July 9-10, 2013
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While most consumers aren’t directly taking advantage of RSS feeds — they’ve mostly been supplanted by social media and mobile news reading apps –  they’re still an important way for publishers to get their content distributed and discovered.

For London-based Mediafed, that means big business.

How big? The company announced today that its platform for news feed discovery has powered 30 billion article views in the last 12 months and 89 billion news feed requests. Additionally, Mediafed has driven 6.4 billion clicks back to publisher sites and has seen its mobile views increase by 83 percent.

With most online publishers struggling to maintain decent ad rates, Mediafed’s explosive performance could be a rare bit of relief.

Launched in 2007, the company has built a platform to help publishers distribute, monetize, and analyze their news feeds. Its business has steadily risen over the past few years, following the rise of social media, smartphones, and tablets. Mediafed isn’t talking about its revenues yet, but it boasts that it’s been profitable since its first day in business.

“One of the advantages we had was the fact that Google hasn’t really been doing much with Feedburner,” said Ashley Harrison, the company’s chief executive, in an interview with VentureBeat. Google bought the RSS feed manager Feedburner in 2007, but after struggling to figure out how to properly make money off of RSS feeds, it ended up shutting down its “AdSense with Feeds” product late last year.

“From April [2012] to April [2013] we’ve doubled monthly article visits,” Harrison said. “A large percentage of that growth has been from the concentrated strategy of working with U.S. publishers.”

Indeed, looking at the company’s monthly article stats is telling: It jumped from 14 million monthly views in January 2010 to 47 million in 2011. Since then, the figure has doubled every year — in January 2011 it was 100 million monthly visits, and this year that increased to 200 million. Harrison tells me he expects to reach 300 million monthly views by next January.

Mediafed monetizes news feeds for more than 2,000 publishers, including heavy-hitters like NBC, the New York Times, and Reuters (which make up its highest daily article views).  The company has also partnered with more than 1,200 major advertisers.

Looking forward, Harrison tells me Mediafed is going to build on Taptu’s technology (Mediafed acquired the news DJ app last year) to help its users more easily discover content they’ll like. Specifically, the company will integrate Taptu’s tech into its Feedsportal offering, which offers anonymous statistical information about RSS feed usage.

“At the moment our strategy is to try and make RSS more available now that there are so many popular newsreaders out there,” Harrison said. “We think we can help build the RSS ecosystem rapidly by piggy-backing [on] the newsreaders people want to use.”

RSS photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
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RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. – While others might see tech companies as competing with the media, Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo doesn’t see things that way.

“We view ourselves as complementary to what those folks are doing, and we try to create complementary experiences,” Costolo said today at the D11 tech conference here.

For instance, he said he’s spending a lot of time working on Twitter’s new television partnerships, which advertisers can use to combine television and Twitter ad campaigns.

“It amplifies what is already happening on television, as opposed to detracting from what’s going on,” Costolo said. ”It’s a much more engaging experience for users.”

The company is already working with ESPN and Turner Broadcasting, Costolo said, among many others. (It may also be in talks with Viacom and Comcast.)

Costolo repeated a similar line about complementarity later on, when moderator Kara Swisher of All Things D asked him whether Twitter was replacing traditional news publications as a source of real-time news on breaking events — like the Boston Marathon bombing.

“I don’t think of ourselves as a news organization,” Costolo said. ”I see ourselves partnering with news organizations to deliver this real-time stream of information to them.” (Twitter is also a discovery and distribution tool for news media).

Costolo acknowledged that early Twitter reports on breaking news can be inaccurate, as when the rumors spread via the service about the ethnicity of the alleged bombers. However, he said, others stepped in to correct those rumors within “minutes,” indicating that Twitter is getting better at self-correcting.

Costolo additionally talked about his company’s aggressive, mobile-centric innovation strategy.

“We’re not just mobile first, we’re all-in on mobile.”

The company’s goal is to iterate as rapidly as possible with mobile products.

To help facilitate that, any team within Twitter can launch any experiment to 1 percent of the users, without approval from Costolo, the legal department, or communications.

July 9-10, 2013
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Google Glass will likely be immensely useful for doctors, field workers, and other service providers. But for ordinary people, it’s disorienting and nerdy. 

But that hasn’t stopped developers from responding to Google’s request to build applications for Glass. Owners of the device now have a nifty news aggregation app dubbed “Thirst Droplet,” released today by Thirst Labs.

Thirst believes the investment in Glass was worthwhile and will help it reach “Generation C” (the “C” stands for “connected.”) Either way, it reportedly only spent around three days developing features for the app.

Thirst has already unveiled its Android and iPhone apps for personalizing and curating the news. Follow topics on a mobile device and the web, and Glass will send a push notification when it’s trending on social media. Hundreds of thousands of topics — such as “Oprah Winfrey,” “49ers,” or “Google” — are currently available for you to follow.

The Glass app takes the news experience step further, giving you the opportunity to listen to an entire article. You can also flag an article for future reading and email it to yourself straight from Glass. You can also “like” or “dislike” a story.

Thirst has differentiated itself from other news readers with its language processing tools. Rather than asking readers to discover news, the it automatically finds and presents the most relevant content in what Thirst says is an engaging way. The company tracks millions of data sources — blogs, social media, and so on — to determine whether news is trending.

Don’t miss the explanatory video below to see how the app works.

The Thirst news app for iPad

“Under the hood, you don’t read the same feeds as Google Reader. We find the topics relevant to you,” CEO Anuj Verma said in a recent interview with VentureBeat (pictured above), hitting on how Thirst differs from competing news apps like Flipboard and Pulse. “You don’t really have to hunt for the content.”

Similarly to news aggregation app Pulse, which LinkedIn recently acquired, Thirst Labs was formed by college friends. The founders are a pair of University of Berkeley, California grads who share a passion for UI, UX, and developing algorithms.

San Francisco-based Thirst Labs has raised $950,000 in seed funding from BlueRun Ventures, Steve Newcomb, and Jason Krikorian.

Top image // Google Glass

July 9-10, 2013
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The Atlantic, a purveyor of high-tone, long-form, magazine-type literature, is launching a new division for e-books.

Called, ever so colorfully, “The Atlantic Books,” the new product line will include nonfiction reads between 10,000 words and 30,000 words and will first be featured as the Kindle Singles. Later, the e-books will also be made available elsewhere.

In addition to original pieces created solely for this new endeavor, The Atlantic Books will also include hand-picked classic selections from The Atlantic‘s vast catalog of journalism, memoirs, and narrative nonfiction.

“The launch of The Atlantic Books reflects our commitment to innovation in publishing in the service of great journalism and storytelling,” said The Atlantic president M. Scott Havens in a statement on the news.

Just last month, the media company announced a partnership with Longreads, a web startup focusing on, duh, longer-form online content.

As other print publications struggle to maintain great, expensive content in an age of changing economics and reader habits, it’s heartening to watch an older institution gamely try new things.

The Atlantic was founded in 1857 in Boston as a literal and cultural commentary magazine. Its long list of luminary founders includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In 2009, the publishers launched The Atlantic Wire, a website to aggregate opinion, editorial, and news from a wide range of reputable sources.

