBeat: Does Pulse want to help publishers and digital media sites connect with readers? Or vice versa? 
Kothari: Pulse is user-centric at its core – we’re striving to elevate media consumption to foster informed discussions in the world.  Helping users find relevant content and then facilitating their engagement with this content is our top priority.

VentureBeat: Will Pulse Insights be available for free? Do you plan to make money from it in the future? 
Kothari: Yes, Pulse Insights is free and will always be free. We use data to guide pretty most of our product and content development. We think that democratizing access to this same data will help others (publishers, start-ups, advertisers) take advantage of shifts in consumption behavior and emerging patterns. We’re seeing great monetization traction with our brand content solutions for advertisers and our premium subscriptions offering – we will remain focused on these efforts to drive revenue for Pulse.

VentureBeat: With Pulse Insights, are you guys riding the ‘big data” trend?
Kothari: We’re big believers in data. The broader emancipation of data that’s happening across industries is super exciting and we’re excited to be a small part of it.

VentureBeat: How can startups like Pulse help traditional publishers stay relevant?
Kothari: We position ourselves as a resourceful technology and design partner for publishers.  We help them understand how their content is being consumed and who is consuming it.  We’re also a powerful distribution driver for publishers.  Last but certainly not least, both our brand content solutions and our premium subscription product is driving real revenue for publishers today.

VentureBeat: Your founding story is classic….
Kothari: Pulse was started off as a class project in the Launchpad class in the d.school (Stanford’s famous design school). The only requirement of the class was to launch your product publicly. No business plan, no pitches, no proposals – just focus on the product and launch it! We pushed Pulse out in 5 weeks. The first version of the app was really barebones – there was no backend, there was no catalog (of thousands of publishers) – Pulse only allowed you to add 10 tech websites. But, we got a ton of feedback – and we made daily tweaks to the product.

The turning point was the WWDC conference when Steve Jobs highlighted it as the first of a few iPad apps he liked. That literally changed us from a class project to a company.

As mentioned above, our relationship with publishers is quite strong – except for the NYTimes misfire very early on, there hasn’t been a single publisher who has backed off. (At 22 and 23 years old, the founders found themselves at the center of a legal dispute with the New York Times. Read more on the legal snafu here.) Most publishers are excited to integrate even more deeply with us.

We’ve grown from working in a cafe to a garage to a shared office to a stunning headquarters in the financial district of SF. To be able to work on all aspects of product, culture, hiring, marketing and revenues along the way – has been a dream run. I’m looking forward to taking Pulse to even bigger heights!

Akshay Kothari Photo: David Paul Morris, Bloomberg / SF

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Flipboard is fast becoming the application of choice for millions of people who want a more glossy, magazine-like reading experience on their tablets and smartphones. A new commerce initiative launched Friday suggests that the startup aspires to spruce up mobile shopping as well.

The two-year-old Flipboard electronically delivered “The New Levi’s Collection” catalog to its 20 million users. “Flippers” (can we call Flipboard readers that?) can “flip” through pages of clothes from Levi’s fall collection and purchase items while in the application.

The company said that the Levi’s section, featured in the Style Category of its app, is the first “shop-able clothing catalog” to be offered on Flipboard.

The section also points to a potential new revenue stream for the startup; Flipboard will presumably take home a small percentage of sales made through its mobile applications. Flipboard did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on this matter.

The new edition also strikes me as content padding, which is a developing strategy . Case in point: Flipboard recently ventured into video for the first with the addition of video channels to its lineup. The more content Flipboard can offer people, the better. That way, should Twitter and Flipboard ever come to blows — a Flipboard representative previously told me that this relationship is hunky-dory — members will still have plenty of things to read, watch, and now buy.

Update: A Flipboard spokesperson said that the startup has a revenue sharing arrangement with Levi’s on advertisements. The company does not take a percentage of sales from the catalog as suggested above.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Browsing is flawed — on the Web, but even more so on mobile. That’s the message Trapit co-founder Hank Nothhaft conveyed to me as he demoed his solution to the problem: a Trapit iPad application that uses artificial intelligence to deliver personalized content.

Trapit is the two-year-old, venture-backed intelligent discovery engine that hails from CALO, the same DARPA-commissioned artificial-intelligence project that birthed Apple’s Siri. The company’s eight-month-old product serves up nearly 5 million content recommendations a day from 120,000 human-vetted sources to consumers who use the tool to find fresh news, videos, articles, recipes, and images on the topics that interest them most.

“Here we want to bring the Web to the user and make it really seamless to browse,” Nothhaft said, highlighting the limitations of browsers and a search-and-seek approach to finding content on mobile. “We do that with a topic-based, personalized approach.”

Trapit for iPad fetches content for people across their pre-defined “traps,” or areas of interest, but it does so in a way that’s meant to be even more visually and mentally pleasing than the company’s Web offering.

The application features a fluid interface that caters to the whims of the consummate mobile browser. Traps expand and give way to a smattering of content selected for each individual. Those using the application can touch a selection to enlarge it and from there click to consume, saving the content to their reading lists for later, sharing it to social networks, or choosing to provide feedback in the way of a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down vote to help Trapit get better at making spot-on recommendations.

