Good luck to them. Slightly unrelated, but all these efforts at customization deprive the reader of a chance to broaden his outlook. That is the beauty of aldaily.com, or the Random Page button on Wikipedia – yes, I want to see related content, but I also want to see new things that you'd never guess I wanted just by looking at my past items.

Only available for the iPad? Lame.

Wouldn't this effort to "deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry," well, require news from the newspaper industry for its content?

Looks quite interesting. For now I'll stick to Pulse http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pulse-news-reader/... for my iPad and Good Noows http://goodnoows.com on the web..

Didn't you hear? Blogs are taking over the world. They cure cancer, too.

sounds identical to http://broadersheet.com

That's not a 'newspaper' – it doesn't create news and it certainly isn't paper. It only solves a small part of the problem and doesn't address how we pay for quality journalism. It's no good learning what I like to read if we end up in a barren, deserted, cultural wasteland with bits of useless digital tumbleweed blowing around.

These guys seem to be pretty fast, creating an app for a device before even its launch is really tough but a great strategy. They have made a good start, just have to see how they go.
http://www.dumblittleblogger.com/

I hate the movement towards native apps for everything. This should be a web app only.

So the "newspaper of the future" employs no reporters? Fantastic. Can't wait for the wonderful future of reading customized feeds of press releases.

> That's not a 'newspaper' – it doesn't create news and it certainly isn't paper.

Newspapers [are supposed to] create news, are they? I guess my old-fashioned notions of just reporting the news have gone by the wayside.

I agree with James on the wanting to see new concepts that you might not expect to be into. But then again you also have the option of just never giving anything a thumbs up. Either way I don't feel this Apollo mission is going to land them on the moon. Aesthetically I think this app is really lacking, they should take a note from USA Today's iPad app. I'm interested to see this project grow though.

Excellent! I hope and sincerely wish this sends Rupert Murdoch to the grave !!

This sounds alot like DailyMe and its Newstogram platform, which instead of trying to eliminate news sources is trying to help them by bringing personalization to their sites. Perhaps more news sites need to look at adding Newstogram to their sites.

If they want to conquer the world, why the hell would they make something just for the iPad? Makes me fear they have gimmick disease.

Well, it just "another" news apps that depends on the content of real newspapers….on the other hand HORRIBLE CHOICE of music…..

I'm stunned that TC hasn't reported on how the 3.2.1 update for the iPad apparently fixed the wifi connectivity issue, despite Apple denying it was a problem with their hardware and/or software. I installed it yesterday and so far not a single connection issue. It is as easy as 3.2.1. I guess after 3 months the iPad is practically old news for generation ADD.

Cancer = not funny
Warts = funny

I don't get it. Probably due to the awful production quality of the video. Cool music, bad video.

Is this just a favorites bar that never goes away? Unless I'm missing something (and I probably am), this will hardly revolutionize the newspaper industry.

cancerous warts=???

i just had a flashback to that david cross skit on mr. show, but now it's, "welcome to the newspaper of the future…i am a story, i am a story…i am an ad, i am an ad…i am a headline, i am a headline"

A similar product already exists on the web for free

hxxp://thoora.com

Be interesting to see what they come up with. I did find something pretty cool though. http://www.somethingcoolhappened.com. Looks sweet to me!

My gut reaction is that the majority of newspaper content should remain free (ad-supported) for individual readers while news aggregators/content-syphoners like Apollo should pay newspapers for use of their content. They're planning to profit from someone else's work, fair compensation seems due.

'Wonder how these guys feel about paywalls & whether or not it coincides with their $4.99 paywall.

I think you meant http://www.thoora.com

Next time don't mess up

So, it's an app that's only available to people who own an iPad, *and* it doesn't generate any unique content?

All they need now is a poorly-shot demo video showcasing their pedestrian design to get the Pointless Trifecta badge.

Oh…right…

Not to worry, each story will include a free offer or promo.
Journalistic integrity you say, what's that?

Uh … there already *is* the Newspaper of the Future – they call it "Twitter" ;-)

The link to Shubbam Mittal's homepage is broken. Should be shubbammittal.com

Serendipity… That's what it's called…. Serendipity.. Oh and I agree with you completely

Wow they can't invest in decent screen capturing software? Major fail.

the newspaper of the future is already here, you can see it at http://www.huffingtonpost.com

This is very similar to socialreader for the ipad … (albeit without the cool graphics)

It didn't really seem to change when he clicked the thumbs up button. Still just scattered articles…
and doing a promo video at 1:43AM? Fuzzy, shifting video. What were they on?

a big yawn. most people still want the news fed to them. hyper-customization has been around for nearly a decade and hasn't been impactful…why aren't we all getting customized rss feeds??

yahoo news and google news and cnn.com will continue to satisfy 99% of mainstream needs, digg, reddit etc and other crowdsourced sites pick up the other 1%

for the non-mainstream user, they want even more spoonfeeding as their preferences are political (fox news etc), not technical

“deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry”

That's a great start for a new company, piss off your content providers.

