Android App ‘Currently’ Taps Twitter To Track Breaking Tech News

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Friday, November 11th, 2011
currently

We got a pitch in our inbox from a company called Dujour Technology; they’ve developed an Android app dubbed ‘Currently Tech News’ (direct Android Market link) that mines Twitter to aggregate breaking technology news from a select number of sources.

The makers of the app acknowledge that the app looks pretty basic, but point out that there’s a sophisticated backend taking care of the data collection and analysis behind the scenes.

From the email:

The Currently server is constantly tracking Tweets mentioning certain tech news websites (of which TechCrunch is one of only a few). The Currently Tech News app then receives updates every 15 minutes and generates a pop-chart type list of news headlines.

It’s like a Techmeme you can carry around in your pocket! Except, of course, you can carry around Techmeme in your pocket too (they have a decent mobile website).

The benefit of the Currently app is that important headlines that are rising in the charts are delivered through notifications. You can turn off the alerts during your preferred ‘quiet time’ if you want, otherwise it’ll work 24/7.

We heard about Currently from the founder of Scouta, a now defunct recommendation technology startup we’ve covered a lot in the past. Check it out if you’re a fellow tech news junkie.

Here’s a screenshot (confusingly taken on an iPhone, it would seem):