July 9-10, 2013
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Giving people a broader understanding of the world around them is a noble goal, and one that Track180 founder Drue Hontz takes very seriously.

Track180 launched its iPad app today to provide an easier way for people to consume information about global issues and current events. The ultimate goal is to raise awareness and inspire people to get involved in causes they believe in. Right now there is so much content on the Internet that it can be difficult to sort through the noise and find out what is really going on. Track180′s brings multiple points-of-view together in one place so readers gain an in-depth, global perspective on the issues of the day.

“When I started this project, it was to solve my own pain point,” Hontz said in an interview with VentureBeat. “I wanted to learn more about breaking news, so I’d read an article and then go to other sites to get different points of view, and then I’d want to make connections to things that happened six months ago, and see how a story developed over time and its implications. How do I do that without spending hours and hours of time and research?”

When building the application, Hontz focused displaying large amounts of information in a digestible way. News topics look like bubbles that float and bounce off each other. Each story has a core theme and “petals” stem off the center with related content. The goal is to create a balanced presentation that includes articles from outlets on all sides of the political spectrum, while also adding in local and expert content.

The system collects content from 1200 different sources, ranging from the New York Times to Chinese business blogs, and filters it into the appropriate pipeline. From there, an experienced editorial team curate the stories to create a well-rounded perspective. Another key feature is the “TrackSwitcher” which allows readers to view an event’s ripple effect across several topics and navigate between them to see the larger implications, and connects them to opportunities to get involved.

“In five minutes, Track180 gives you the amount of information it would take you five hours to research,” Hontz said. “And sometimes within these vantage points, there is a call to action which lets readers get directly involved in the issues they are learning about. We are global citizens now and all affecting each other. I wanted to give people an easy path to make a difference.”

For example, if you are reading an article about sex trafficking, you not only have access to a video from a human rights worker, coverage from a local news outlet, a report from an NGO, and a lengthy feature from an American journalist, but also a link to an organization that can help you contribute to their cause.

This is Hontz’s first Internet startup and he said that he is able to do out-of-the-box thinking because he “didn’t know the rules.” His background was in the elevator industry, which we entered during his teens. He built a multi-million dollar servicing company that sold in 2005, worked for the acquirer for a few years, and then took some time off. During that time, he grew passionate about current events but felt the system for gathering and reporting the news was “in need of repair.” As a tinkerer by trade, he set out to fix the problem. And thus Track180 was born. Track180 is based in New Haven, Connecticut.

It’s easy to become caught up in tweets or Facebook posts alleging a story is true when there is very little to back it up. Recent events like the Boston Marathon bombing and fertilizer plant explosion in Texas incite a swarm of incorrect information including photos, videos, and stories. It’s important as a consumer of news to be able to determine what’s fake and what actually happened.

Serge Malenkovich, writer for the Kaspersky Daily, gave readers a “Crash Course in Fact Checking,” simple ways to determine if what you see online is true. Make sure you don’t repost something false (and fall prey to the Internet trolls) by following these tips.

Whether or not a story was posted on a reliable news source is a quick way to tell if it’s true or not. Although news outlets like CNN and FoxNews sometimes report inaccurate stories, they are quick to follow up with a correction when they realize their error.

Other outlets like Bloomberg, BBC, CBS, and NBC are good go-to sites for news of the day without spin.

“Just Google it,” is another tip Malenkovich points out quickly clears up any misunderstandings. You can search topics or stories using Google News, and the search engine pulls from only journalistic sources, like those we mentioned above.

Finding a source is another way to determine factuality. Malenkovich notes it’s one of the fact-checking musts that journalists do and it should apply to readers as well. Head back to the search engine and type in your query with “official site,” and you’ll be able to find (or not) a legitimate source.

Fake quotes and images permeate the Internet. Sometimes it’s quite obvious when it’s incorrect, however it’s easy to get duped – like we saw when Photoshopped images masqueraded as photographs of Superstorm Sandy and several news reports picked them up. An image search is one way of finding out if an image is legitimate, however Malenkovich points out the (awesome and helpful) site Pskiller that determines whether photos were doctored.

When in doubt, you can always go to Snopes, one of the most comprehensive analyzers of hoaxes on the Internet. From the sniper cheerleader circulating Facebook in recent weeks to the false claim that Coke acids are bad for you, Snopes is the first to point out flaws in popular news and information being passed around the web.

Users fact checking more in-depth government information can check out FactCheck.org, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization monitoring factual accuracy of politicians and political players.

It’s vital to determine what stories are true in media. Next time you’re enthralled in a hard-to-believe story on the Internet, take a minute to check out its legitimacy. You might be surprised.

Image via Room 167

July 9-10, 2013
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Stepping even further into the media fray, LinkedIn announced today that it has acquired the popular news reader app Pulse.

LinkedIn ended up paying $90 million for Pulse, 90 percent of which was stock and 10 percent cash. We heard last month that a deal between the two companies was possibly in the works, but at the time it seemed far from final.

The acquisition makes a lot of sense for LinkedIn, as it’s now focusing on becoming a major media destination, and not just a professional social network. We’ve noticed the power of LinkedIn’s news feed and LinkedIn Today, the company’s catered selection of interesting stories, in our own traffic records.

Pulse’s apps aggregate news updates from more than 750 publications, as well as social networks. So far the company has more than 30 million users. With the death of Google Reader (and seemingly, RSS in general), Pulse’s apps are now even more appealing to news hounds. (Yes, there’s an importer to easily bring your Google Reader feeds over to Pulse.)

“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content,” said Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of products, in a blog post today. “Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs … Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.”

In a brief Slideshare presentation explaining the acquisition, LinkedIn notes that it Pulse’s current apps “will continue to be support,” but the two companies are working on “new and innovative ways to publisher, discovery, and share your professional knowledge.”

Pulse co-founder Akshay Kothari confirmed that the companies apps won’t change in a blog post of his own: “LinkedIn is the perfect partner as we continue our journey. The company shares our passions and values, our belief in the power of knowledge and elevated discussion, particularly for professionals looking for insights to help make them better at what they do.”

The deal is sure to have pleased Pulse’s investors. The San Francisco-based company raised $10 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and others.

July 9-10, 2013
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Yahoo has acquired Summly, a startup that has developed technology to automatically summarize news articles for mobile sites, the company announced this morning.

Terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed, and Yahoo notes that it’s expected to close in the second quarter. The Summly team will be joining Yahoo and the existing Summly iPhone app will be shut down. Yahoo’s Adam Cahan, senior vice president of mobile and emerging products, says Summly’s technology will “come to life throughout Yahoo’s mobile experiences soon.”

“Our vision is to simplify how we get information and we are thrilled to continue this mission with Yahoo!’s global scale and expertise,” Summly founder Nick D’Aloisio wrote in a blog post. “After spending some time on campus, I discovered that Yahoo! has an inspirational goal to make people’s daily routines entertaining and meaningful, and mobile will be a central part of that vision. For us, it’s the perfect fit.”