The application also offers people a way to browse a wide variety of content across hundreds of curated traps, and it helps them create new traps with suggestions covering categories like entertainment, business, and science.

“We’ve finally found the right interface to convey … that our underlying approach and technology is radically different and much more capable and flexible [than news readers],” Nothhaft said, addressing the company’s critics.

Trapit, however, has yet to reach the recognition level of artificial-intelligence sibling Siri, let alone command the same type of attention as mobile-friendly content discovery apps Flipboard and StumbleUpon. The service has just hundreds of thousands of active patrons as of June. Nothhaft is confident, however, that mobile will draw new users to Trapit.

“What we’re not doing is presenting a fixed taxonomy of the world where [individuals] have to subscribe to different feeds or just repackaging an existing social feed,” he said. “We’re much more than just a beautiful container for content.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Flipboard, the app that turns your tired old RSS feeds and social streams into a slick digital magazine layout, is finally coming to Google Android platform with a brand new phone application, the startup announced today.

The Flipboard service initially gained its fame through its iPad app, and later on the iPhone. And in addition to its launch on Android phones, the startup has been quite busy. Friday, the app developers announced major support for Apple’s chief competitor, Google in the form of new content streams for Google+ and YouTube.

However, don’t expect to find Flipboard ported over to an Android-powered tablet anytime soon.

“As far as tablets go, the biggest player is the iPad,” Flipboard marketing exec Marci McCue tells GigaOM. “We’ll watch the market but right now the market is the iPad,” she adds. Even without a version for tablets based on Android, today’s news is significant because a major developer is lending its prestige to the Google’s iPhone alternative.

Flipboard, which Apple named the App of the Year in 2010, is now available in the Google Play Store, the Mountain View, Calif. Internet giant’s version of Cupertino’s App Store. Another big plus of having Flipboard on Android phones is that It’ll help promote the search giant’s efforts to sell more of its latest “flagship” phone the Samsung Galaxy S III.  Flipboard will actually be pre-installed on the device by carriers, which should give it some added oomph and it competes with its many competitor,  the  iPhone.

Along with aiding the spread of Android, Flipboard’s entry into the Googlesphere will also fuel growth of two other properties that were at risk of being overshadowed. Google+, an alternative to Facebook’s all-present social networking, will be integrated into Flipboard.

“Now you can connect your Google+ account to Flipboard and see all the activity in your Circles in a beautiful magazine format,” the wrote in a blog post. App users can “+1″ any post within Flipboard, as well as share, comment and reply directly from the digital magazine app.

Also, YouTube, is also available to embed within the app in the same magazine-like treatment it available for Google+

Flipboard also announced it will be speaking more than English, with translations and regional recommendations for users in Germany, Italy, Korea, The Netherlands and Spain.

The startup, which recently raised a $50 million round, has just inked a deal with mega-publisher Condé Nast to include full-page advertising in some of its digital offerings, including The New Yorker, Wired and Bon Appétit. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue spoke with VentureBeat today to discuss the details of the deal.

“In December,” said McCue, “we started a trial with a number of publishers. Stories from the publications in the trial that are shared on social networks like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn show up in a full-format magazine page on Flipboard when you tap on them.”

The company said these are high-quality, magazine-format ads — not your typical web popup or skyscraper eyesore. “We worked with their design teams to create the look and feel of the pages,” said McCue. “We’ve created HTML5 templates that render the web page in a full screen of just the story and images.”

In the trial, no money changed hands, and most of the ads were simply selling each partner publication’s iPad app, McCue said. But the Condé Nast deal is the company’s first true advertising partnership and will be lining the coffers.

How users react to full-page ads, which are welcome enough in print but generally hated in digital content, has been a point of concern for the Flipboard team. “Prior to every release of Flipboard, we do user testing and include partner content and ads in the process,” McCue said. “To date, we’ve had positive reactions.”

Flipboard will be working with publishers directly to give them analytics on how their ads and titles are performing in the app.

McCue, who has previously said he wasn’t building a business at publishers’ expense, says the company sees ad sales as its primary revenue stream moving forward. But at this point, the company plans to let its publishers handle advertiser accounts themselves.

“In this model,” he said, “our publisher partners own the relationship with advertisers. We will support their ad sales team wherever we can.”

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Flipboard’s app uses a book’s page-turning metaphor. The app makes it much easier to browse through a variety of social and online media by pulling together diverse streams and reassembling them as a single stream that is easy to navigate with a touchscreen.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think [the funding] confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” Flipboard chief executive Mike McCue told BoomTown.  “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

Much of the funding came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners, with other investors including Comcast Interactive Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a number of angels including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Ron Conway, Dustin Moskovitz, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. executive Peter Chernin.

McCue co-founded Flipboard in January 2010 with former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll. They debuted Flipboard in July. The company has 32 employees and plans to expand to around 50. Flipboard will also use the money for international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development. The next product will be for the iPhone and then the company will do a Google Android mobile app. Rivals include Pulse and Zite.

McCue said the company has struck content licensing deals with 17 major publishers so far, including Oprah Winfrey’s network. The company plans to make money through ads and subscriptions. Flipboard previously raised $10.5 million.

Calling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. We’ve pretty much finalized the invite list, but have a few spots left. Request an invitation.