Zolt helps you stay on the pulse with customized news summaries

We get it, you’re a busy person, and life moves at 132 MPH. But you still want to keep your finger on the pulse, if for no other reason to not be completely out of the loop at the office water cooler, right? Zolt is fresh out of its app wrapper to help you stay tuned, with 60-word news updates on the topics you care about.

Fresh fruit juice and the morning news? Sign me up. (Juice not included, void where prohibited)

Fresh fruit juice and the morning news? Sign me up. (Juice not included, void where prohibited.)

“More than 80% of the message can be conveyed by less than 20% of the words used,” the founder of Zolt, Rush Sadiwala, explains. “The casual news reader who just wants to be informed doesn’t need to be subjected to 500 words of fluff.”

Or, more succinctly: 80 percent of what you read in this article is bollocks, and you could have saved yourself a boatload of time by skipping to the next article after reading the first paragraph.

But, since you’re clearly the curious type, let’s talk about the what and how.

The app works by using crawlers to search for breaking news stories in key subject areas. The automated search results are then filtered by machines and human editors, before being converted into short snippets of text, giving just enough information to get the gist of what’s going on. If you want more information, hit the link at the bottom of the update, and you can dive deeper into the story from the most prominent news source that covered it.

The iOS version of the app has a feature Zolt calls Shout, which enables users to post reactions to the news by adding photos, doodles and comments to the news cards before sharing them with their friends.

Zolt is available for free on both Android and iOS.