D’Aloisio started programming at just 12 years old, and he founded Summly last fall at 15. It’s not the only news summarization app out there, but Summly packs in a surprising amount of elegant design on top of its news blurb tech. It’s a shame the app is being killed off, but hopefully D’Aloisio and his team can bring some design smarts to Yahoo’s other mobile products.

London-based Summly has raised more than $1.5 million from several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, and others.

Pew Research took a long look at what Twitterati say about major social and political issues and compared it to what opinion polls say. The differences are significant.

“At times the Twitter conversation is more liberal than survey responses, while at other times it is more conservative,” the research firm said when announcing the results. “Often it is the overall negativity that stands out.”

For example, Twitter users were 46 percent positive about California’s February 2012 same-sex marriage ruling, and only 8 percent negative. Public opinion polls, however, which are both anonymous and run with at least some attempt at scientific sampling, were only 33 percent positive — and 44 percent negative. And while Twitter Nation was 77 percent happy that President Barack Obama was re-elected, America was only 52 percent unhappy, and 45 percent unhappy.

In addition, during the October presidential debates 66 percent of Americans polled thought GOP candidate Mitt Romney had done a better job, but 59 percent of Twitter users thought Obama had won.

Why the difference?

Pew says that Twitter users are only a small slice of the overall population. Only about three percent of U.S. adults tweet or retweet news, and only 13 percent say they read Twitter updates. This small slice, according to Pew, skews young and skews Democrat … and skews the overall reaction to public events.

The upshot on Twitter polls?

“While this provides an interesting look into how communities of interest respond to different circumstances, it does not reliably correlate with the overall reaction of adults nationwide,” the Pew report says.

photo credit: woodleywonderworks via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
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Google won. Publishers won. No one won.

Google won’t have to pay German news publishers to show short snippets of news, thanks to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s parliamentary coalition. But the law doesn’t specify how long those snippets can be. And the publishers association is also claiming victory, saying that the new legislation allows them to decide how Google — and others — can use their content.

In other words, Germany has replaced a complete mess with an entirely new complete mess. Which is perfectly reflected in the news coverage:

Bloomberg reports that “Google defeats publishers over web copyright in German vote.” GigaOm reports that “German parliament passes ‘Google tax’ law, forcing royalty payments for news snippets.

Which means no one has a clue.

The good part for Google is that the new law says aggregators can display “single words or very small text excerpts” without paying royalties. The good part for German publishers — according to the publishers — is that they get to choose whether and how aggregators use their content:

An automatic right of use is not associated with the approved scheme. Rather, it is open to publishers to make the business decision that they agree with search engines and aggregators who wish to use the content for commercial publishing.

[This] gives the publishers a fair policy instrument with which to make decisions on the commercial use of their content by search engines and aggregators themselves. This is a real signal of parliament, which underscores the value of a free press and journalistic content.

The worst part of the new law would seem to be the fact that the bill does not define what “very small text excerpts” are. Is that five words? Ten? The first paragraph? The phrase is completely open to interpretation, and putting “single words” just before it only makes them trend to really, really, really small. A quick check of Google News reveals that an average snippet on the site right now seems to be in the 20-  to 30-word range.

Does that count? Will a judge in a new case brought a few months from now agree that 20-30 words is “very small?”

All of which means that the short version of this article is: Google and news publishers in Germany are going to have more problems before this all gets figured out, and this recent legislation was a complete waste of time.

photo credit: dullhunk via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
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While I was impressed with Thirst’s gorgeous Twitter client when it launched over the summer, the app was ultimately just that — a very pretty Twitter client.

Now Thirst has revamped its iOS app to create a social network for personalized news discovery, taking advantage of the language processing tools it previously developed along with the experience of building a client for a major social network. It’s also launching a web client to satisfy desktop news junkies.

“Under the hood, you don’t read the same feeds as Google Reader. We find the topics relevant to you,” Thirst Labs chief executive Anuj Verma said in an interview with VentureBeat, hitting on how Thirst differs from competing news apps like Flipboard and Pulse. “You don’t really have to hunt for the content.”

Thirst is now a social network of its own instead of just another window for viewing Twitter. Verma said that this is another major way that the app is different from other news readers, though it’s only a matter of time before apps like Pulse attempt to rally their many users into a social network.

Just like its first app, the new Thirst app is full of great imagery and a design that begs you to touch it. Upon opening the app for the first time on your iPhone or iPad, you can connect it to your social networks and instantly have access to a wide variety of topics (currently the app has a dedicated section for breaking stories from the State of the Union and New York Fashion Week). Finding and reading news stories within the app is a pleasant experience, and you can easily like, dislike, share, and comment on stories with it.

Like many other discovery apps, Thirst learns from the stories you read and interact with to deliver more relevant content to you. That analysis technology was one of the major reasons the company sought to be more than just a Twitter app.

“We wanted a higher ceiling, something that had bigger potential and could be its own company some day,” Verma said. “The original app had this core [semantic analysis] technology underneath he hood, and we took a step back and said our tech is pretty good — we realized we can look at anything and find out what users are talking about.”

The San Francisco-based Thirst Labs has raised $950,000 in seed funding from BlueRun Ventures, Steve Newcomb, and Jason Krikorian.

July 9-10, 2013
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Like one part Siri and one part morning news update, a new app called Winston could change the way you consume news online.

Launching today on the iPhone for free, Winston reads aloud recent news and social media updates through a distinguished electronic English accent. The app summarizes news to highlight the juicy bits, and it also translates your Twitter and Facebook updates into easily absorbed nuggets (ignoring hashtags, abbreviations, and the usual social media mess).

Think of it like an NPR news brief mixed together with a news reading app like Pulse, and you’ll get an idea of what Winston’s developer Reactor Labs is up to.

“There are plenty of times during the day when we realized people can’t read a screen,” Reactor Labs co-founder and chief executive Aaron Ting told VentureBeat in an interview last week.

In particular, Ting and his team built Winston with a typical wake up experience in mind — when you’ll likely be groggy, and may only need a quick summary of breaking news and weather. (Gorgeous imagery plays alongside the stories, though it’s not entirely necessary to watch.) The app also sports Airplay support, so you can easily throw its updates over to an Airplay speaker or Apple TV as you’re eating breakfast.

Reactor Labs plans to eventually allow Winston to access your daily agenda and add voice commands, both of which will make Winston seem even more like a loyal butler. Ting notes that Winston also sorts every bit of content it receives through semantic analysis, and it pays attention to the content you interact with. Basically, it’s always getting smarter.

In my brief testing, I found Winston to be gorgeously designed and I loved its approach to news clips. Even though it summarizes news posts, it generally does a great job of delivering the most relevant information. Winston was less successful with social media updates, often getting hung up on Twitter user names and the actual intent of particular updates. When it did work, Winston’s social media summaries were also fairly uninformative, with updates like “Joe tweeted about Facebook,” and “Jane had something negative to say about Twitter.”

But Winston is yet young, so I’m confident Reactor Labs can iron out its social media kinks. There have been other attempts at apps that read aloud your news, like Voice Brief and Read it Aloud, but Winston’s combination of smart summarizing technology and semantic analysis makes it far more compelling than anything that has come before.