Agreed… horrible demo. I would have expected a bit more from a Stanford MBA. Looks like they need help with marketing.

Personal recommendations for news is cool, sure, but I agree with the comments: someone has to write the articles. Hardly a news killer.

Oh, and for interesting articles that are from almost every topic, I dig givemesomethingtoread.com. Probably one of my favorite sites.

Maybe "create news" isn't the right term… but almost all news coverage still starts with a handful of news agencies. Follow whomever you like on Twitter and you'll see re-tweeted or re-purposed content from a "major" news source. Funny how this may “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry” yet the screenshots show content from NYTimes and LA Times. The vast majority of bloggers and news sites would be screwed if it weren't for a newspaper reporter uncovering a story.

Sounds like PersonalWeb circa-2005

I really impressed by the Google :)
Like the company…

Pulse is pretty awesome, and while this thing has some definite plus sides based on the video, the video itself does a bad job selling it. Dudes, this is what the the iPad dev app is for! Don't hold a shakycam over an iPad. It kills your polish.

Know what I haven't seen in any of these iPad RSS-scraping apps yet? A focus on typography and layout. Pulse does a good job with it, but I'd love to see these apps put as much focus into the fonts and the layout as newspapers do.

Not necessarily – you it is possible to construct filters that give you windows into other groups you want to know more about.

Seriously, that video is unwatchable.

The other white meat?

Google plays a monopoly role already not only with our online life but in real. It wouldn’t be that of a surprise to see Google using our DNA in the name of 'faster search results'.

That was my thought, too… for the most part, blogs aren't reporting. Most seem to be either extended op-ed pieces, links to articles (often newspaper or magazine articles) the blogger found interesting, and/or vanity sites without the investigative aspect (and fact-checking!) that I associate with quality journalism.

If this company's ultimate objective is a world where we get our news solely from blogs — a great information 'circle-jerk' is the metaphor that comes to mind — I certainly hope that they fail. Fail spectacularly.

I bet google already bought 60% of Apollo Share's , because that's what it does with it's very deep pockets .

But James was talking about the opposite thing…that non-personalized newspaper will sometimes expose you to things you didn't know that you want to know more about.

If you are wondering where the music is coming from it's the Canon in D remixed by some Koreans in this wonderful video. Much better than the boring demo being shown.

Read this artcile,thought the app soundeed cool, bought it.
Pretty dire app!!
No way to add news feeds. Can't delete feeds. Click on fave's and it bring up a safari network error!
Only one source is from outside the States. Fine if you want pages of stories on Obama,Baseball and US Stocks.
Clicked on what seemed to be an interesting story from Huffington. It too me to a tweet!
It loads the entire webpage, sometimes the 'articles' are only a couple of lines long, such as the huffington tweets which seem to be 'news'. Clicked on a 'news' item from yahoo. Get the whole yahoo site loading, again the 'story' was just 2 lines long , a brief copy of some reuters news item.
Do you actually try out these apps before you post how amazing they are???
The layout is awful, the main box keeps on popping back up after you've minimised it, covering the story again.

Or as much as possible. All personal computers are running a web browser of some sort, which are capable of displaying content like this one does, just as well as a standalone app. Making it an app (or only an app, presuming they don’t produce a website too), means waiting for a different app to be written for every computing platform, narrowing people’s access to their efforts. It also involves the inconvenience of having to install and update the app on every computer you want to run it on, instead of being able to just walk up to any computer running a web browser, and entering a URL.

Step one is to make it free and step two is to not start on minority platform

I hope the production app comes without the stupid music.

Hmmm, back 1993-1996 I was with Knight Ridders R&D lab in Boulder. We did a ‘vision’ video about the newspaper of the near future, tablet-based. Would look very familiar to Hawthorne Labs & others. And we weren’t the first to shape this vision either. The MIT Media Lab had its Daily Me for ex. And some of the ideas in Xanadu long predate these. Someday I need to digitalize and post it…

As a long time media person – I was a writer and editor before becoming a technology C-exec – what’s inside a newspaper and the process by which it is gathered and presented – is the core to a newspaper’s value. The printing and the paper is merely a delivery channel. It’s too bad so many newspaper companies fell in love with their own printing presses and were too fearful to leverage what they really had of value!

There is a profession behind that editorial process. It’s not perfect, but through it there is some verification, some balance, and some ability to present information in a way that is understandable. There’s also the long-term consistency that happens only when it is a paid profession and an entity larger and more far-reaching than … I-have-some-spare-time-I’ll-blog.

my 2c …