Reactor Labs is based in Boulder, Colorado and has raised $750,000 in seed funding from Forest Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
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Hear ye, hear ye: The Knight Foundation named the winners of its third Knight News Challenge today.

The Knight Foundation supports “transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities, and foster the arts.” In 2007, the foundation launched the Knight News Challenge to promote the next generation of media innovation. The challenge occurred three times in 2012, with the first two challenges themed around networks and data.

Winners receive a share of $5 million and support from the Knight Foundation’s extensive network of influential people and advisors. Today, it awarded eight mobile media ventures a total of $2.4 million.

“In 2013 the number of Internet-enabled mobile devices is expected to be greater than the number of computers for the first time,” said Michael Maness, VP for journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation.  “These eight Knight News Challenge projects, and the innovators behind them, are helping to stretch the ways people around the world are engaging with information and using it to shape their communities.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is one of the recipients, nabbing $600,000 to make it easier for people in developing counties to access its content. In addition to Wikipedia, the winners include:

• Witness: Helping newsrooms authenticate the deluge of photos and videos emerging from news events by creating an app that automatically stamps the content with identifying information, including the location where it was taken. The project is lead by the human rights organization Witness in partnership with The Guardian Project.

• Digital Democracy: Enabling residents of the Peruvian Amazon to document the effects of mining and oil drilling by creating a mobile tool kit they can use to collect and share data.

• RootIO: Piloting software that will connect basic mobile phones with a transmitter to turn them into micro community radio stations. The effort is being tested in Uganda.

• Abayima: Creating an app that turns a SIM card into a storage device for news and information. The app will be particularly useful in crisis situations, enabling journalists and others to safely transfer information when communication networks are compromised or disabled.

• Textizen: Expanding the ways governments can collect citizen input by enabling it through text. Piloted through Code for America, Textizen works by placing survey questions in physical places like parks and bus stops where residents will encounter them and can text in their opinion.

• TKOH: Creating a more natural tool for recording oral histories with an app that prompts people to tell stories when they see pre-selected photos or videos.

• Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation: Connecting small farmers in developing countries with advice and feedback via a platform through which they can ask questions and have them quickly answered by farmers in other communities. In the pilot, a Kenyan farmer received advice on frost control and tips on raising rabbits.

Over the course of the past six years, the Knight Foundation has put more than $32 million into funding 88 projects. In December, it partnered with San Francisco’s public media station KQED and the Public Radio Exchange to launch media accelerator program Matter Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
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Launch.it, a New York City-based startup that has built a platform for managing and distributing news, has been tapped to power the onslaught of news coming from startups at the Consumer Electronics Show next month.

The company will serve as a news platform for exhibitors at Eureka Park, the startup innovation portion of CES, as part of its partnership with the Consumer Electronics Association. Launch.it will provide a central spot for startups to publish their news and contact information at CES, as well as provide detailed analytics about visitors.

In short, it’s a far better alternative to throwing flash drives and PDFs at journalists and prospective investors. For startups, Launch.it gives them one place to send anyone interested in their company. And for journalists and everyone else, they’ll know exactly where to go to learn more about an intriguing startup.

“Our big vision is a free self-publishing platform to unlock the news,” said Trace Cohen, president and co-founder of Launch.it. “We want to be the biggest searchable database [of news] … almost to disintermediate Google.”

For its customers, Launch.it offers a bunch of useful features, including: a Wiki-like environment to allow customers to easily update their news, Facebook comments, the ability to buy and test out services, and the ability to let media and investors “follow” companies for instant news updates.

While Launch.it is starting with Eureka Park for now, its goal is to eventually offer a centralized spot for the thousands of companies exhibiting at CES, Cohen tells me. The father and son company (chief executive Brian Cohen is Trace’s father) has also partnered with Ultralight Startups and ShowStoppers, which runs product showcase events at popular conferences. So far, Launch.it powers news sites for around 300 to 400 companies.

You’d think by now that someone would have come up with a solution to modernizing the news distribution process, but Cohen tells me he was just as surprised at the lack of innovation in the market when he kicked off Launch.it at the New York Tech Meetup in May. One potential competitor is Virtual Press Office, which was acquired by PRNewswire in 2009, but Cohen notes that’s less appealing than his company since it resells wire services and isn’t consumer-facing. (Also, Virtual Press Office looks like it was made a decade ago.)

Launch.it is completely bootstrapped and only has three employees (along with an “off-shore” tech team in Long Island), but Cohen says the company is looking for strategic partnerships.

Photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
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Buried in a lengthy press release about News Corp’s long-proposed business separation, the company unceremoniously announced the end of The Daily, its experimental iPad-only news app.

Production of the Daily’s iPad app will cease on December 15, 2012, though News Corp says its brand will “live on” in other properties. Additionally, News Corp’s experience with The Daily won’t go to waste — the company says technology and “other assets,” including some staff, from the app will move to the New York Post. The Daily publisher Greg Clayman will lead News Corp’s digital strategy.

The news isn’t a huge surprise since The Daily cut 30 percent of its staff in July. The Daily launched in February 2011 and reportedly cost News Corp about $30 million a year. It eventually made its way to a few Verizon Android tablets, as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The plan was to break even after five years — but it appears The Daily’s slow growth made that plan unsustainable.

As the first all-iPad magazine, The Daily also saw some initial support from Apple. Eddy Cue, vice president of interactive services at Apple, joined Murdoch on stage to launch the app. But even from the beginning, it seemed like a big production for a fairly limited market. After testing it out for a few weeks, I let my Daily subscription lapse and never gave it a second thought.

“From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation,” News Corp chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch said in a statement today. “Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties.”

News Corp announced back in June that it would split into two separate publicly traded companies. Today the company revealed that its future publishing arm will retain the name News Corp, while the entertainment arm will be called Fox Group. Murdoch will continue to serve as chairman of News Corp, but will be handing the chief executive role to Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch will serve as chairman and CEO for Fox Group.

Cameron Yuill, chief executive of AdGent Digital, says the failure of The Daily came down to a simple math problem:

Not enough subscribers to cover the cost of production and distribution (Apple’s 30% fee). The Daily had reportedly 100,000 subscribers at $40 per year which by my math is only $4 million annually. The mistake News Corp. made was hiring (expensive) editorial, journalists and technologists to build and provide content for the newspaper. No doubt overhead was way in excess of income. Murdoch has made the decision that The Daily is not growing fast enough to ever have a chance of covering its costs, let alone making a profit. So The Daily bites the dust. Fair enough.

At first, he and co-founder Steve Huffman planned to make the world suck less by inventing a phone-based sub sandwich ordering app … in 2005. But after a spring break meeting with Y Combinator’s Paul Graham — before Y Combinator existed — and an initial rejection from Y Combinator, Huffman and Ohanian decided to create “the front page of the web.”

And Reddit, the site that had 47 million visitors last month, was born.

“Content was being created — even back in 2005 — by such a broad array of sources that no one source could really lay claim to that,” Ohanian said. “Unless it aggregated everything.”

So the pair took the ideas behind two popular sites of the day– Delicious, an early social-bookmarking site, and Slashdot, the first truly large geek community focused on news and ideas — and combined them. When they joined YC, the two worked day and night on the first version of Reddit.

“The only outdoor experiences we had,” Ohanian says, “were in Azeroth, the fictional world of Warcraft.”

The site launched accidentally after three weeks of work, after Paul Graham criticized the pair for not launching earlier. They got a beta version live, and Graham — unbeknownst to Ohanian and Huffman — linked to it in a blog post, giving Reddit its first thousand visitors.

Here’s the whole story:

As is well-known, Huffman and Ohanian created fake users and much of the early site’s content. But not for long.

“The day I woke up and Reddit was working on its own was just the most incredible feeling,” Huffman says. “It was, like, holy shit … we’ve got a thing that’s making a difference in people’s lives!”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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YouTube won a News Innovation Award from the International Center for Journalists last night. Ironically, that came just a day before the Israeli army used the service, along with Twitter and its own blog, to almost livecast the assassination of a Hamas leader.

YouTube has become a massive news destination, YouTube chief executive Salar Kamangar said in his acceptance speech, with 7,000 hours of news-related footage uploaded every single day. Fully a third of searches on YouTube are news-related, and after the March earthquake in Japan this year, the top 20 YouTube videos of the disaster were watched almost 100 million times.

Appropriately or not, the award comes just a day before Israel published a video on YouTube showing the killing of Ahmed Jabari, a Hamas military leader, by missile.

That’s news at its most raw, and given that it was presented by one of the participants in the event not by a theoretically neutral party, it might showcase better than anything else the changing face of news in a connected digital world.

YouTube is also moving into live-streaming more than ever before, live-streaming the recent U.S. elections, for example, to 24 million people in 215 countries around the globe.

Here’s Kamangar’s acceptance speech.

Note to YouTube PR: Drop the silly cat and dog puppets next time.

photo credit: Viktor Hertz via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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At 12 years old, Nick D’Aloisio began his career as a mobile programmer when he downloaded the Apple Developer Kit. By 15, one of his hacks, an app known as “Trimit,” caught the eye of an investor in Asia offering to fund “the company’s” next project.

What company? D’Aloisio, a school boy from South London, admitted to this venture capitalist that it was merely an after-school creation.

A whizz at the programming language C, D’Aloisio had created the app to test his skills in machine-learning technology, a branch of artificial intelligence that yields trends and patterns in a mass of data, and makes smarter predictions over time.

Summly’s founder demoes the app in San Francisco

Less than a year later, the “Internet boy wonder,” as he was dubbed by the European tech media after an appearance at Le Web’s conference, had developed a keen interest in web summarization technology. It’s a simple enough problem, but the execution is tricky. How do we take a meaty piece of content and whittle it down to its bare bones?

Today, D’Aloisio is ready to take his iPhone app public. Summly, available to download for free, reduces full-blown articles into snippets, making it easier to skim the news on a mobile device.

From ESPN to VentureBeat, the app includes almost all of the major news outlets. You lightly tap the screen to browse news, and if a summarized story piques your interest, you can share it with your friends via SMS, email, Twitter, or Facebook, or click a link the bottom of the screen to access the original, full-length story.

The founder told me he hit on the idea for the novel way to scan the news while studying for his History “GCSE” (an exam that all British school kids sit before their junior year). He quickly became frustrated by thousands of web search results that were slow to load and sometimes impossible to access on mobile.

“There has to be a way to summarize this information into bite-size,” he said. Trimit, the app he developed, summarized content into 140, 500 or 1,000 character summaries. With a little finessing, he moved on to Summly, which can automatically break down full pages of text into bullet-points. 

Most summarization experts have yet to apply their knowledge to a mainstream market. In a highly strategic move, D’Aloisio is applying the technology to the news, since, as he said, “No one had figured out how to perfect the news-reading experience on mobile.” In many cases, it’s relatively simple: Most journalists still write in the Associated Press (AP) style, so the first paragraph contains the crux of the news.

It’s not nearly as straight-forward as cropping the first few sentences, however. In the background, the technology works by scraping content, pulling out the most important bits, categorizing each story by topic, and displaying the news in a highly visual way. The summarized stories fit comfortably on your screen (tailored to both the iPhone 4 and 5).

At a coffee shop in San Francisco, D’Aloisio led me through a demo of the app: It’s a highly intuitive with the algorithm working to recommend news stories to you based on your pre-existing set of interests. As you shift location (from the UK to the U.S., for instance), the stories will change as well.

In person, D’Aloisio is wise beyond his years. It’s hard to believe this media-savvy, sharp-talking business executive is a teenager taking a leave of absence from school. He is both a high-school student and an employer. No longer a solo coder, he now has a team of seven people working for him. In addition, half a dozen researchers at SRI, the non-profit technology research institute based in Silicon Valley, are working with D’Aloisio to perfect the algorithm.

Some major technical hurdles  remain: Magazine-style features are tougher to summarize, and are often thrown out by the algorithm. The team is currently working on auto-translation (notoriously problematic and obvious to anyone who has ever used Google Translate, BabelFish and the like), and they have plans to integrate French and Spanish into the app. If they get it right, it could be a neat language-learning tool.

The team will also butt heads with Pulse, Flipboard, and a host of other beautifully-designed news-reading apps, especially since it is in the process of designing an interface for tablet devices. To succeed, it will need to win over voracious news consumers who routinely use web-based aggregators like Google Reader. The competition for these users is heating up: Circa is experimenting with ways to re-frame the news on mobile, and NewsBlur, a Y Combinator alum, recently launched its iPad app.

Summly is backed by several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Yoko Ono and many more.

Top image: Wired UK

Circa has released a new mobile app for news. And — hallelujah — it is most definitely not just another copycat attempt to cash in on the path that Flipboard and Pulse paved.

With cofounder Ben Huh of Cheezburger fame, Circa chief executive Matt Galligan is attempting to reframe what news is and how news is consumed when delivered via mobile channels. And no, in spite of the competition, he doesn’t see that space as crowded right now.

“Flipboard and Pulse are great ways to aggregate existing articles, but the content is the same,” Galligan told me this morning while dealing with a little failure-to-launch crisis (Apple’s app store didn’t release the app at the expected time). “The best way to deliver news is to tailor the news to the device is to make it not just prettier but actually different content.”

Source: iTunes

A Circa news story.

So Circa built a new kind of content management system, hired 12 editors, and redefined news.

Instead of a story or an article, like this one, Circa news is a collection of points: key details. Instead of one post that tells you everything you need or want to know, Circa points back to its sources so you can easily seek more information. And instead of a static one-off story, Circa follows the news for you, if you choose, alerting you when new details come to light.

In other words, it’s context, not just content.

“You can follow breaking news or stories that take place over time,” says Galligan. “So for instance, about that Air France flight that went down a few years ago, they very recently found the plane’s black box. If you happened to be interested in that event, you would have to kind of be lucky to see that latest development to know about it … you have to stay very engaged.”

But people, he argues, shouldn’t need to have to remember to check up on previous stories. Instead, he argues, it’s the job of journalism to send the news updates, to keep users informed on not just categories of events, but actual events.

That’s new, and that’s significant.

It’s likely we’ve all experienced this scenario: You’re interested in a story but never quite hear the end. You read about the survivor of a crash, but not how they’re doing years later. Or you see news about the stock scandal, but not whether anyone actually gets hauled into court.

Circa, if it works, could fix that.

Circa-style news will be a little Sergeant Friday-style: Just the facts, ma’am. And there will be no original reporting. But the point, Galligan says, is to drive people to the full story.

“It’s not original information but it is original content,” he says. “Trust is important to use … on a point-by-point basis we cite our sources, and while we may be the brief for someone, they can read the full articles.”

Circa has been in development for about a year and has raised $900,000 in funding. It’s Galligan’s third company — he most recently cofounded SimpleGeo, which was acquired by Urban Airship.

Oh and, in the spirit of updating the news: While I was writing this story, Circa went live on the app store. Knock yourself out.

photo credit: Zarko Drincic via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Print’s not dead! According to a just-published study from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that more than half of all U.S. tablet and smartphone owners read news on their mobile devices at least once a week, but they’re still turning to more old-school sources of news, too.

According to the study, which surveyed nearly 10,000 U.S. adults, around half of whom owned some sort of mobile device, a full 64 percent of tablets owners and 62prcent of smart phone owners said they used their devices for news at least one per week, meaning that one third of adults in the United States get some kind of news on a tablet or phone on a weekly basis, if not more frequently.

It’s interesting to note that these mobile newshounds aren’t just scanning Twitter for headlines from MSNBC. Around three quarters of tablet news-readers said they sometimes read full-length, in-depth news articles. Nearly one in five said they read in-depth articles on their tablets every day.

Still, most of these people are only using these devices to check the news around once a day tops, and they’re usually doing so from home.

“Even with the broadening population and wide range of competing activities, mobile owners are drawn to news on their tablet and smartphones,” said the project’s deputy director, Amy Mitchell, in a statement accompanying the official report.

“The evidence is also mounting that mobile devices are adding to rather than replacing how much news people consume,” said Mitchell.

The study further showed that almost half of tablet news readers said their tablets add to the total amount of news they consume. Around one third of tablet news readers said they’re exposed to more sources of news than they had access to previously.

Around half of tablet-using news junkies said they also used a smartphone to access news; three quarters said they consumed news on a laptop or desktop computer, and — brace yourselves — half of these tablet users are also still reading print newspapers and magazines.

One out of four tablet owners who use their iPads and Kindle Fires (and other tablets) for news said they read and watched the news on all four platforms.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Taptu, creator of mobile apps that let you “DJ” your news, has been acquired by RSS advertising firm Mediafed, the companies announced today.

The union of the UK-based companies will allow Mediafed to expand its RSS monetization platform on mobile, after finding success with RSS ads on the desktop. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but we imagine it was well above Taptu’s $20 million in funding.

“[The acquisition] came about as kind of an opportunity, we’ve been working with Mediafed, and they have a fantastic tech platform,” said Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar in an interview with VentureBeat. He added that Mediafed has also been effective at building relationships with publishers — it counts major names like The New York Times and The Guardian among the 1,200-plus publishers on its platform.

Mediafed touts itself as the first company to make a major business around RSS. The company powers ads on news feeds from more than 125 million consumers around the globe, 50 million of which are on mobile (up from 20 million just three months ago).

Taptu fans shouldn’t worry about the company’s mobile news readers disappearing. Mediafed CEO Ashley Harrison said in an interview that his company is going to keep the Taptu brand and will continue to develop its apps. This week, Mediafed is going to debut Chinese, Italian, and Russian versions of the Taptu app.

While Mediafed isn’t a major name in the U.S. just yet, primarily because the company has focused on BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) first, helping Mediafed to expand its U.S. presence was one of the things that attracted Taptu investor DFJ Esprit to the acquisition, DFJ partner Krishna Visvanathan told VentureBeat.

Mediafed got its start with $450,000 in funding from angel investors, but it hasn’t pursued additional funding since it has been profitable since its first day.

Photo via Shutterstock

Do you find yourself reading about Kim Kardashian but only sharing articles from the Harvard Business review? You are not alone.

“If Google represents the entire web, Bitly represents the tiny percentage of the web to which people are paying attention,” says URL shortener Bitly’s chief data scientist Hilary Mason. And the content to which you pay attention is almost entirely distinct from the content you share with others. “The things you share are things that make you look good,” Mason explains, “things which you are happy to tie into your identity.”

Today New Yorkers are lapping up a story about a struggling actor who failed to extort money from Harvey Weinstein while the residents of Chicago are more interested in a newly discovered immune system disease. Want to know what’s interesting people in Dublin or Dubai? “Realtime,” Bitly’s social search engine, tracks the most popular links on the web by location, topic, and social network. It’s already being used by the recently relaunched Digg. According to Mason, the links tracked by Bitly are representative of the global social web. Only 30 percent of its traffic originates in the U.S.

The attention that content receives on the various social networks depends on its type. A lot of technology content is, unsurprisingly, trafficked from Twitter while Facebook users prefer to share celebrity gossip. How content spreads on a network depends on two factors: whether it’s breaking news or evergreen content, and the design of the network itself. Twitter is by nature real time. A link’s half-life is the amount of time it takes for it to receive half of its total lifetime clicks. On Facebook the half-life is 3.1 hours. Twitter readers are only interested for 2.7 hours. YouTube viewers hang in there for a full 7 hours. Pinterest activity peaks on Saturdays.

I asked Mason about the downsides of the explosion in data which, like Bitly’s, is gathered from human beings. ”There’s a growing distance between the people who have the data and people who are the subject of the data,” she says. “You as an individual don’t know what people know about you. We will also probably see some horrible things happening with disconnected data being connected in a way which violates someone’s privacy. Even though I didn’t check in to the last event I was speaking at, so many people mentioned that I was there that I’ve lost any kind of privacy around my presence.”

The U.K.’s Prince Harry would probably agreed with that sentiment today. Hmm…did I just share that? 

Bitly is based in New York and recently raised $15 million in a new round of funding.

Hacker Dojo, Silicon Valley’s own hacker-friendly work and meeting space, has run into some financial trouble. Now it’s holding a uniquely geeky bake sale to help defray its costs.

Last week we ran an interview with Katy Levinson, the director of development at Hacker Dojo. The hacker space has run into some financial trouble meeting the safety requirements mandated by the city of Mountain View, Calif., where it’s located, and the Dojo has turned to fundraising and Kickstarter for help.

Through fundraising auction site Goodwillion, Hacker Dojo’s community has banded together to offer an eclectic selection of rewards, services, and meetings. Hacker Dojo office coordinator Marie Knox’s other passion is baking, so she’s offering up a cake of the winning bidder’s choosing. “Hacker Dojo is more than just the place I work for,” Knox told VentureBeat. “It is also a wonderful community where I have made numerous friends. It has also provided a safe and productive meeting place for getting together with people to work on outside projects. For the right price, I will bake a cake of your choosing. I’ve been baking solo for 15 years now, so I can assure you that I am fully qualified to deliver a cake of high-quality deliciousness.”

I was ready to drop down whatever it took to win Knox’s auction and then force her to slave away over a ridiculously elaborate Super Mario Bros.-themed wedding cake (just because), but the fine print in her auction forbids it. So close!

A personal party planner is also available in case you need a place to eat your cake. ”As a founding member of Hacker Dojo,” says Casey Greene, “I’ve been amazed to see this place grow from an idea bounced around a table into a real community center, bringing people together and having them create such awesome things. I love throwing parties, and this auction is a great way to support the Dojo, bring even more people together, and have fun at the same time.”

Next up is Fake Grimlock (sorry, I refuse to write anything in all caps), a “giant robot startup dinosaur” that has more followers on Twitter than GamesBeat does. For the 1 percent of you who may be wondering, the real Grimlock is one of the most beloved Transformers characters of all-time, and he’s making his big comeback in this year’s Transformers: Fall of  Cybertron video game.

Fake Grimlock is currently the highest-earning auction out of the Hacker Dojo set, sitting pretty at $900. On offer is an hour-long Skype call to discuss startup ideas, tips, and how to not be a moron in general.  To his credit, Grimlock has maintained a healthy (and entertaining) stream of comments on his auction page, far more than anyone else.

“I’m glad to give back to the Dojo in such a fun way,” says software engineer Ben Grue, who is  auctioning up a casual or business-type meeting. “The spirit of this is awesome … although it’s a bit humbling to be worth less than a 10th of a Twitter robot dinosaur.”

Though there are some exceedingly successful (pricey) auctions, quite a few are in the single digits or low tens of dollars. ”With hacker prices so low, you can’t afford to not have your own hacker,” says Hacker Dojo Founder Brian Klug, himself available for a meeting via auction.

Be warned, however, that the auction process is a minor hassle. To pay for our $15 cup of tea with a commercial interior designer, we had to send the money through WePay and then forward the email receipt to support@goodwillion, who then credited our Goodwillion account the proper amount several hours later. It’s not like we had to solve a Rubik’s cube or anything, but it’s not at seamless as we’ve come to expect from similar online checkout and auction systems.

The “Like” feature (which determines an auction’s placement on the front page) can also be gamed since there’s seemingly no limit to how many times a single user can like something, even their own auction. Goodwillion is still in beta and is using Hacker Dojo as a sort of trial run, so hopefully the site irons out the user experience and takes a look at how Amazon and eBay do things for some excellent guidelines. There’s a lot of potential here to do good for many different causes in a fun and rewarding way for all involved.

Levinson also assured VentureBeat that most of the auctioneers are well-known Dojo members, but in the off chance a winning bidder may not be able to receive their reward, a refund would be provided.

A large number of the Hacker Dojo auctions end around noon PST on Thursday. Head on over to Goodwillion for the full list.

Update: Fake Grimlock has noted in the comments that his auction still has roughly a day left. There are also new auctions still going up for anyone who missed the first wave.

Big deal, the social network is featuring some of the cutest and warmest and heart-tuggingest status updates. Pink puppies and other people’s achingly poignant memories?

I have enough, thanks.

And it’s not even new. Mark Zuckerberg announced basically the same thing way back in July 2010.

But today I think I completely missed the point. And maybe most of us haven’t realized the true power and full potential of Facebook Stories. Frankly, it’s possible that Facebook itself doesn’t know what kind of a tiger it has created.

This morning, in the fresh light of a new dawn, I think it’s nothing less than the future of news.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook Stories: imagine many, many more dots. At much higher resolution

OK, maybe more People than Time. But still. Work with me.

Today, Facebook has just picked a few stories to highlight. Not at random, but just a few — seven to be exact. But, in true you-are-the-product modern social network style, Facebook is asking you to Add Your Story. And get a chance to Be Famous.

Hurry up.

The first 10 minutes of this social experience will make some people famous. But anything after that … you’ll have to settle for world-famous in your home town.

Because this is a perfect platform for local social news.

Imagine the best stories, from everyone not just in your limited social circle, but everyone in your community. The high school football team. The concerts at the state fair. The new road city council is pushing through the former playground.

Let’s define community widely, of course. It is your local regional physical space, yes. But, as Facebook and Flipboard and Twitter have already taught us, it’s our interest community as much if not more.

So it’s also any political or technology or global news, if it’s in your interest category. But that’s not the focus, because Facebook is ultimately about people, and Facebook Stories is about how they use … well … Facebook … to share.

And share, and share, and share we will.

There’s a reason that Facebook has pushed hard, year after year, to decrease privacy. When Mark Zuckerberg says social by default, he means public by default. And when your status updates are set to public, Facebook will be able to someday take them and populate them into a billion different Facebook Stories. Seven billion in fact: a personalized slice of social local news for every one of us.

The transformation from social utility to global publisher will be complete.

Book deal to follow … or book deals, one for every geographical social political sexual religious ethnic age interest slice of humanity.

Amazing, wonderful, and scary. It’s the future.

Image credit: Brian A. Jackson/ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Iconic prime-time news show host Larry King is launching a new program for the streaming media generation on Hulu, the company announced today on its blog.

King is, of course, best known for his CNN show, Larry King Live, which spanned three decades and in which he interviewed various celebrities, creators, politicians, and others in the media spotlight. I grew up watching King, and when I think of a generic image for “TV newsperson,” his image pops into my brain.

So I would say that the debut of his new Hulu show, appropriately titled Larry King Now, is a big deal for the up-and-coming streaming video company. The show was announced back in March for Ora.tv and is financed by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú.

King said he was compelled to get back into the news “chasing” game after one of his CNN specials didn’t air due to the breaking news coverage of the U.S. government killing al-Qaida terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden. In an interview from the Hulu blog, King said: “…had I been working, I would’ve been running in that night to do interviews. I realized then, ‘God, I miss this.’ I want to be in the hunt.”

The show began airing last night on Hulu’s website, with Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane as King’s first guest. New episodes run Monday through Thursday during the week.

In addition to King’s new show, Hulu is also adding tons of exclusive premium content to its media library, such as original programs like scripted comedy Battleground, Morgan Spurlock’s A Day in the Life reality series, travel show Up to Speed from director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Slackers), and many others.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Tablets are a dream come true for news junkies, but with a tidal wave of content spread across countless apps and sites, it’s tough to just sit back and stay informed.

Watchup, a new startup competing at our MobileBeat 2012 Innovation Competition next week, hopes to reduce the noise with its free tablet app, which lets you queue up news videos and watch them uninterrupted.

“I wanted a hands-free experience — just the best and latest news videos coming straight to me,” founder Adriano Farano told VentureBeat in an interview this week. “It’s almost a TV-like experience, but much more intimate and portable.”

The app sports a simple and elegant interface, with your queue of selected videos on the left, and videos on the right from popular news sources like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the AP. Simply choose the videos you want to watch and hit Play.

Watchup launched last week, and while Farano wouldn’t share download numbers just yet, he was excited to point out that Apple featured the app under its “New and Notable” section in the iTunes Store on Monday. That’s a sign that it’s getting enough downloads and good reviews for Apple to notice. Publishers are also interested in working together with Watchup, Farano tells me.

The app competes with Newsy, which makes its own news reports based on breaking news, as well as apps from CNN and other organizations. But Watchup has a leg-up on all of them when it comes to simplicity.

Watchup is also a finalist for our MobileBeat 2012 Innovation Competition, where it will be duking it out against other tablet apps. This year at MobileBeat we’re focusing heavily on mobile design, and with its minimalist interface and ease-of-use, Watchup caught our eye pretty quickly.

“For web design it’s all about what you show, with iPad design it’s all about what you hide,” Farano said. “I really think that the strength… the goal of designing a tablet screen, it’s still very different from designing a website.”

Farano has news in his blood. His father was an entrepreneur who owned local TV stations in Southern Italy, and Farano himself spent 12 years running news organizations in France and was a Knight Fellow at Stanford. With Watchup, he wanted to figure out a new way to augment the news experience with tablets.

Watchup got its start at Stanford’s StartX Acclerator, but Farano tells me the company is soon moving out and shacking up with another StartX alum in Palo Alto. Together, they’re aiming to build a workspace they’re calling the “tablet dojo.”

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible — visually and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, taking place July 10-11 in San Francisco, is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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The New York Times will soon be available in full on the iPad and iPhone via Flipboard‘s online media app.

The announcement is a big deal for online media startup Flipboard, which has finally scored a big publisher to give it full access to premium newspaper content. In the past, it has enticed publisher to offer samples of content. And for the New York Times, the deal represents its full entry into the age of apps.

Until now, you could read the New York Times on the nytimes.com web site or by using its iOS and Android apps. Now, subscribers will be able to read the paper using any device or software they want, including Flipboard, which creates beautiful layouts on the iPad and iPhone that look just like the real thing on paper. The newspaper will also have a shot at getting new readers, since non-subscribers can use the Flipboard app to get free access to a small slice of the newspaper’s stories.

If the Flipboard app generates revenue for the New York Times, Flipboard will get a slice. Flipboard debuted in 2010 as a cool way to look at social media, but it has added more traditional print publishers, audio content, and video too. Flipboard designed the experience — with authentication and navigation — specifically for the New York times.

In January, Flipboard said that 8 million people had downloaded and installed its apps. The New York Times on Flipboard will be available on June 28.

“With the launch of NYT Everywhere, with Flipboard, we are continuing our effort to extend the user-experience across a variety of platforms to reach readers where they want to access our journalism,” said Denise Warren, general manager, NYTimes.com and senior vice president and chief advertising officer, The New York Times Media Group. “We’re excited to offer our subscribers the option of Flipboard’s rich experience and also to bring our authoritative news, opinion and superior multimedia to a new audience of Flipboard users who may not yet be Times subscribers.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Fans of Taptu’s news DJ mobile apps will now be able to get their news fix from computers as well. The company today launched a new HTML5-powered web app that also synchronizes with all of Taptu’s existing apps — giving it a leg up on competitors like Pulse and Flipboard, which are still mobile only.

The Taptu web app will also allow you to easily share remixed streams of news with anyone on the web, even if they’re not Taptu users. And once new users catch a glimpse of Taptu’s slick web app, which also updates feeds in real-time, they could easily be tempted to sign up for the service as well.

“Taptu’s main advantage has always been our powerful search and aggregation technology that allows us to take any topic, source or keyword search and create a beautiful news reading experience around it,” Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar said in a statement today. “Today we are taking a huge step towards making Taptu a universal tool for both discovering and sharing all your personal interests.”

Launching a web app is a wise move for Taptu, since it can now directly fight aging news and RSS services like Google Reader. As more and more users give up on trying to follow a deluge of news from feed readers, a service like Taptu could let them easily filter out the noise and follow news they care about.

The company says it’s also working on bringing its web app to any mobile browser based on WebKit (which includes iOS and Android). While the company already has mobile apps on those platforms, the web app will still be useful for targeting consumers who haven’t yet signed up for Taptu. And of course, it gives the company an easy gateway to other mobile platforms without building new apps.

Taptu is based in Cambridge, England and Denver, Colorado. It has raised around $19 million in funding from DFJ Esprit and Sofinnova, and 3i Group.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The social news-reader Flud isn’t just for iOS fans anymore: the company recently launched both Android and Windows Phone apps. And now, it’s planning to raise up to $8 million in a new round of funding.

Like competitors Pulse and Taptu, Flud is a fun way to keep track of your news (and it’s a bit of a looker too). But unlike the other apps, Flud is building up a social network of its own for news junkies, instead of just relying on Facebook and Twitter. You can create a profile, follow others, and directly share news to those following you. Basically, it’s a lot like the hot photo-sharing app Instagram, except with a focus on news.

“When you give people a profile in a specialized network so they can share content with each other, you start to see interesting things in interaction,” Flud co-founder and CEO Bobby Ghoshal told VentureBeat in an interview.

Flud lets you share stories on Twitter and Facebook, but Ghoshal tells me users are 600 percent more likely to “Flud” news and share with their followers. The company updated its platform and iOS app to function more as a social network back in December, but now users on other platforms will get their chance.

Ghoshal says the company is also working on launching a web app next month — so you’ll be able to use Flud for news outside of your mobile device. The company also recently updated its iPad app to take advantage of the new iPad’s Retina Display.

Flud initially launched an Android app back in August, but the company had to pull it a month later because of a variety of issues. “We ended up screwing that up a bit,” Ghoshal said. But the company has come back even stronger with its new Android app after working closely with Google. Similarly, Flud tapped Microsoft for help when developing its Windows Phone app.

San Diego, Calif.-based Flud is now working on raising between $5 million and $8 million in a first round of funding. The company doesn’t have many details to share on that round yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some participation from its seed investors (who put in $1 million) Scott Belsky, Detroit Venture Partners, and Ludlow Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

UPDATE 3/21/2012: We’ve updated this story with the correct name of Localytics.

As our culture shifts from a desktop-based paradigm to a mobile one, news junkies are leading the trend with their consumption habits.

New data from app analytics firm Localytics show that news readers are more engaged on mobile apps than on websites and that they are more likely to return to a news app than to a news site.

Data from Nielsen showed that around 70 percent of casual news readers went to a given news site one or two times each month, and less than 10 percent of readers would visit a news site 10 or more times in a month.

By contrast, Localytics found that 29 percent of news readers will use a mobile news app at least once a month — a much smaller figure than the 70 percent of mainstream web-based news readers. However, Localytics also found that 24 percent of news readers would launch that news app more than 10 times in a month.

These news hounds who download and keep returning to their mobile news apps aren’t the casual readers Nielsen is tracking. Rather, they’re fans of a news brand (for example, the New York Times or Washington Post), and they use the apps for news discovery very much in the same way they would do if they had a physical newspaper subscription.

And for news publications, this means a whole new set of goals for use and engagement on digital properties, Localytics points out. Rather than pure traffic, the firm’s blog says, publications should be shooting for high session times, a large number of articles read, and lots of app relaunches on each mobile device.

Image courtesy of Goodluz, Shutterstock